Escaped Thoughts

In the last minute of the world

 

IN THE LAST MINUTE OF THE WORLD

a daylily is opening beside tomorrow’s bud.

A robin tends her two hungry nestlings.

The sun emerges from behind a cloud.

Peppermint, thyme, and sage lose their perfume.

People outside, hugging, holding hands, and crying.

     by Kenneth Ronkowitz

"Bloom" by Emily Dickinson

BLOOM
by Emily Dickinson

Bloom — is Result — to meet a Flower
And casually glance
Would cause one scarcely to suspect
The minor Circumstance
Assisting in the Bright Affair
So intricately done
Then offered as a Butterfly
To the Meridian —
To pack the Bud — oppose the Worm —
Obtain its right of Dew —
Adjust the Heat — elude the Wind —
Escape the prowling Bee
Great Nature not to disappoint
Awaiting Her that Day —
To be a Flower, is profound
Responsibility —

 

Now, watch this:

To arrive where we started

A favorite section from T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding" in his book Four Quartets 

 

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea."

 

Are you a poet?  You might want to try using one of the many writing prompts I have used on my Poets Online magazine site. 

If you are ready to try our latest prompt and call for submissions, you can submit for our next issue. The submission deadline is always the end of the month.

Take a look in our archive at some past issues - they go back to 1998, so there is plenty to examine. Maybe you're a reader more than a writer . Then just drop by to read.

Writing the Day - a poetry podcast

My podcasts of the poems on WRITING THE DAY are now in their third season (though season one was just a short time in 2021). The number of plays, followers, and streaming was all up in 2022, but that is not so impressive to me because I know that I only started the podcast in 2021 and the numbers were very low at the start.

Spotify tells me that the three most popular podcasted poems this year were This Garden of Earthly Delights, In the Last Minute of the World, and Napping in the Multiverse. I wish I could figure out why a poem rises to the top. The ones that do are usually not personal favorites.

The most streams were from September 4-10.

Spotify is the place most listeners go to though episodes are available on other platforms.

2023 is season 3 of podcasts but “season 10” of poems here since I began as a daily practice in 2014.

Approach of Winter

 

Approach of Winter
by William Carlos Williams

The half-stripped trees
struck by a wind together, 
bending all,
the leaves flutter drily
and refuse to let go
or driven like hail
stream bitterly out to one side
and fall
where the salvias, hard carmine,—
like no leaf that ever was—
edge the bare garden.


William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey in 1883. A highly influential figure in twentieth-century poetry, he was the author of Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems and many other works. Williams was also a physician. He died in 1963.

Williams was known as an Imagist poet. “Imagism was born in England and America in the early twentieth century. A reactionary movement against romanticism and Victorian poetry, Imagism emphasized simplicity, clarity of expression, and precision through the use of exacting visual images.”    

 

Read more about the history of the Imagist movement.


  

 

A poet is

“A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.”
― James Dickey

Where Have I Been?

On a desert and deserted island of my own making...

But now I am home and I will follow Charles Baudelaire's advice and

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”

everyone becomes a poet

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back.
Those who wish to sing always find a song.
At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”
― Plato

Moonlight, Summer Moonlight

Moonlight, Summer Moonlight

by Emily Bronte

'Tis moonlight, summer moonlight,
All soft and still and fair;
The solemn hour of midnight
Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere,

But most where trees are sending
Their breezy boughs on high,
Or stooping low are lending
A shelter from the sky.

And there in those wild bowers
A lovely form is laid;
Green grass and dew-steeped flowers
Wave gently round her head.

 

Bio note via http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org

Emily Bronte, born in Thornton, Yorkshire, England (1818) is the author of Wuthering Heights (1848), a story of love and tragedy set in the moors of Yorkshire.

She was the fifth of six talented Bronte children born to parents who seemed to have had no literary interest themselves. Their mother died when Emily was two, and the children were pretty much left to their own devices. Their father was aloof and treated his children as intellectual equals. Other than that, he mostly ignored them. The Bronte children had only themselves for playmates.

Their house was bounded on two sides by the village graveyard. They became best friends with each other. All the Bronte children were avid readers and storytellers. They made up a mythical land called Gondal, and Emily made it the subject of many of her poems. She was shy and reclusive and whenever she left home she got homesick. She joined her three older sisters at a school for clergymen's children when she was six. In 1845, Charlotte found out that Emily had been writing poetry. Charlotte had also been secretly writing verse, and so had Anne. They published their joint work the next year. Instead of using their real names, they called it Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. That book sold only two copies, but it paved the way for Charlotte's Jane Eyre (1846) and Emily's Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne's Agnes Grey (1847).

Jane Eyre was an instant success, but Emily's book didn't get much attention until after she fell ill and died the next year, at age thirty. Charlotte wrote a preface for it explaining why it was better than her own Jane Eyre, and it became a classic.

Not Zen

 

rice and tea for lunch

Buddha on the windowsill

I feel so not Zen

Walking Beside a Creek

Walking Beside a Creek

Walking beside a creek
in December, the black ice
windy with leaves,
you can feel the great joy
of the trees, their coats
thrown open like drunken men,
the lifeblood thudding
in their tight, wet boots.

by Ted kooser

from Flying At Night: Poems 1965-1985 (Pitt Poetry Series)

Humans

Where there are humans,

you'll find flies,

and Buddhas.

 

— Kobayashi Issa

Snow on Branches

snow on branches

very cold bright sun

I am saying the names of those

that I have not seen for years

out loud

bits of snow

slide down

It's Sunday Morning

a poem by Philip Schultz

It's Sunday Morning in Early November

and there are a lot of leaves already.
I could rake and get a head start.
The boy's summer toys need to be put
in the basement. I could clean it out
or fix the broken storm window.
When Eli gets home from Sunday school,
I could take him fishing. I don't fish
but I could learn to. I could show him
how much fun it is. We don't do as much
as we used to do. And my wife, there's
so much I haven't told her lately,
about how quickly my soul is aging,
how it feels like a basement I keep filling
with everything I'm tired of surviving.
I could take a walk with my wife and try
to explain the ghosts I can't stop speaking to.
Or I could read all those books piling up
about the beginning of the end of understanding...
Meanwhile, it's such a beautiful morning,
the changing colors, the hypnotic light.
I could sit by the window watching the leaves,
which seem to know exactly how to fall
from one moment to the next. Or I could lose
everything and have to begin over again.

 

from The God of Loneliness: Selected and New Poems

I Imagine I

I imagine I

am in Bombay

caught in the spirit

of a sapphire sky

and that the air

is flavored with almond,

lemon peel, liquorice,

orris root, angelica,

coriander, cassia,

cubeb, grains of paradise

and juniper berries.

 

I am not in Bombay

and the air is cool,

the glass is cold

and the sky is clear gray.

I am drinking very slowly

so that each sip

is a deep-spirited

herb-infused breath.

I should not need

to take this journey

but today I do.

I imagine I.

 

September Fourth

barely September,
early chrysanthemum bloom -
Why encourage death?