My Inner Life

 

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 'Tis true my garments threadbare are,

          And sorry poor I seem;

But inly I am richer far

          Than any poet's dream.

For I've a hidden life no one

          Can ever hope to see;

A sacred sanctuary none

          May share with me.

         

Aloof I stand from out the strife,

          Within my heart a song;

By virtue of my inner life

          I to myself belong.

Against man-ruling I rebel,

          Yet do not fear defeat,

For to my secret citadel

          I may retreat.

Oh you who have an inner life

          Beyond this dismal day

With wars and evil rumours rife,

          Go blessedly your way.

Your refuge hold inviolate;

          Unto yourself be true,

And shield serene from sordid fate

          The Real You.

            

              

                

Robert William Service                  

By The Fireside : The Builders

 

StockCake
 

All are architects of Fate,

  Working in these walls of Time;

Some with massive deeds and great,

  Some with ornaments of rhyme.

Nothing useless is, or low;

  Each thing in its place is best;

And what seems but idle show

  Strengthens and supports the rest.

For the structure that we raise,

  Time is with materials filled;

Our to-days and yesterdays

  Are the blocks with which we build.

Truly shape and fashion these;

  Leave no yawning gaps between;

Think not, because no man sees,

  Such things will remain unseen.

In the elder days of Art,

  Builders wrought with greatest care

Each minute and unseen part;

  For the Gods see everywhere.

Let us do our work as well,

  Both the unseen and the seen;

Make the house, where Gods may dwell,

  Beautiful, entire, and clean.

Else our lives are incomplete,

  Standing in these walls of Time,

Broken stairways, where the feet

  Stumble as they seek to climb.

Build to-day, then, strong and sure,

  With a firm and ample base;

And ascending and secure

  Shall to-morrow find its place.

Thus alone can we attain

  To those turrets, where the eye

Sees the world as one vast plain,

  And one boundless reach of sky.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sometimes

 

Valeriia Miller

Sometimes I can’t find the words

That fill my messy head.

Can’t find the effort to smile

Or get out of my silly old bed.

The world just sometimes feels like

I don’t fit and don’t belong,

And even when I make the effort,

A smile just doesn’t last long.

I could pretend with all my might

That I am the happiest I can be.

Surrounded by the world, it seems

Lonelier I couldn’t be.

Not sure what may be the answer.

Not sure if I’m really keen

To spend another day here,

Living this dreadful dream.

But I must find some courage,

Light a fire inside my heart

And find a love for life again,

And I know where I shall start.

I’ll walk among the forest

And feel the crisp sea breeze

And lay among the meadow

And listen to all the bees.

I’ll figure out the mayhem

And gaze at all the stars

And dance at every sunset

With a smile inside my heart.

Lucy Petersen

On Growing Old

 

Tony Luciani

Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying; 

My dog and I are old, too old for roving. 

Man, whose young passion sets the spindrift flying, 

Is soon too lame to march, too cold for loving. 

I take the book and gather to the fire, 

Turning old yellow leaves; minute by minute 

The clock ticks to my heart. A withered wire, 

Moves a thin ghost of music in the spinet. 

I cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander 

Your cornland, nor your hill-land, nor your valleys 

Ever again, nor share the battle yonder 

Where the young knight the broken squadron rallies. 

Only stay quiet while my mind remembers 

The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers. 

Beauty, have pity! for the strong have power, 

The rich their wealth, the beautiful their grace, 

Summer of man its sunlight and its flower, 

Spring-time of man all April in a face. 

Only, as in the jostling in the Strand, 

Where the mob thrusts or loiters or is loud, 

The beggar with the saucer in his hand 

Asks only a penny from the passing crowd, 

So, from this glittering world with all its fashion, 

Its fire, and play of men, its stir, its march, 

Let me have wisdom, Beauty, wisdom and passion, 

Bread to the soul, rain where the summers parch. 

Give me but these, and, though the darkness close, 

Even the night will blossom as the rose. 

John Masefield

Today I asked my body what she needed

 

Pablo Merchán Montes

Today I asked my body what she needed,

Which is a big deal

Considering my journey of

Not Really Asking That Much.

I thought she might need more water.

Or protein.

Or greens.

Or yoga.

Or supplements.

Or movement.

But as I stood in the shower

Reflecting on her stretch marks,

Her roundness where I would like flatness,

Her softness where I would like firmness,

All those conditioned wishes

That form a bundle of

Never-Quite-Right-Ness,

She whispered very gently:

Could you just love me like this?

Hollie Holden

The Sun

 

StockCake

This morning on the desk,

facing up,

a poem of Kavanagh’s

celebrating a lost love.

“She was the sun,” he said,

and now she still

lives in the fibre

of his arms,

her warmth

through all the years

folding the old man’s hand

in hers

of a Sunday

Dublin morning.

