Jun 21 2022
Today marks the longest day of the year, the summer solstice, also known as midsummer and the first day of summer. The sun reaches its highest point in the sky for the year on this day. To celebrate the start of the season, here is a poem by Carl Sandburg, “Back Yard” from The Chicago …
Jun 19 2022
I, Too I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother.They send me to eat in the kitchenWhen company comes,But I laugh,And eat well,And grow strong. Tomorrow,I’ll be at the tableWhen company comes.Nobody’ll dareSay to me,“Eat in the kitchen,”Then. Besides,They’ll see how beautiful I amAnd be ashamed— I, too, am America. -Langston Hughes
Jun 10 2022
“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” -Saul Bellow
May 11 2022
10 maggie and milly and molly and maywent down to the beach(to play one day) and maggie discovered a shell that sangso sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and milly befriended a stranded starwhose rays five languid fingers were; and molly was chased by a horrible thingwhich raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and may came home with …
Mar 20 2022
The Spring Now that the winter’s gone, the earth hath lostHer snow-white robes, and now no more the frostCandies the grass, or casts an icy creamUpon the silver lake or crystal stream;But the warm sun thaws the benumbed earth,And makes it tender; gives a sacred birthTo the dead swallow; wakes in hollow treeThe drowsy cuckoo, …
Feb 12 2022
Flirtation After all, there’s no needto say anything at first. An orange, peeledand quartered, flares like a tulip on a wedgewood plateAnything can happen. Outside the sunhas rolled up her rugs and night strewn saltacross the sky. My heart is humming a tuneI haven’t heard in years! Quiet’s cool flesh—let’s sniff and eat it. There …
Jan 23 2022
Here is “Bleecker Street, Summer” by Derek Walcott, born on this day January 23, 1930 in Castries, the capital of Saint Lucia located in the Caribbean. Walcott won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. Bleecker Street, Summer Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,for the eternal idleness of the imagined return,for rare flutes …
Jan 15 2022
Amores (III) there is a moon sole in the blue night amorous of waters tremulous, blinded with silence the undulous heaven yearns where in tense starlessness anoint with ardor the yellow lover stands in the dumb dark svelte and urgent (again love i slowly gather of thy languorous mouth the thrilling flower)
Nov 01 2021
Shinto When sorrow lays us lowfor a second we are savedby humble windfallsof the mindfulness or memory:the taste of a fruit, the taste of water,that face given back to us by a dream,the first jasmine of November,the endless yearning of the compass,a book we thought was lost,the throb of a hexameter,the slight key that opens …
Jul 14 2021
the tomato,star of earth, recurrentand fertilestar,displaysits convolutions,its canals,its remarkable amplitudeand abundance,no pit,no husk,no leaves or thorns,the tomato offersits giftof fiery colorand cool completeness. -from Ode to Tomatoes, Pablo Neruda Neruda understood the suggestive majesty of the tomato, that culinary conundrum – both a fruit and a vegetable!, omnipresent and visually intriguing, memorialized as much on Warhol’s soup can as …
