Dream on, for dreams are sweet:
Do not awaken!
Dream on, and at thy feet
Pomegranates shall be shaken.
Who likeneth the youth
of life to morning?
’Tis like the night in truth,
Rose-coloured dreams adorning.
The wind is soft above,
The shadows umber.
(There is a dream called Love.)
Take thou the fullest slumber!
In Lethe’s soothing stream,
Thy thirst thou slakest.
Sleep, sleep; ’tis sweet to dream.
Oh, weep then thou awakest!
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 17, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
—after Michael Heizer
I may be looking at the set of boulders
that is now in front of me, but it is you I am addressing.
You are near or you are far,
depending on the accuracy of the words I have chosen.
When my teacher told me to use this
instead of the, she was talking about the range between
the intimate and the conventional. The gray cluster
is radiant, but it is a melancholy radiance.
To describe it only seems to lean away
from what I intend. Maybe, then, touch is a better way
of explaining the pleasure of that
encounter: the surprise and familiarity of the plant
that you brush past in the dark of your
own house. Or maybe the always-new logic of a dream
is closer to the truth: the falling that takes place
in a place where there is no ground.
The boulders are there for me, an arrangement
and its warren of rooms. One door opening to foggy roses.
Another one opening to a dawn that is the color of tea.
Surely there will always be new language
to tell you who I am, imagination rousing
out of idleness into urgency, reaching now towards you.
I keep remembering my teacher and she is an image
of joy, the small and wordless music
of her silver bangles. This over the.
One of the rules for writing the poems of a lonely person.
Copyright © 2019 by Rick Barot. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 7, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
The wounded wilderness of Morris Graves is not the same wild west the white man found It is a land that Buddha came upon from a different direction It is a wild white nest in the true mad north of introspection where ‘falcons of the inner eye’ dive and die glimpsing in their dying fall all life’s memory of existence and with grave chalk wing draw upon the leaded sky a thousand threaded images of flight It is the night that is their ‘native habitat’ these ‘spirit birds’ with bled white wings these droves of plover bearded eagles blind birds singing in glass fields these moonmad swans and ecstatic ganders trapped egrets charcoal owls trotting turtle symbols these pink fish among mountains shrikes seeking to nest whitebone drones mating in air among hallucinary moons And a masked bird fishing in a golden stream and an ibis feeding ‘on its own breast’ and a stray Connemara Pooka (life size) And then those blown mute birds bearing fish and paper messages between two streams which are the twin streams of oblivion wherein the imagination turning upon itself with white electric vision refinds itself still mad and unfed among the hebrides
from A Coney Island of the Mind, copyright ©1958 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.