Entrance

Source: Favim

Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight,

out of the room that lets you feel secure.

Infinity is open to your sight.

Whoever you are.

With eyes that have forgotten how to see

from viewing things already too well-known,

lift up into the dark a huge, black tree

and  put it in the heavens:  tall, alone.

And you have made the world and all you see.

It ripens like the words still in your mouth.

And when at last you comprehend its truth,

then close your eyes and gently set it free.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

(Translated by Dana Gioia)

Entrance

Source: Favim

Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight,

out of the room that lets you feel secure.

Infinity is open to your sight.

Whoever you are.

With eyes that have forgotten how to see

from viewing things already too well-known,

lift up into the dark a huge, black tree

and  put it in the heavens:  tall, alone.

And you have made the world and all you see.

It ripens like the words still in your mouth.

And when at last you comprehend its truth,

then close your eyes and gently set it free.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

(Translated by Dana Gioia)

Ode to Multiple Universes

Terry Pratchett at his home in 1997; Credit: PA Wire

I do have worlds enough and time

to spare an hour to find a rhyme

to take a week to pen an article

a day to find a rhyme for 'particle'.

In many worlds my time is free

to spend ten minutes over tea

And steal the time from some far moon

so words can take all afternoon,

Away beyond the speed of light

I'll write a novel in one night.

Aeons beckon, if I want 'em...

...but I can't have em', 'cos of Quantum.

~ Terry Pratchett

Ode to Multiple Universes

Terry Pratchett at his home in 1997; Credit: PA Wire

I do have worlds enough and time

to spare an hour to find a rhyme

to take a week to pen an article

a day to find a rhyme for 'particle'.

In many worlds my time is free

to spend ten minutes over tea

And steal the time from some far moon

so words can take all afternoon,

Away beyond the speed of light

I'll write a novel in one night.

Aeons beckon, if I want 'em...

...but I can't have em', 'cos of Quantum.

~ Terry Pratchett

Words

Source: ADFP Home Magazine 

The simple contact with a wooden spoon and the word   

recovered itself, began to spread as grass, forced   

as it lay sprawling to consider the monument where   

patience looked at grief, where warfare ceased   

eyes curled outside themes to search the paper   

now gleaming and potent, wise and resilient, word   

entered its continent eager to find another as   

capable as a thorn. The nearest possession would   

house them both, they being then two might glide   

into this house and presently create a rather larger   

mansion filled with spoons and condiments, gracious

as a newly laid table where related objects might gather

to enjoy the interplay of gravity upon facetious hints,   

the chocolate dish presuming an endowment, the ladle  

of galactic rhythm primed as a relish dish, curved   

knives, finger bowls, morsel carriages words might   

choose and savor before swallowing so much was the   

sumptuousness and substance of a rented house where words   

placed dressing gowns as rosemary entered their scent   

percipient as elder branches in the night where words   

gathered, warped, then straightened, marking new wands.

~ Barbara Guest

Words

Source: ADFP Home Magazine 

The simple contact with a wooden spoon and the word   

recovered itself, began to spread as grass, forced   

as it lay sprawling to consider the monument where   

patience looked at grief, where warfare ceased   

eyes curled outside themes to search the paper   

now gleaming and potent, wise and resilient, word   

entered its continent eager to find another as   

capable as a thorn. The nearest possession would   

house them both, they being then two might glide   

into this house and presently create a rather larger   

mansion filled with spoons and condiments, gracious

as a newly laid table where related objects might gather

to enjoy the interplay of gravity upon facetious hints,   

the chocolate dish presuming an endowment, the ladle  

of galactic rhythm primed as a relish dish, curved   

knives, finger bowls, morsel carriages words might   

choose and savor before swallowing so much was the   

sumptuousness and substance of a rented house where words   

placed dressing gowns as rosemary entered their scent   

percipient as elder branches in the night where words   

gathered, warped, then straightened, marking new wands.

~ Barbara Guest

Corrigenda

Source: Favim

I take it back.
The crow doesn't have red wings.
They're pages of dust.
The woman in the dark room
takes the barrel of a .357 magnum
out of her mouth, reclines
on your bed, a Helena Rubinstein smile.
I'm sorry, you won't know your father
by his darksome old clothes.
He won't be standing by that tree.
I haven't salted the tail
of the sparrow.
Erase its song from this page.
I haven't seen the moon
fall open at the golden edge of our sleep.
I haven't been there
like the tumor in each of us.
There's no death that can
hold us together like twin brothers
coming home to bury their mother.
I never said there's a book inside
every tree. I never said I know how
the legless beggar feels when
the memory of his toes itch.
If I did, drunkenness
was then my god & naked dancer.
I take it back.
I'm not a suicidal mooncalf;
you don't have to take my shoelaces.
If you must quote me, remember
I said that love heals from inside.

