How will I know you in the underworld?
How will we find each other?

-Eavan Boland (1944-2020)
from “Eurydice Speaks”
#everynightapoem

As if we knew what the other was feeling. We don’t,

of course. We never do. No matter.

It’s the tenderness I care about.

-Raymond Carver, "The Gift"
#everynightapoem #thismorning

So, here you are
too foreign for home
too foreign for here
never enough for both

"diaspora blues" by Ijeoma Umebinyuo
#everynightapoem

things got terribly ugly incredibly quickly

–

ugly things will get less ugly inevitably hopefully

Terrance Hayes, "American Sonnet for the New Year"

As ever, for #everynightapoem on January 1

It's not that my love for flowers exceeds life itself -
Just that I grieve how petals, like years, rush to fade

不是愛花即欲死
只恐花盡老相催

-杜甫 Tu Fu (712-770)
Sharing a remembered spring blossom and a bit of a favorite poem, for a flower-loving friend whose birthday falls in the late autumn season of Descending Frost 霜降

#everynightapoem #poetry

“It is also November. The noons are more laconic and the sundowns sterner. November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.”

-Emily Dickinson, letter to Lavinia Dickinson (Nov 1864)
#everynightapoem #november

Then be pitiless you whom I could not save –
Send your cries to me, if only in this way:
I've found a prisoner's letters to a lover –
One begins: "These words may never reach you."
Another ends: "The skin dissolves in dew
without your touch." And I want to answer:
I want to live forever. What else can I say?
It rains as I write this. Mad heart, be brave.

-Agha Shahid Ali
#everynightapoem #fragment

I wanted to stay as I was
still as the world is never still,
not in midsummer but the moment before
the first flower forms, the moment
nothing is as yet past—

-Louise Glück, "The Doorway"
(1943 - October 13, 2023) safe travels
#everynightapoem

War creates two categories of persons: those who outlive it and those who don’t.

Both carry wounds.

-Anne Carson
#everynightapoem

夏草や兵共がゆめの跡
natsukusa ya
tsuwamono domo ga
yume no ato.

Waves of summer grass:
All that remains of soldiers’
Impossible dreams.
(trans. David Bowles)

-松尾芭蕉 Matsuo Bashō
#everynightapoem