Mary Carroll-Hackett's Blog, page 63

Happy National Poetry Month! Gratitude by Susan Ludvigson <3

 

The boat is a boat gliding
down the river whose fragrance
spins us to shady places
under apple trees
and into bedrooms. When
it ties up at shore,
the soul and drifts and returns.

 

More and more I see
how everything goes together.
There is such grace
in this reconciliation–
even the stomach, that restless
loner, begins to understand.

 

Surely the body is mind’s
gift to the soul. How else
would the dance of ecstacy begin
except in the muscles, in how
the eyes light on beauty,
and expand it, blue
when it needs blue?

 

Think how love penetrates
like music, rhythm
overpowering stasis,
as the nerves, the pulse
propel us toward moonlight,
and how the body celebrates
wholeness, its first desire.








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Daily Prompt Love <3 Reborn

6 April 2017

Birthday Prompt

Happy National Poetry Month! <3 A Pity, We Were Such a Good Invention by Yehuda Amichai

A Pity, We Were Such a Good Invention
by Yehuda Amichai
Translation by Assia Gutmann





They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I’m concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantle us
Each from the other.
As far as I’m concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little.



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Daily Prompt Love <3 What I Found in the Wild 

5 April 2017

My company this morning ❤ 

Make art about the comfort of wild things. 

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Happy National Poetry Month! Beginning by Lia Purpura

BEGINNING
by Lia Purpura

In the beginning,
in the list of begats,
one begat
got forgot:
work begets work
(one poem
bears
the next).
In other words,
once there was air,
a bird
could be got.
Not taken.
Not kept.
But conjured up.

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Daily Prompt Love <3 In Your Eyes

4 April 2017

Make art inspired by this. 

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Happy National Poetry Month! Mary Oliver <3 Wild Geese

Wild Geese

Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-

over and over announcing your place

In the family of things.

Happy National Poetry Month! Making Peace With That Faulty Heart–Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood has been and remains one of the poets whose work made me want to write. I discovered her collection Two-Headed Poems when I was in my teens, and I go back to it still, these amazing fearless poems. This poem is not from that collection, but it answers the one I remember best. And it’s the poem that found me today ❤ 

The Woman Makes Peace With Her Faulty Heart

by Margaret Atwood

It wasn’t your crippled rhythm

I could not forgive, or your dark red

skinless head of a vulture

but the things you hid:

five words and my lost

gold ring, and the fine blue cup

you said was broken,

that stack of faces, gray

and folded, you claimed

we’d both forgotten,

the other hearts you ate,

and all that discarded time you hid

from me, saying it never happened.

There was that, and the way

you would not be captured,

sly featherless bird, fat raptor

singing your raucous punctured song

with your talons and your greedy eye

lurking high in the molten sunset

sky behind my left cloth breast

to pounce on strangers.

How many times have I told you:

the civilized world is a zoo,

not a jungle, stay in your cage.

And then the shouts

of blood, the rage as you threw yourself

against my ribs.

As for me, I would have strangled you

gladly with both hands,

squeezed you closed, also

your yelps of joy.

Life goes more smoothly without a heart,

without that shiftless emblem,

that flyblown lion, magpie, cannibal

eagle, scorpion with its metallic tricks

of hate, that vulgar magic,

that organ the size and color

of a scalded rat,

that singed phoenix.

But you’ve shoved me this far,

old pump, and we’re hooked

together like conspirators, which

we are, and just as distrustful.

We know that, barring accidents,

one of us will finally

betray the other; when that happens,

it’s me for the urn, you for the jar.

Until then, it’s an uneasy truce,

and honor between criminals.

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Daily Prompt Love <3 What Holds Us Up

3 April 2017

I dreamt of bones last night

Monday Must Read! Resist Much, Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance

Resist Much, Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance

A monumental anthology of poems of resistance, edited by Michael Boughn, John Bradley, Brenda Cardenas, Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, Kass Fleisher, Roberto Harrison, Kent Johnson, Andrew Levy, Nathaniel Mackey, Ruben Medina, Philip Metres, Nita Noveno, Julie Patton, Margaret Randall, Michael Rothenberg, Chris Stroffolino, Anne Waldman, Marjorie Welish, Tyrone Williams. 

Featuring poetry by Eileen Myles, Nathaniel Mackey, Anne Waldman, Margaret Randall, Forrest Gander, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Brenda Hillman, Bob Holman, Pierre Joris, Douglas Kearney, Evie Shockley, & Terese Svoboda, Norma Cole, Fady Joudah, Lewis Warsh, and more.

50% of the proceeds will be donated to Planned Parenthood.

Buy this amazing anthology: http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/resist-much-obey-little.html

we can’t build a wall. we can only spout pure water again and again and drown his lies.~Eileen Myles

Racism, xenophobia, misogyny and their related malaises are to the U.S. what whiskey is to an alcoholic. The current occupant of the White House won the election yipping, against possible recovery, “Drinks are on me!” The rich, multitudinous voices in this anthology variously call for—having embarked on—the hard work of sobriety, sanity.~Nathaniel Mackey

Poets are summoned to a stronger imagination of language and humanity in a time of new and radical Weathers. White House Inc. is the last gasp of the dying Confederacy, but its spectacle is dangerous and addictive so hold onto your mind. Fascism loves distraction. Keep the world safe for poetry. Open the book of love and resistance. Don’t tarry!~Anne Waldman

More about this Resist Much Obey Little

On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ResistMuchAnthology/

On Twitter : @ResistMuchAnthology

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Rock on, you poets and warriors!

xo

Mary

 

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