Open To
An English poet, Philip Larkin, said that poetry doesn’t start with an idea; it starts with a poem…
You have to be open to mystery. If you are open to it, mystery will come.
If you’re not, why should it, actually?
–Lucille Clifton
Art & Paintings
Thirtieth Anniversary Report of the Class of ’41
We who survived the war and took to wife
And sired the kids and made the decent living,
And piecemeal furnished forth the finished life
Not by grand theft so much as petty thieving–
Who had the routine middle-aged affair
And made our beds and had to lie in them
This way or that because the beds were there,
And turned our bile and choler in for phlegm–
Who saw grandparents, parents, to the vault
And wives and selves grow wrinkled, grey and fat
And children through their acne and revolt
And told the analyst about all that–
Are done with it. What is there to discuss?
There’s nothing left for us to say of us.
— Howard Nemerov
The Lynching
His spirit is smoke ascended to high heaven.
His father, by the cruelest way of pain,
Had bidden him to his bosom once again;
The awful sin remained still unforgiven.
All night a bright and solitary star
(Perchance the one that ever guided him,
Yet gave him up at last to Fate’s wild whim)
Hung pitifully o’er the swinging char.
Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view
The ghastly body swaying in the sun:
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.
–Claude McKay
Past The Moons
he dreamed of a place
past the moons
and cuckolds of his heart
where he and his lady could bask
in the warped rhapsody of their love
a story told an untold times
mounted against him
So he waited
strangled by principle
he waited for the revolution
to scream aloud with his bloody fist
in the air, in the name of all he held dear
for the sins to be unearthed
to labor for his children
and die a warrior
He waited for danger
to kill and spite his country
a gladiator in another time with another her
If only she were aware of the way he’d
bare knuckled three armed guards outside
her bedroom window
or how he stayed up all night
tending the fires so that she’d never know cold
or loneliness
but it never came
It passed him over in every century
a philosopher a teacher an artist
a woman an apprentice a poet
a lawyer a father a nurse
a dancer a devil a leader and a criminal
all couldn’t break character
not even for an instant did he
dispel a silent oath for anarchy
He perished unfulfilled and unsung
for generations
wondering what he had done
why visions of valor never came to be
why he needed the fight
why he dreamed of this
lady’s beauty
every night
The Peace of Wild Things
Bruce Onobrakpeya
When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— by Wendell Berry
To Be Or Not To Be
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and, by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub.
Risky Art With Juice Wick
Check out this cool art installation of edgy animated paintings by Ashley Wick!
Dear High School Me,
If you thought that was hard
you’re in for a treat
‘here endeth the lesson’
The Mother
Flux-Art.Inspiration.Life
Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages,
aches, and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I
loved you
–Gwendolyn Brooks
The Poet
He sang of life, serenely sweet,
With, now and then, a deeper note.
From some high peak, nigh yet remote,
He voiced the world’s absorbing beat.
He sang of love when earth was young,
And Love, itself, was in his lays.
But ah, the world, it turned to praise
A jingle in a broken tongue.
–Paul Laurence Dunbar
The Poetry Corner 