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

“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

Why are so so many of my friends Libras? Happy birthday season to all my fellow indecisive beauty lovers
(I’m a child; I’ll be celebrating all month)

I have been younger in October /
than in all the months of spring

-W.S. Merwin, who understands (and whose birthday I share)

“The Love for October”
#everynightapoem #libraseason

Because it is the first day of fall.
As ever, my #everynightapoem for the autumnal equinox

———
Sharing one of my favorite poems since childhood.

By the 12thc warrior poet Xin Qiji 辛棄疾, who was sidelined during peacetime, demoted, drifting through a decade of minor posts in remote lands.

Poetry, then, is that which is left unsaid.
“My, what a cool and lovely autumn.”

i bear witness to no thing
more human than hate

i bear witness to no thing
more human than love

apples and honey
apples and honey

what is not lost
is paradise

-Lucille Clifton, "Rosh Hashanah" from September Suite 2001
A good new year filled with apples and honey to us all #shanahtovah
#everynightapoem

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself
——
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;

-Carol Ann Duffy, Prayer
#everynightapoem

Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

-Adam Zagajewski’s poem, translated by Clare Cavanagh, was published on the final page of The New Yorker special issue following 9/11/01.
(It is also the poem that made me want to learn Polish)
#everynightapoem as ever as ever

The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence. A coquettish, even cheerful nihilism. One recognizes the imperative of silence, but goes on speaking anyway. Discovering that one has nothing to say, one seeks a way to say that.

Susan Sontag (1967)
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

“…because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.”
-The Unbearable Lightness of Being (trans. from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim)

Ave atque vale, Milan Kundera (1 April 1929-11 July 2023), and safe travels.
#everynightapoem #MilanKundera

Suppose I say summer

-Raymond Carver, “Hummingbird”
(For Tess)

From “A New Path to the Waterfall” - completed in the last weeks of his life and published posthumously
#everynightapoem #poetry

After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won’t pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

-Wisława Szymborska, “The End and the Beginning” (t. Cavanagh & Barańczak)
#everynightapoem #war

In the desert
I saw a creature,naked,bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”

Stephen Crane
#everynightapoem #poetry