“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” -Saul Bellow
Category: Poetry
May 31 2022
May 31st Birthday Love: Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman was born son of house-builder Walter Whitman and Louisa Van Velsor on this day May 31, 1819, in West Hills in Huntington on Long Island, NY. He spent much of his childhood and career years in Brooklyn, where he left school at the young age of eleven to work. By the age of twelve, he was …
May 11 2022
maggie and milly and molly and may
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” by Thomas Carew
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” by Rita Dove
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
January 23rd Birthday Love: Derek Walcott
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)” by e e cummings
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 by Jorge Luis Borges
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
Art and Vegetables for Everyone at Tomato Art Fest
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 …
Jun 20 2021
Happy Father’s Day
The Harpby Bruce Weigl When he was my age and I was already a boymy father made a machine in the garage.A wired piece of steelwith many small and beautiful weldsground so smooth they resembled rows of pearls. He went broke with whatever it was.He held it so carefully in his arms.He carried it foundry …
