Green Heart
52 notes (4:00)Poem submission by Glenn Roth
Run to the green heart of me,
I who run true on woodland paths,
on beach sand, through storm berm,
the water welcomes me.
I am sea and river and bird and sky.
Delve to the granite heart of me,I who was born of these eastern hills.
The scree and soil mask the ore
running heartlong, rich veins coiling
through breath and bone.
Run to the green heart of me.I am water and stone, air and bone.
I am the march of oak and the spire pine.
The dun hart knows the heart of me;
the fox shelters deep in my deepest den.
I breathe the wind to learnthe names of all the winds.
I name the birds and trees, for Adam’s
gift is my gift too. I seek to see, to know,
to name. I name what see; I seek to look true.
Know the green heart of me,the stone and soil from which I spring.
Learn the birdsong soul of me;
I am bluesky diamond; evensong.
I am the hawk-wind at the green heart of you.
a distant prayer
approaches
like a smile,
inching across
the pebbles beneath my lips.
contemplating your thoughts
and the
arc of your cheekbones
how many
years have passed?
12 Famous Book Titles That Come From Poetry →
2,334 notes (12:48)1. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold - “I Knew a Woman” by Theodore Roethke
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!2. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh - The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
…I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.3. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe - “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;4. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck - “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough” by Robert Burns
But little Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!5. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy - “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.6. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust - “Sonnet 30″ by William Shakespeare
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:7. Endless Night by Agatha Christie - “Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake
Every night and every morn,
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night,
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.8. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway - “Meditation XVII” by John Donne
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
9. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers - “The Lonely Hunter” by William Sharp
O never a green leaf whispers, where the green-gold branches swing:
O never a song I hear now, where one was wont to sing.
Here in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.10. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou - “Sympathy” by Paul Laurence Dunbar
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings —
I know why the caged bird sings!11. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald - “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.12. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster - Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Passage to India!
Struggles of many a captain–tales of many a sailor dead!
Over my mood, stealing and spreading they come,
Like clouds and cloudlets in the unreach’d sky.
❝
93 notes (1:12)
Chigiriki na
Katami ni sode o
Shibori tsutsu
Sue no Matsuyama
Nami kosaji to wa
(Our sleeves were wet with tears
As pledges that our love —
Will last until
Over Sue’s Mount of Pines
Ocean waves are breaking.)
Katami ni sode o
Shibori tsutsu
Sue no Matsuyama
Nami kosaji to wa
(Our sleeves were wet with tears
As pledges that our love —
Will last until
Over Sue’s Mount of Pines
Ocean waves are breaking.)
—
Kiyohara no Motosuke, ancient Japanese poet, writing of a tsunami in AD 869.
Scientist Warned of Japan Tsunami Disaster via Ancient Poem:
In 2001, Koji Minoura read the poem above. He’s a paleontologist in Sendai, Japan. “Sue no Matsuyama” jumped out at him, a reference to the name of a local pine-covered hill. Ancient historical accounts of the region referenced thousands dying in rising waves after an earthquake.
So he published this paper, using sediments that he found beneath rice fields to estimate the 869 earthquake at 8.3 magnitude. He warned of possible dangers should another earthquake like it occur, and the likelihood of mass deaths inTōhoku.
Unfortunately, no one listened until after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, which killed nearly 16,000 people in precisely the manner Minoura predicted ten years earlier. I guess you never know where scientific inspiration will strike.
Keep your eyes and mind open.
(via jtotheizzoe)
13 notes (1:52)Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
and though they are with you, and yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love, but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the
house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward, not tarries with yesterday.- Kahlil Gibran
Trashcan Lives
69 notes (4:19)the wind blows hard to night
and it’s a cold wind
and I think about
the boys on the row.
I hope some of them have a bottle
of red.it’s when you’re on the row
that you notice that
everything
is owned
and that there are locks on
everything.this is the way a democracy
works:
you get what you can,try to keep that
and add to it
if possible.this is the way a dictatorship
works too
only they either enslave or
destroy their
derelicts.we just forget
ours.in either case
it’s a hard
cold
wind.The Pleasures of the Damned - Charles Bukowski
Tongues Made of Glass
180 notes (1:06)Poem submission by Shaun Shane
if only
our tongues
were made
of glass
how much
more careful
we would be
when we
speak
The last page
31 notes (5:54)Poem submission by Guy Peace
Days pass by like pages flapping in the wind
One by one,
Many in one go
Often
And then the last page goes
And you turn all over again
From the first one
Memories erase memory
Days days
Leaving me blank
Leaving me alone at last
People don’t talk enough.
85 notes (3:51)Poem submission by tokyoshuynh
conversations held in whispers,
they keep their thoughts as secrets,
emotions nonexistent.
people don’t talk enough,
enough for them to feel
to feel - what is it to feel?
to steal a glance into the eyes of another, the life of another,
people are afraid to feel,
they are scared to embrace the emotions they are blessed with,
they run away from what makes us human,
as if it was not human to think, to touch, to smell, to love, to want.
desires kept hidden under heavy hearts and lonely hands,
no one speaks unless spoken to,
but never are they spoken to because-
people are afraid to talk.
significance exists in speech, but
the words everyone says lack importance,
not hard to forget, they lack feeling and substantial meaning,
they lack heart, which lies forgotten under a heavy chest
someone lost the key,
because communication is no longer key
just empty terms,
no more similes and metaphors,
or words that scream with sorrow or happiness or truth,
just silence.
silence in the way you look around, eyes emptied and hollowed out,
silence in the way you move your mouth,
you have forgotten how to talk.
your body is a
sacred sanctuary.
desecration
has made your pain ivory
the smell of your
skin is
brokenhearted
and you sit
on the altar
of loss.
