Poetry Appreciation (do NOT post your own poetry)

Where Silence Blooms

Between quiet fields a mountain rose, firm, lonely, as if waiting for something soft to touch it without breaking it.

And a cloud came down from the sky, not in haste, but with perfume and nectar on the skin.

It wasn't rain, it was a caress. Drop by drop, he spoke to the mountain with his essence, until it trembled... and at its peak, a river was born.

A flower opened right there, where the plain ends and desire begins, and its petals covered the height with liquid secrets that no one else could see.

He allowed himself to flourish. She let herself be rained. And between nectar and sap, a new channel emerged, a hidden language where two energies embrace each other without a body, but feel more real than the world.

There were no screams. Pulses only. There were no names. Only symbols. There was no time. Only eternity hidden between the branches and the verses.

And there they continue... the cloud and the mountain, the flower and the river, he and she...

telling each other everything, without anyone knowing.

-Unknown

 

by Charles Simic

 

by Margaret Atwood

 

Kids Who Die
This is for the kids who die,
Black and white,
For kids will die certainly.
The old and rich will live on awhile,
As always,
Eating blood and gold,
Letting kids die.

Kids will die in the swamps of Mississippi
Organizing sharecroppers.
Kids will die in the streets of Chicago
Organizing workers.
Kids will die in the orange groves of California
Telling others to get together.
Whites and Filipinos,
Negroes and Mexicans,
All kinds of kids will die
Who don't believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment
And a lousy peace.

Of course, the wise and the learned
Who pen editorials in the papers,
And the gentlemen with Dr. in front of their names.
White and black,
Who make surveys and write books.
Will live on weaving words to smother the kids who die,
And the sleazy courts,
And the bribe-reaching police,
And the blood-loving generals,
And the money-loving preachers
Will all raise their hands against the kids who die,
Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets
To frighten the people—
For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people—
And the old and rich don't want the people
To taste the iron of the kids who die,
Don't want the people to get wise to their own power,
To believe an Angelo Herndon, or even get together.

Listen, kids who die—
Maybe, now, there will be no monument for you
Except in our hearts
Maybe your bodies'll be lost in a swamp.
Or a prison grave, or the potter's field,
Or the rivers where you're drowned like Leibknecht.
But the day will come—
You are sure yourselves that it is coming—
When the marching feet of the masses
Will raise for you a living monument of love,
And joy, and laughter,
And black hands and white hands clasped as one,
And a song that reaches the sky—

The song of the life triumphant
Through the kids who die.

-Langston Hughes

 

by Langston Hughes

 

The Next War, by Ursula K. Le Guin

It will take place,
it will take time
it will take life,
and waste them.