stonepicnicking_okapi: otherwords (otherwords)
The Hurting Kind is a collection of poetry by the US Poet Laureate Ada Limón. I enjoyed it. I listened to an audiobook of her reading it and I recommend that. Her voice adds a lot. A bit like Mary Oliver but not as focused on nature as Mary Oliver (but there is a lot of nature, animals, bird, plants, flowers, etc.).

So I am going to post one of my favorites and link to the others.

The Magnificent Frigatebird by Ada Limon

Is it okay to begin with the obvious? I am full of stones—
is it okay not to look out this window, but to look out another?

A mentor once said, You can't start a poem with a man looking
out a window. Too many men looking out a window.


What about a woman? Today is a haunting. One last orange
on the counter: it is a dead fruit. We swallow dead things.
Read more... )
stonepicnicking_okapi: black coral (matissebnw)
This is the second batch of poems from Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic edited by Alice Quinn. There were several poems with lines I liked but I didn't like the whole poem.

They include:

from Shelter in Place by Peter Cooley

I savor my sense of smell. I'm well, I'm safe at home.
Reader, help me to tongue-taste these flowers' hues:
piquant crimsons, tart amethysts, honey-ambers.


and the opening lines of A Private Life by Mark Wunderlich

Now that all life is private life
I am more a fiction than previously thought.


But there were four I liked in their entirety.

The Burning One by Li-Young Lee [and if you want to hear the poet read it, you can here.]

Say, Ahhhh.

Stop saying, Death lives
because Life dies,
thus rendering the impossible possible.

Read more... )

The End of Poetry by Ada Limón [read by the poet here]

Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower
and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,
enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy
and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and tis
of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and god
not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,
enough of the will to go on and not go on or how
a certain light does a certain thing, enough
of the kneeling and the rising and the looking
inward and the looking up, enough of the gun,
the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lost
letter on the dresser, enough of the longing and
the ego and the obliteration of ego, enough
of the mother and the child and the father and the child
and enough of the pointing to the world, weary
and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border,
enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough
I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,
enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high
water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,
I am asking you to touch me.

----

I haven't been able to find cut and pasteable versions of two more poems I like "Poem for My Students" by Sharon Olds and "Fantasia in a Time of Plague" by Rown Ricardo Phillips so I may scan them and post them later today. Wednesday is shopping day so I'm off to do that.
stonepicnicking_okapi: okapi (orange)
I haven't really been keeping up with my New Year's resolution to read a poem a day. I haven't found a good time of day to set aside/remember to do it. But this was an interesting (and unusual for me, modern) poem from a link from a post by [personal profile] jesse_the_k on a list of works related to kink.

Crush by Ada Limón

Maybe my limbs are made
mostly for decoration,
like the way I feel about
persimmons. You can’t
really eat them. Or you
wouldn’t want to. If you grab
the soft skin with your fist
it somehow feels funny,
like you’ve been here
before and uncomfortable,
too, like you’d rather
squish it between your teeth
impatiently, before spitting
the soft parts back up
to linger on the tongue like
burnt sugar or guilt.
For starters, it was all
an accident, you cut
the right branch
and a sort of light
woke up underneath,
and the inedible fruit
grew dark and needy.
Think crucial hanging.
Think crayon orange.
There is one low, leaning
heart-shaped globe left
and dearest, can you
tell, I am trying
to love you less.

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