Sometimes reading

Kavanagh I look out

at everything

growing so wild

and faithfully beneath

the sky

and wonder

why we are the one

terrible

part of creation

privileged

to refuse our flowering.

I know

in the text of the heart

the flower is our death

and the first opening

of the new life

we have yet to imagine,

but Kavanagh’s line

reminds me

how I want to know

that sun,

and how I want to flower

and how I want to claim

my happiness

and how I want to walk

through life

amazed and inarticulate

with thanks.

And how I want to

know that warmth

through

love itself,

and

through the sun itself.

I want to know

that sun

of happiness

when I wake

and see through

my window

the morning color

on the far mountain.

I want to know

when I lean down to the lilies

by the water

and feel their small and

perfect reflection

on my face.

I want to know

that gift

when I walk

innocent through the trees

burning with life

and the green

passion

of the pasture’s

first growth,

and I want to know

as lazily

as the cows

that tear at the grass

with their

soft mouths.

I want to know

what I am

and what I am

involved with by loving

this world

as I do.

And I want time

to think of all

the unlived lives:

those that fail to notice

until it is too late,

those with eyes staring

with bitterness,

and those

met on the deathbed

whose mouths are wide

with

unspoken love.

Every year

they keep me faithful

and help me

realize there is more

to lose

than I thought

and more at stake

than the mere

possibility

of a recognized

heroism.

They remind me

why

I want to be found by love,

why I want to come alive

in the holiness

of that belonging,

and like Kavanagh

I want to be courageous

in my terrors.

I want to know

in life or death

all the ways

the warmth of that

great rose fire

sun

in its heaven

has made me.

And everything

that made me

has been

a sun to my growing,

that is the article

of my faith,

even the darkness

of that soil that went

before the time of light

was another

kind of sun.

What I am

is what I have

been grown by,

the sun,

that great love,

all the many small loves

and that one love too

who waited so long

to find me and

who has always

walked by my side

folding my

remembering

hand in hers.

David Whyte

in, The House of Belonging

This Be The Verse

 

StockCake

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin

Stereotype

 

What is the stereotype of a sexual offender?

Believe me it's not true.

What is the stereotype of a Victim?

Again it's not true.

Take away the stereotypes,

You don't know who they are,

Is it a stranger in the distance?

Is it someone not so far?

The offenders is someone's child, parent or friend,

They don't just hide in the dark corners of the street end.

The victim is someone's child, parent or friend,

For them the darkness will never seem to end.

The offender is innocent to guilt is found, 

The victim is shamed, called a liar that sleeps around. 

Don't be so quick to judge who they are, 

That because you know the offender they are innocent by far.

Thinking of this subject puts people in an awkward place,

Not knowing what to say, how to understand or tell by a face.

Think of yourself in a room filled with family and friends,

Could you tell who is the offender or victim through your eyes lense? 

Anonymous

I Know You Want to Lie by the Roadside but the Wolves Are Coming, Sweetheart

 

Jannek Viegas

I’m here with you.

Our feet are bare at the beginning of a long walk.

I know the field looks empty now.

It’s not. The seeds are still growing.

Do not learn the lessons of heartbreak.

The wisdom of sorrow is a lie.

It will tell you wolves are a mercy,

that a bare field is acceptable.

If you need to rest let’s do it now.

Drink water, sleep, hold yourself.

Save your voice for when it’s time to scream.

I won’t lie to you, though.

The wolves are coming.

In your heart is a knife

but also a harvest.

When it’s time,

use one to protect

the other.

Leslie J. Anderson

You don’t know me

 

pinkrabbit

You don’t know me

You don’t know what I had go through

You see where I am now

But you haven’t seen what it took me to get here

You don’t see the nights I cried myself to sleep

Or the times I want it all just be over

You can’t see what I lost on my way here

You keep just saying how easy my life is

Easy

It has never been easy

I make it look easy

I make Hell looking like a Heaven

I hide the pain, struggle and everything else

It ain’t like you all would care

No you just want easy targets to hit me more

To bring me down

You don’t want to see me success

Because you can’t success

No I’m not the one to be blamed for that

That is on you

You need to put the hard work and do it for yourself

No one will give it to you

No one didn’t give it to me

Lot of people did try to stop me

Told me stop

Told how ridiculous my dreams were

How none of it was meant for me

No matter what everyone said

I knew deep inside me

It was for me

It will be for me

And next one who tries to keep me from it

Will find out why it wasn’t good idea

I’m done playing nice

I’m done making myself small

Stop shining so others would be more comfortable

No more that

I will shine bright like sun

I don’t care about others insecurities

That is their own job to fix those issues

Not mine responsibility

Never again

It is time to show who I am

No you don’t know me

You might know my name

Just wait when you can’t escape seeing it everywhere

I’m not stopping

This is just the beginning

You’re welcome to stalk my next chapter

But you will never be part of my success

You will never again be part of my life

Viper can’t ever be a good friend

So no you don’t know me and you never will

C.F. Grönroos 

Diving into the Wreck

StockCake

First having read the book of myths,

and loaded the camera,

and checked the edge of the knife-blade,

I put on

the body-armor of black rubber

the absurd flippers

the grave and awkward mask.

