unask

 

orange as...

 

Orange as the perfumed fruit
hanging their globes on the glossy tree,
orange as pumpkins in the field,
orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs
who come to eat it, orange as my
cat running lithe through the high grass.

 

Marge Piercy

 

 

 

dark

Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill, and sleep, while it
flows through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us, except we keep returning
to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,
willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

 

Wendell Berry

 

 

smile

Don't struggle;
You are bound to fail.
Just smile a sweet smile.

Sri Chinmoy

 

 

 

 

Anything Couldn’t Make Me Rejoice

 

Anything Couldn’t Make Me Rejoice
I Was In The Darkness Of Life

Shadow Of Death That Feared Me
Sorrow That Had Occupied My Heart

Have Now Disappeared Of The Yesterday
Today Only I Remember

Your Face Drowned In The Beauty Of Moon

 

Avishek

 

 

 

greenness is deeper

 

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that
says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things' selves for a second finding,
to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to
wonder.

 

Richard Wilbur

 

 

 

a third tiger

 

Against the tiger of symbols I have set
the real one, the hot-blooded one
that savages a herd of buffalo,
and today, the third of August, ’59,
its patient shadow moves across the plain.

But yet, the act of naming it, of guessing
what is its nature and its circumstance
creates a fiction, not a living creature,
Not the animal that lives wild upon the earth.

Let us look for a third tiger. This one
will be a form in my dream like all the others,
a system, an arrangement of human language,
and not the flesh-and-bone tiger
that, out of reach of all mythologies,
paces the earth.

I know all this; yet something
drives me to this ancient, perverse adventure,
foolish and vague, so that still I keep on looking
throughout the hours for the other tiger,
the other tiger, the one not found in verse.

 

Jorge Luis Borges, transl. Tom Davis and (mostly) Alastair Reid

 

 

 

the stain of love

 

I lie here thinking of you:—

the stain of love
is upon the world!
Yellow, yellow, yellow
it eats into the leaves,
smears with saffron
the horned branches that lean
heavily
against a smooth purple sky!
There is no light
only a honey-thick stain
that drips from leaf to leaf
and limb to limb
spoiling the colors
of the whole world—

you far off there under
the wine-red selvage of the west!

 

William Carlos Williams