We stand at the casement window of Pushkin’s Lycée.
These are the desks where Pushkin wrote, his chalkboards, his astrolabe.
Snow falls from here into the past and vanishes on golden minarets.
Snow recedes from the birches. A lesson writes itself in winter chalk:
On the day Michelangelo died in Rome, Galileo was born in Pisa.
Isaac Newton was born the year Galileo died. When they searched for
the poet Kabir, they found nothing beneath his shroud but a sprig of jasmine.
Man is like the statue whispering about the marble chiseled from his mouth.
You are the guardian of this statue, standing in your silent world.
The year Isaac Newton died, there was a barn fire during a puppet show.
Kabir says all corpses go to the same place, and the world has fallen
in love with a dream. This life is not the same as your other life.
We are here now in one of the shrines of the silver poets.
You are one of the silver. The snow is a white peacock in a Russian poem.
-- 'For Ilya at Tsarskoye Selo' by Carolyn Forché from 'In the Lateness of the World'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @bookstodon

(Art credit: Jessie Arms Botke)

Our new dog, named for the beloved poet,
ate a book which unfortunately we had left unguarded.
Fortunately it was the Bhagavad Gita,
of which many copies are available.
Every day now, as Percy grows
into the beauty of his life, we touch
his wild, curly head and say,

“Oh, wisest of little dogs.”
--'Percy' by Mary Oliver from 'Dog Songs'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @bookstodon

(Art credit: Edouard Manet)

Our poor dead
gaze at us with their
empty eyes
and see everything to come—
but even they can’t help
or warn us,
since neither war nor peace
has taught us much.
-- 'Not Much' by Ryszard Krynicki, trans. Clare Cavanagh from 'Magnetic Point'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

(Art credit: Jacoba van Heemskerck)

A whip-poor-will brushed
her wing along the ground
a moment ago, fifty years
in the orchard where my father
kept pear and plum,
a decade of peach trees
and Antonovka’s apples
whose seeds come
from Russia by ship
under clouds islanding
a window very past
where also went
the soul of my mother
in a boat with blossoming
sails like apple petals
in wind fifty years at once.
-- 'Clouds' by Carolyn Forché from 'In the Lateness of the World'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

(Art credit: Claude Monet)

The sun, yellow spider,
climbs the sky and lets down
its web of dust.

Old man at the horizon,
he’s on top of the world
blowing smoke.

His fish basket is empty
except for lures
in their nest of clear thread.

Under water a fish,
Old Whiskers they call him,
breaks away.

Sunlight and air
pulled in on a line.
-- 'Fisherman' by Linda Hogan from 'Dark. Sweet.'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry

(Artist: Eugene Delacroix)

Remember how the naked soul
comes to language and at once knows
loss and distance and believing

then for a time it will not run
with its old freedom
like a light innocent of measure
but will hearken to how
one story becomes another
and will try to tell where
they have emerged from
and where they are heading
as though they were its own legend
running before the words and beyond them
naked and never looking back

through the noise of questions
-- 'Note' by W.S. Merwin from 'The Shadow of Sirius'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

(Art credit: Peter Nottrott)

saw this poem recently and remembered that I haven't done a #VerseThursday in a while

In Those Years, by Adrienne Rich

Just before dark the light gets dark. Violet
where my hands pull weeds around the Solomon’s seals.
I see with difficulty what before was easy.
Perceive what I saw before
but with more tight effort. I am moon
to what I am doing and what I was.
It is a real beauty that I lived
and dreamed would be, now know
but never then. Can tell by looking hard,
feeling which is weed and what is form.
My hands are intermediary. Neither lover
nor liar. Sweet being, if you are anywhere that hears,
come quickly. I weep, face set, no tears, mouth open.
-- 'Too Bright To See' by Linda Gregg from 'Raised By Wolves'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

(Art credit: Ana Marini-Genzon)

I've got the children to tend
The clothes to mend
The floor to mop
The food to shop
Then the chicken to fry
The baby to dry
I got company to feed
The garden to weed
I've got shirts to press
The tots to dress
The can to be cut
I gotta clean up this hut
Then see about the sick
And the cotton to pick.

Shine on me, sunshine
Rain on me, rain
Fall softly, dewdrops
And cool my brow again.

Storm, blow me from here
With your fiercest wind
Let me float across the sky
'Til I can rest again.

Fall gently, snowflakes
Cover me with white
Cold icy kisses and
Let me rest tonight.

