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.