I am having to do this

not like Cousteau with his

assiduous team

aboard the sun-flooded schooner

but here alone.

There is a ladder.

The ladder is always there

hanging innocently

close to the side of the schooner.

We know what it is for,

we who have used it.

Otherwise

it is a piece of maritime floss

some sundry equipment.

I go down.

Rung after rung and still

the oxygen immerses me

the blue light

the clear atoms

of our human air.

I go down.

My flippers cripple me,

I crawl like an insect down the ladder

and there is no one

to tell me when the ocean

will begin.

First the air is blue and then

it is bluer and then green and then

black I am blacking out and yet

my mask is powerful

it pumps my blood with power

the sea is another story

the sea is not a question of power

I have to learn alone

to turn my body without force

in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget

what I came for

among so many who have always

lived here

swaying their crenellated fans

between the reefs

and besides

you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail.

I stroke the beam of my lamp

slowly along the flank

of something more permanent

than fish or weed

the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth

the drowned face always staring

toward the sun

the evidence of damage

worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty

the ribs of the disaster

curving their assertion

among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.

And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair

streams black, the merman in his armored body.

We circle silently

about the wreck

we dive into the hold.

I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes

whose breasts still bear the stress

whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies

obscurely inside barrels

half-wedged and left to rot

we are the half-destroyed instruments

that once held to a course

the water-eaten log

the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are

by cowardice or courage

the one who find our way

back to this scene

carrying a knife, a camera

a book of myths

in which

our names do not appear.

Adrienne Rich

in, Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972 

To His Coy Mistress

Silco Saaman

Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side

Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide

Of Humber would complain. I would

Love you ten years before the flood,

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires and more slow;

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast,

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart.

For, lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate.

       But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found;

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song; then worms shall try

That long-preserved virginity,

And your quaint honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust;

The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

       Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may,

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour

Than languish in his slow-chapped power.

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Through the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

 Andrew Marvell

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

 

Bert Hardy





 

Come live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove,

That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,

Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the Rocks,

Seeing the Shepherds feed their flocks,

By shallow Rivers to whose falls

Melodious birds sing Madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of Roses

And a thousand fragrant posies,

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle

Embroidered all with leaves of Myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool

Which from our pretty Lambs we pull;

Fair lined slippers for the cold,

With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and Ivy buds,

With Coral clasps and Amber studs:

And if these pleasures may thee move,

Come live with me, and be my love.

The Shepherds’ Swains shall dance and sing

For thy delight each May-morning:

If these delights thy mind may move,

Then live with me, and be my love.

 Christopher Marlowe

On the Death of the Beloved

 

Shutterstock

Though we need to weep your loss,

You dwell in that safe place in our hearts,

Where no storm or night or pain can reach you.

Your love was like the dawn

Brightening over our lives

Awakening beneath the dark

A further adventure of colour.

The sound of your voice

Found for us

A new music

That brightened everything.

Whatever you enfolded in your gaze

Quickened in the joy of its being;

You placed smiles like flowers

On the altar of the heart.

Your mind always sparkled

With wonder at things.

Though your days here were brief,

Your spirit was live, awake, complete.

We look towards each other no longer

From the old distance of our names;

Now you dwell inside the rhythm of breath,

As close to us as we are to ourselves.

Though we cannot see you with outward eyes,

We know our soul's gaze is upon your face,

Smiling back at us from within everything

To which we bring our best refinement.

Let us not look for you only in memory,

Where we would grow lonely without you.

You would want us to find you in presence,

Beside us when beauty brightens,

When kindness glows

And music echoes eternal tones.

When orchids brighten the earth,

Darkest winter has turned to spring;

May this dark grief flower with hope

In every heart that loves you.

May you continue to inspire us:

To enter each day with a generous heart.

To serve the call of courage and love

Until we see your beautiful face again

In that land where there is no more separation,

Where all tears will be wiped from our mind,

And where we will never lose you again. 

John O’Donohue

When I Think About Myself

 

Magnific

When I think about myself,

I almost laugh myself to death,

My life has been one great big joke,

A dance that's walked

A song that's spoke,

I laugh so hard I almost choke

When I think about myself.

Sixty years in these folks' world

The child I works for calls me girl

I say 'Yes ma'am' for working's sake.

Too proud to bend

Too poor to break,

I laugh until my stomach ache,

When I think about myself.

My folks can make me split my side,

I laughed so hard I nearly died,

The tales they tell, sound just like lying,

They grow the fruit,

But eat the rind,

I laugh until I start to crying,

When I think about my folks.

Maya Angelou