breeding lilacs from the dead ground

[harborshore]

I appear to be experiencing the only good thing to ever come from period cramps: they improve your circulation, and consequently my crick in the neck (that had me in such pain yesterday I could barely move off the couch and had me going home an hour early from work) is improving. Mobility, you guys, I kind of like it. (Even if I'm in a different kind of pain right now.)

Today is World Poetry Day, they're telling me (♥), and so, here, because it's late and I'm rather tired:


The Sciences Sing a Lullaby


Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you're tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They'll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.

Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren't alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren't alone. Go to sleep.

Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.

--Albert Goldbarth

First given to me (and I do think of it as a gift) by novembersmith. Thank you, dearest.

If you want to add your own calm or joyful or sleepy or spring-like or thundery poems, feel free. Or just read that one over, let it help with the breathing.

Comments

[egelantier.livejournal.com]

- Czeslaw Milosz, "A Song On the End of the World"

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.