Sun, rain, curving sky
Mountain, oceans, leaf and stone
Star shine, moon glow
You're all that I can call my own.
-- 'Woman Work' by Maya Angelou

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry #MayaAngelou @poetry

My little girl, infallible till now,
learns to read and write
and makes mistakes for the first time

and I live through my old errors
of humankind once more.
-- 'My Little Girl Learns to Read' by Ryszard Krynicki, trans. Clare Cavanagh from 'Magnetic Point'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @bookstodon@a.gup.p

(Art credit: Irina Sztukowski)

What if this virgin-
coloured cluster
huddled close against
the cold and bluster
were all the hue a spring-time
field could muster?

Accustomed
to such deprivations,
would we crave
the lichen's grey and white striations,
or knots of black on birches,
like dalmatians,

or stuff that blows
in gales across the rough,
like hail--the pussy
willow's silver fluff?
Would black-and-whiteness
be enough?
-- 'Snowdrops' by Erica McAlpine

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @bookstodon@a.gup.p

(Photo credit: Caroline Wirtz)

And I matured in peace born of command,
in the nursery of the infant century,
and the voice of man was never dear to me,
but the breeze's voice--that I could understand.
The burdock and the nettle I preferred,
but best of all the silver willow tree.
Its weeping limbs fanned my unrest with dreams;
it lived here all my life, obligingly.
I have outlived it now, and with surprise.
There stands the stump; with foreign voices other
willows converse, beneath our, beneath those skies,
and I am hushed, as if I'd lost a brother.
-- 'Willow' by Anna Akhmatova, trans. Jennifer Reeser

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry #AnnaAkhmatova @poetry

Gather quickly
Out of darkness
All the songs you know
And throw them at the sun
Before they melt
Like snow
-- Bouquet by Langston Hughes

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @bookstodon@a.gup.p

(Art credit: Hans Veltman)

Come dance with me and the snowflakes
They're falling now, but they won't last long
Come give me a smile
and let's laugh for a while
They're playing our favorite song

Come whisper to me about snowflakes
how for a moment they were pure lace
and the sheer delight
we felt on that night
as they melted when they touched our face

Remember me when the snowflakes
come swirling on crisp winter wind
and promise me this
that you'll know the bliss
of dancing with snowflakes again
-- 'Dance With the Snowflakes' by P.S. Awtry

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @bookstodon@a.gup.p

(Art credit: Henri Odabas)

Now the artichokes
cluster, prickling with secret.
Each hides sweetness
under a mace

of lapped dragon scales.
What hunger drove shepherds
to eat the first thistle?

The tall ones, past harvest,
explode into blossom:
Violet anemones, cyclops eyes.

What we cannot eat
now dazzles the bees:
I too would romp

in that wild
phosphorescence,
would nectar & stumble

& plunder each bract—
— 'Now the Artichokes' by Tess Taylor from 'Leaning Toward Light'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

(Art credit: Brenda Williams)

I’ve heard these words
Spoken repeatedly
As a child
The story of my
Indigenous history shared
With audience after audience
Burnt into my memory
We’ve been here since time immemorial

It means—time, so long ago
That people have no memory
Or knowledge of it
Filling out my law school application
How long has your family lived in Saskatchewan?
I pause for a moment
Then write
Since time immemorial
What would have been other options?

Since Saskatchewan became a province
Before Saskatchewan was, we were

I was stumped but,
I got in anyway and nobody questioned my answer.
— 'Since Time Immemorial' by Francine Merasty
#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

(Art credit: Hanne Lore Koehler)

"He begins
at the crown of my scalp. He parts the two sides like a tree

branch at the V, and I think of all the forks in the road
in all the storybooks about emerald forests, kingdoms.
All the swinging bridges we travailed. Mariners, trains, conductors."

#TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry #VerseThursday
Hairbrush by Cynthia Atkins (2023 Reverie Magazine) https://tinyurl.com/38bhhazd

"Empty mountain: no man is seen.
But voices of men are heard.
Sun's reflection reaches into the woods
And shines upon the green moss."

#TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry #VerseThursday
Deer Enclosure by Wang Wei, translated by Wai-Lim Yip from Hiding the Universe (1972 Grossman Publishers) https://tinyurl.com/y9w53btd
in 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by Eliot Weinberger (1987, 2016 New Directions Publishing) https://tinyurl.com/2p95v5mk

"Our orbit is drunk in its spin, and sobriety comes
only in flashes. No one knows who we are.
We live in that freedom and peril.
Let the imagination be the beast it is
that eats and fattens on us.
But let us not believe a word it says."

#TodaysPoem #VerseThursday #poetry @poetry
In the Air by @ronnabloom (2024 Brick Literary) https://tinyurl.com/5ewvd55z