In the near woods listening to the wind. Perpetual student, former teacher. I read flash fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, children's stories, & more. Sometimes I write.
Profile image is from a painting: Moonlight by Ilya Repin 1896.
| https://www.instagram.com/laura_esckelson/ |
This is the beauty of being alone
toward the end of summer:
a dozen stray animals asleep on the porch
in the shade of my feet,
and the smell of leaves burning
in another neighborhood.
It is late morning,
and my forehead is alive with shadows,
some bats rock back and forth
to the rhythm of my humming,
the mimosa flutters with bees.
This is a house of unwritten poems,
This is where I am unborn.
James Tate
Stray Animals
Tell me our story: are we impetuous,
are we kind to each other, do we surrender
to what the mind cannot think past?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53598/summer-solstice
Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
Antonio Machado,
Translated by Robert Bly
https://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/Poets/M/MachadoAnton/LastnightasI/index.html
via Rob Brezsny's Free Will Astrology newsletter
What we did to the earth, we did to our daughters
one after the other.
What we did to the trees, we did to our elders
stacked in their wheelchairs by the lunchroom door.
What we did to our daughters, we did to our sons
calling out for their mothers.
Marie Howe
Postscript
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/160014/postscript-64271592ebbd2
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs – all this resinous, unretractable earth.
Jane Hirshfield
Optimism
#TodaysPoem #Poetry #Poem #JaneHirshfield #EarthDay #Ecopoetry
the whole field filled
with chicory in bloom, blue
as the sky reflected in the pond—
bluer even, and somehow lighter;
though they belonged to gravity.
Wendell Berry
from A Timbered Choir
https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2001%252F08%252F05.html
Am I as old as I am?
Maybe not. Time is a mystery
that can tip us upside down.
Jim Harrison
Seven in the Woods
Sometimes, when we're on a long drive,
and we've talked enough and listened
to enough music and stopped twice,
once to eat, once to see the view,
we fall into this rhythm of silence.
It swings back and forth between us
like a rope over a lake.
Maybe it's what we don't say
that saves us.
Dorianne Laux
Enough Music
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58676/enough-music
"Breathe, breathe in the long spaces that tell you how to live, revealing this thing that we call life, day in and day out, from the moment we get up, confused and dazed by the other world, throughout the day, all convoluted and contorted into the thing that we were not meant to be."
#TodaysPoem #poetry #NationalPoetryMonth
The theory of lungs by Irene Marques (2023 NationalPoetryMonth.ca @AmandaEarl) http://bit.ly/43vm4Yb & http://bit.ly/41h5RUC
AngelHousePress presents NationalPoetryMonth.ca, a celebration of poetic form of all kinds and an homage to those poets who try to extend the definition of poetry. This year's edition, which marks our fifth anniversary, is a tribute to the Last Vispo, an anthology of visual poetry edited by Nico Vasilkais and Crag Hill and published by Fantagraphics in 2012. The site contains visual poetry, asemic writing, collage, concrete poetry and other forms of whimsy by artists from Australia, Canada, the USA, Finland, Hungary, Italy, and Sweden. Each day in April a different visual poem will be shown. AngelHousePress thanks all who participated and sent work for consideration and wishes the month had at least forty five days in order to showcase all the great poetry we received.
we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice
Wisława Szymborska
Vicki Ziegler