Some pain // stays so long its absence becomes // a different pain—

— Kaveh Akbar, from “An Oversight,” Pilgrim Bell (via lifeinpoetry)

 I Woke Up—Smiling By Ha Jin                          to L. Y.I was told that I was a sad man.Sadness is a fatal disease in this placewhere happiness is a key to success.If you are sad, you are doomed to fail—you can’t please your boss,your long face won’t attract customers,a few sighs are enoughto let your friends down. Yesterday afternoon I met Pham,a Vietnamese man who was once a general.He came to this countryafter nine years’ imprisonment.Now he works hard as a custodianand always avoidsmeeting his former soldiers here,because every one of themis doing better than he is.“Sadness,” he told me,“is a luxury for me.I have no time for it.If I feel sadI won’t be able to support my family.” His words filled me with shame,although I learned long agoa busy bee feels no sorrow.He made me realize I’m still a fortunate oneand ought to be happy and gratefulfor having food in my stomachand books to read. I returned home humming a cheerful tune.My wife smiled wonderingwhy I had suddenly become lighthearted.My son followed me, laughing and frolicking,while I was capering on the floor. Last nightI went to a party in my dream.Voices and laughter were drifting in a large hallthat was full of paintings and calligraphy.Strolling with easeI ran into the handwriting of yourshung in the airpiece by piece waving like wings.Dumbfounded, I turnedand saw you sitting on a chair,motionless, the same lean detached face,only your blue clothes had grown darker.Something snapped in my chestand my tears flowed.What’s the use of promising?I have promised, a hundred times,but never returned. Wherever we goour cause is the same:to make a living and raise children.If a poem arises, it’s merelyan accidental blessing. For several hours my heart ached,but I woke up—smiling.

Nicole Sealey

WAIT Wait, for now. Distrust everything, if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven’t they carried you everywhere, up to now? Personal events will become interesting again. Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Buds that open out of season will become lovely again. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old. Wait. Don’t go too early. You’re tired. But everyone’s tired. But no one is tired enough. Only wait a while and listen. Music of hair, Music of pain, music of looms weaving all our loves again. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, most of all to hear, the flute of your whole existence, rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Galway Kinnel (via bookwormlily)

Katy Farris

The Seven Of Pentacles by Marge Piercy

Under a sky the color of pea soup she is looking at her work growing away there actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans as things grow in the real world, slowly enough. If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water, if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food, if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars, if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees, then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock. Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground. You cannot tell always by looking what is happening. More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet. Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet. Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree. Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden. Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar. Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses. Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving. Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in, a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs. Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen: reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in. This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always, for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

The Wall Hanging I Never Noticed by Dorothea Lasky

I never noticed before How the red flowers hang from the blue branches I never noticed before the light in this room I never noticed the way the air is cool again I never noticed anything but you But you but you So that I couldn’t sleep I never noticed what was anything but you Until I noticed you And could not help it Until I noticed you I could not help it Until you made the red flowers alive again Until the blue branches The lemons you loved, but also the way you loved me, too Until all of this I never noticed you But once I did I never minded noticing I never stopped noticing Until I noticed you I never stopped noticing Until you, I never stopped

The End of the Pier - Nicole Callihan

The End of the Pier - Nicole Callihan

Air by Malena Mörling

What if the air turns solid and locks us into place? And only those who are embracing at that moment will be embracing. And only those who are looking at each other then will be looking at each other. Those who just made a promise will never break it. The child counting out loud behind the trunk of a tree will never say twenty behind the trunk of a tree. And all the other children will be hiding, each in a momentary solitude. The man diving from a cliff into the ocean will be diving.

Dew Light by W. S. Merwin

Now in the blessed days of more and less when the news about time is that each day there is less of it I know none of that as I walk out through the early garden only the day and I are here with no before or after and the dew looks up without a number or a present age

Song by Jane Kenyon

An oriole sings from the hedge and in the hotel kitchen the chef sweetens cream for pastries. Far off, lightning and thunder agree to join us for a few days here in the valley. How lucky we are to be holding hands on a porch in the country. But even this is not the joy that trembles under every leaf and tongue.

Sea Church by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Give me a church made entirely of salt. Let the walls hiss and smoke when I return to shore. I ask for the grace of a new freckle on my cheek, the lift of blue and my mother’s soapy skin to greet me. Hide me in a room with no windows. Never let me see the dolphins leaping into commas for this water-prayer rising like a host of sky lanterns into the inky evening. Let them hang in the sky until they vanish at the edge of the constellations —  the heroes and animals too busy and bright to notice.

Confession: by Mitchell L. H. Douglas

I have not written a poem in months, but I love you. That is poem enough. If I count the days of silence, render my debt in absent ear,

a broken heart makes no poem. It is the mending, love, the way we bind the pieces whole. The body

fluid, singular—day- dream, learning how to feel, float. That is poem & love, the angles, breaks.

Poem Missing Someone by C, D, Wright

shielding her eyes from the sun with her free hand stabbed by the sudden thought of him standing on the rim of some pond wind washing the beans out of his dish teaching a dog to retrieve in water living within himself one lost valley

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (via uncanny-archive)

I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig tree.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (featured in our 15-book giveaway)