like the ebb of a tide

like the ebb of a tide

people drift

in and out.

come swim with me

their eyes whisper.

come let's go

dive into this ocean

together.

Langston Hughes: Peace

Picture from my journal, April 2007

Marie Howe: Prayer

Prayer

Every day I want to speak with  you. And every day something more
calls for my attention - the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage

I need to buy for the trip
Even now I can hardly sit here

Among the talling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside
Already screeching and banging.

The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?

My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.

Help me. Even as I write these words, I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.

-Marie Howe

Frank Horne: To You

To You

All my life
they told me
that You
would save my soul
that only
by kneeling in Your house
and eating of Your body
and drinking of Your blood
could I be born again...
And yet
one night
in the tall black shadow
of a windy pine
I offered up
the sacrifice of Body
upon the altar
of her breast...
You
who were conceived
without ecstasy
or pain
can You understand
that I knelt last night
in Your house
and ate of Your body
and drank of Your blood
...and only thought of her?

-Frank Horne
from "Letters Found Near a Suicide"

Saint Francis of Assisi

John Pineda: Blackbird

Blackbird

Luke, at two years old, takes his mother's open hand
and tells us that she's holding a blackbird, her palm
curved, it seems, under the weight. It makes us smile.

Later, after you've fallen asleep, I find your hand
under covers, run my fingers inside the warm
cusp and touch, for the first time, its wings.

-John Pineda

Guillevic

In 2007 (according to my journal), I discovered the French poet Eugène Guillevic. He isn't very well-known in the States, so it's tough to find translated works.  I wish I had known this at the time, for I was reading a randomly selected encyclopedia of poetry, passing time between classes.  Luckily, I wrote a couple of his poems in my journal.

Heartbeat 

Not a wing, not a bird, no wind, but night,
only the pulsing of soundlessness
Gulls:
   Life for them is hunger,
   vast spaces of hunger
   and time to cry out space
   through their hunger,
   to drift with the sea,
   to curse the sea
   that will set bounds
   to space and hunger. 

 Florida gull.

Scalene Triangle
Good for dancing,
Twirling
On my base, on my tip,
On my sides, my other angles
It’s that I’m always
Agitated, pulled,
By the angles, by the sides
Put together by chance
Without equality.

Isosceles Triangle
I’ve succeeded in putting
Myself in a little order,
I tend to please myself. 

Equilateral Triangle
I’ve gone too far
In my concern for order
Nothing can come any more

Trikonasana (Triangle Pose)
(Source)

And, straight from my journal...

I was also a professional artist in college.