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Archive for the ‘joy’ Category

In the Next Galaxy

Things will be different.

No one will lose their sight,

their hearing, their gallbladder.

It will be all Catskills with brand

new wrap-around verandas.

The idea of Hitler will not

have vibrated yet.

While back here,

they are still cleaning out

pockets of wrinkled

Nazis hiding in Argentina.

But in the next galaxy,

certain planets will have true

blue skies and drinking water.

-Ruth Stone

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Mirabeau Bridge

Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away

And lovers

Must I be reminded

Joy came always after pain

The night is a clock chiming

The days go by not I

We’re face to face and hand in hand

While under the bridges

Of embrace expire

Eternal tired tidal eyes

The night is a clock chiming

The days go by not I

Love elapses like the river

Love goes by

Poor life is indolent

And expectation always violent

The night is a clock chiming

The days go by not I

The days and equally the weeks elapse

The past remains the past

Love remains lost

Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away

The night is a clock chiming

The days go by not I

-by Guillaume Apollinaire (Translated by Donald Revell)

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A Dream

In visions of the dark night
I have dreamed of joy departed-
But a waking dream of life and light
Hath left me broken-hearted.

Ah! what is not a dream by day
To him whose eyes are cast
On things around him with a ray
Turned back upon the past?

That holy dream- that holy dream,
While all the world were chiding,
Hath cheered me as a lovely beam
A lonely spirit guiding.

What though that light, thro’ storm and night,
So trembled from afar-
What could there be more purely bright
In Truth’s day-star?

-Edgar Allan Poe

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The Joy Of Writing

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence – this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word “woods.”
Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they’ll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what’s here isn’t life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof’s full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

-Symborska

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