Some Poems.

I Cling To You, Julia Barrett

The fog pours over the
low mountains
in a slow cascade of
wet curls.

If I were the fog
I would cling to you
just like this.

Thirst, Julia Barrett

I am
lost in the desert
alone and parched.

I could drink the heavens
written in your name.

Time Passing, Many Afternoons, Ellery Akers

Weeds rustling,
the afternoon pulling its heat after it,
coming on like a dark hand
pulling me into the hill.

As a child, I played on the lawn,
watching the afternoon gathering in a corner.
Dark under the dark elm. The latch getting dark.
The short grass, dark. My dress, soaked with it.

The Traveler, Pablo Neruda

The stones do not mope.
within lives the gold;
the seed-bearing planets
with bells in their depths,
gauntlets of iron, weddings
of time and the amethysts;
within is the laughter of rubies
and the bread of the lightning.

This I know at great cost:
all life is not outward,
nor is all death from within:
time writes in the ciphers
of water and rock for no one at all,
so that none may envision the sender
and no one be any wiser.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Langston Hughes

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Dream Dust, Langston Hughes

Gather out of star-dust
Earth-dust,
Cloud-dust,
Storm-dust,
And splinters of hail,
One handful of dream-dust
Not for sale.

A Selection of Japanese Poetry (my favorite)

The mists rise over
The still pools at Asuka.
Memory does not
Pass away so easily. Akahito

I wish I were close
To you as the wet skirt of
A salt girl to her body.
I think of you always. Akahito

I should not have waited.
It would have been better
To have slept and dreamed,
Than to have watched night pass,
And this slow moon sink. Lady Akazome Emon

I think of the days
Before I met her
When I seemed to have
No troubles at all. Fujiwara No Atsutada

We were together
Only a little while,
And we believed our love
Would last a thousand years. Yakamochi

I have always known
That at last I would
Take this road, but yesterday
I did not know that it would be today. Narihira