April's poetry posting has become a habit a bit hard to break. Here's a short one by Wendy Videlock, "There's Nothing More"There's nothing more
erotic than
one red
Chilean plum
slumbered in
the brown palm
of the curved
hand of the right
man.
A friend recently send me a couple of back issues of Poetry Journal and that poem was in it. Short and sweet, punny how sweet. [Sorry the picture is mangoes and not plums.]
There was also an essay about the Canadian poet Daryl Hine who also spent a period of his life in the US as editor of Poetry Journal. This is the first stanza of his poem "Don Juan in Amsterdam"
This also is a place which love is known in,
The hollow land beneath a lifeless sea
Remote from whatever region he was born in,
How far it is impossible to say.
The brackish water as I crossed
A bridge was delicately created
And stained and stale, like love-disordered linen.
I'm glad he gave the place in the title, it makes references here clear, otherwise I wouldn't be sure what he was talking about or where he was. For me it's important to know such things. It's a wonderful thing to go to the mailbox and come back with a hand full of poetry and thoughts about poetry.
3 comments:
Poetry is a brilliant addiction. Thanks for sharing so many great ones.
I offer you my favorite "fruit-centric" poem:
From Blossoms
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
Li-Young Lee
Yes, I love that poem, Jonas, only slightly less than I love ripe peaches.
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