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14 posts tagged Poetry

“Four Women” by Nina Simone

from “Race” by Elizabeth Alexander

Sometimes I think about Great-Uncle Paul who left Tuskegee,
Alabama to become a forester in Oregon and in so doing
became fundamentally white for the rest of his life, except
when he traveled without his white wife to visit his siblings—
now in New York, now in Harlem, USA—just as pale-skinned,
as straight-haired, as blue-eyed as Paul, and black. Paul never told anyone
he was white, he just didn’t say that he was black, and who could imagine,
an Oregon forester in 1930 as anything other than white?
The siblings in Harlem each morning ensured
no one confused them for anything other than what they were, black.
They were black! Brown-skinned spouses reduced confusion.
Many others have told, and not told, this tale.
When Paul came East alone he was as they were, their brother.

[The house was just twinkling in the moon light] by Gertrude Stein

The house was just twinkling in the moon light,   
And inside it twinkling with delight,
Is my baby bright.
Twinkling with delight in the house twinkling   
with the moonlight,
Bless my baby bless my baby bright,
Bless my baby twinkling with delight,
In the house twinkling in the moon light,
Her hubby dear loves to cheer when he thinks
and he always thinks when he knows and he always   
knows that his blessed baby wifey is all here and he
is all hers, and sticks to her like burrs, blessed baby

“Astrophil and Stella 63” by Sir Philip Sidney

O Grammar rules, O now your virtues show;
    So children still read you with awful eyes,
    As my young Dove may in your precepts wise
Her grant to me, by her own virtue know.
For late with heart most high, with eyes most low,
    I crav’d the thing which ever she denies:
    She lightning Love, displaying Venus’ skies,
Least once should not be heard, twice said, No, No.
    Sing then my Muse, now Io Pæan sing,
    Heav’ns envy not at my high triumphing:
But Grammar’s force with sweet success confirm,
    For Grammar says (O this dear Stella weigh,)
    For Grammar says (to Grammar who says nay)
That in one speech two Negatives affirm.

from “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is, 
Inter-assurèd of the mind, 
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss. 

Our two souls therefore, which are one, 
Though I must go, endure not yet 
A breach, but an expansion, 
Like gold to aery thinness beat. 

from The Iliad by Homer

Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away.

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