it's been a while since I shared a #VerseThursday

The Problem with Early Warnings, by Charles Rafferty

At thirty-six
I finally stopped wanting to shower—
a caricature,
convinced I couldn’t do that right,
either.

#VerseThursday

saw this poem recently and remembered that I haven't done a #VerseThursday in a while

In Those Years, by Adrienne Rich

2 years ago, almost to the day, I posted this:

#VerseThursday

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Cold toilet seats away from home are ok with me, I can imagine no recent sitters,
How about you?

#VerseThursday because I don’t feel fine and I’m not going to write, so here is W.H. Auden

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

(to be contd.)

"He begins
at the crown of my scalp. He parts the two sides like a tree

branch at the V, and I think of all the forks in the road
in all the storybooks about emerald forests, kingdoms.
All the swinging bridges we travailed. Mariners, trains, conductors."

#TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry #VerseThursday
Hairbrush by Cynthia Atkins (2023 Reverie Magazine) https://tinyurl.com/38bhhazd

"Empty mountain: no man is seen.
But voices of men are heard.
Sun's reflection reaches into the woods
And shines upon the green moss."

#TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry #VerseThursday
Deer Enclosure by Wang Wei, translated by Wai-Lim Yip from Hiding the Universe (1972 Grossman Publishers) https://tinyurl.com/y9w53btd
in 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by Eliot Weinberger (1987, 2016 New Directions Publishing) https://tinyurl.com/2p95v5mk

"Our orbit is drunk in its spin, and sobriety comes
only in flashes. No one knows who we are.
We live in that freedom and peril.
Let the imagination be the beast it is
that eats and fattens on us.
But let us not believe a word it says."

#TodaysPoem #VerseThursday #poetry @poetry
In the Air by @ronnabloom (2024 Brick Literary) https://tinyurl.com/5ewvd55z