This far north, Winter
Comes like some uncle,
Dearly loved, but always too early
For supper, and staying into the
Small dark hours, full of tales of
Death and sadness,
And there you are, longing
For the break of Spring
Then Summer comes,
And you rush to embrace her
Like an old sweet regret,
Anxious not to screw things up this time,
And cling too tightly
Until finally, inevitably,
She slips away, again too soon.
And Winter says,
I told you this is how it would be.
No poetic lineage could be complete without Shakespeare, could it?
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
BONUS: Click here for a marvelous musical setting of this poem.
Twin flames
in the dying light
Only you can make fire
From the liquid night
Twin flames,
oh, my wounded heart
Such dreams
as we fling athwart
Our desire
like embers aglow
Like this
ancient long ago
I’m burned beyond repair
Let’s fling away despair
Twin flames
In the blinding night
Only you can make love
From this dynamite
Dorothy Parker is, of course, famous for witticisms, short, incisive, and very quotable. One of my favorites is, “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” But she was a fine poet as well, and along with her better-known light-hearted efforts were some very dark verses, so I’ve included two poems about love, one from each variety. I’ll let you decide which is the more serious.
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Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania
August
When my eyes are weeds,
And my lips are petals, spinning
Down the wind that has beginning
Where the crumpled beeches start
In a fringe of salty reeds;
When my arms are elder-bushes,
And the rangy lilac pushes
Upward, upward through my heart;
Summer, do your worst!
Light your tinsel moon, and call on
Your performing stars to fall on
Headlong through your paper sky;
Nevermore shall I be cursed
By a flushed and amorous slattern,
With her dusty laces’ pattern
Trailing, as she straggles by.
The precise forces of living
Hinge on a paper-thin reality
Behind which lurk the illusions
We work so hard to uncover
The precise moment of discontinuity
Comes when we discover
That a lifetime of regrets
Is only a simple misunderstanding
The precise inclination of a heart
Determines the difference
Between love
And death
exiles child 