Emily's comments (member since Jun 15, 2009)

Emily's comments from the ¡ POETRY ! group.

I don't know if this has already been posted, but I love the last lines from e.e. cummings' "i carry your heart with me"

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Here is the whole poem. I will embarrass myself and admit that it is currently one of my favorites.

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

To That Song I Have Stuck In My Head
I hope you don't mind that I put down in words
how wonderful life is, now you're in the world.
- Elton John

Maybe
if I knew the end of you
you wouldn't be here
repeating a few lines over and over
like a record with a flaw.
Maybe
I should sing something else
forcing you away
leaving some other occupant in your place
a new tenant for my brain.
Or maybe
maybe
you're here because of what you have to say
repeating to me just how I feel
and making me wish I could just say it.
Then maybe you would leave
instead of taunting me
every time I see him
with what you know I'm thinking
wishing
but won't say

I know. I think that's part of the charm of the poem. I love that the couple is middle aged. And I love how she has a little extra weight and he is going gray. It makes the people that much more real, like the people that I've seen at the airport.

And that third stanza is incredible. It goes from just describing the couple to being something that we can all relate to, or at least dream of. Everyone wants to be looked at like the first sunrise seen from the earth. Everyone wants to think that, at least once, they were looked at that way. And that's why everyone is staring at the couple, trying to put themselves into her body. They want to be seen the way he sees her.

I like to assume that the poem is real. I'd like to think that things like that really do happen.

I don't know what it is, but something about this poem just gets me. I think it's the part in the last stanza about being seen like the first sunrise seen from the earth. I first read it as I was browsing through a poetry anthology in a bookstore. I read this one and it just caught my attention, so I thought I'd share.

Gate C22

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he'd just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she'd been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching--
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn't look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after--if she beat you or left you or
you're lonely now--you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman's middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.