~ Yusef Komunyakaa

Corrigenda

Source: Favim

I take it back.
The crow doesn't have red wings.
They're pages of dust.
The woman in the dark room
takes the barrel of a .357 magnum
out of her mouth, reclines
on your bed, a Helena Rubinstein smile.
I'm sorry, you won't know your father
by his darksome old clothes.
He won't be standing by that tree.
I haven't salted the tail
of the sparrow.
Erase its song from this page.
I haven't seen the moon
fall open at the golden edge of our sleep.
I haven't been there
like the tumor in each of us.
There's no death that can
hold us together like twin brothers
coming home to bury their mother.
I never said there's a book inside
every tree. I never said I know how
the legless beggar feels when
the memory of his toes itch.
If I did, drunkenness
was then my god & naked dancer.
I take it back.
I'm not a suicidal mooncalf;
you don't have to take my shoelaces.
If you must quote me, remember
I said that love heals from inside.

~ Yusef Komunyakaa

Language

Source: Favim

For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience, and it worries me that more and more people are learning not to use language; they’re giving in to the banalities of the television media and shrinking their vocabulary, shrinking their own way of using this fabulous tool that human beings have refined over so many centuries into this extremely sensitive instrument. I don’t want to make it crude, I don’t want to make it into shopping-list language, I don’t want to make it into simply an exchange of information: I want to make it into the subtle, emotional, intellectual, freeing thing that it is and that it can be.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Language

Source: Favim

For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience, and it worries me that more and more people are learning not to use language; they’re giving in to the banalities of the television media and shrinking their vocabulary, shrinking their own way of using this fabulous tool that human beings have refined over so many centuries into this extremely sensitive instrument. I don’t want to make it crude, I don’t want to make it into shopping-list language, I don’t want to make it into simply an exchange of information: I want to make it into the subtle, emotional, intellectual, freeing thing that it is and that it can be.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Affirmation

Source: Favim

Let us begin again. This time on a train. Where the tunnels
only highlight your flicked cheekbones. And maybe you are going
to a job you hate. And maybe you’re going home to a wife. And maybe
you’re going to visit an old friend or lover. And maybe you don’t
even look at me. But you leave your book, Marquez, and touch me
through the way the edge of the pages are rubbed upwards,
pushed down in the love of wearing out. There are words you circle,
words I can only assume catch you, that you repeat, mouthing them
in the shower, speaking them into your coffee, trying them out
in places they’d seem inappropriate: saying “vulgar” to the papaya
at the corner market, “metamorphosis” to your bank teller,
“empurpled” to your empty kitchen. And these are the reasons I love
you, and these are the words I try on now, and these are the words
I’d never even be able to speak if I saw you again.

~ MeLaina Elise Evans

Affirmation

Source: Favim

Let us begin again. This time on a train. Where the tunnels
only highlight your flicked cheekbones. And maybe you are going
to a job you hate. And maybe you’re going home to a wife. And maybe
you’re going to visit an old friend or lover. And maybe you don’t
even look at me. But you leave your book, Marquez, and touch me
through the way the edge of the pages are rubbed upwards,
pushed down in the love of wearing out. There are words you circle,
words I can only assume catch you, that you repeat, mouthing them
in the shower, speaking them into your coffee, trying them out
in places they’d seem inappropriate: saying “vulgar” to the papaya
at the corner market, “metamorphosis” to your bank teller,
“empurpled” to your empty kitchen. And these are the reasons I love
you, and these are the words I try on now, and these are the words
I’d never even be able to speak if I saw you again.

~ MeLaina Elise Evans

Quote: Word-smitten

Source: Unknown/Favim

I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath. Smothered it. Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless. Bear recognized that all writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as if it were final.
...But I was always word-smitten. Always reading in a book or writing in a journal.

~ Charles Frazier

Quote: Word-smitten

Source: Unknown/Favim

I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath. Smothered it. Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless. Bear recognized that all writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as if it were final.
...But I was always word-smitten. Always reading in a book or writing in a journal.

~ Charles Frazier

Poem: The Quiet World

Source: Unknown

In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
the government has decided to allot
each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it
to my ear without saying hello.
In the restaurant I point
at chicken noodle soup. I am
adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover, 

proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond, I know
she's used up all her words
so I slowly whisper I love you,
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

~ Jeffrey McDaniel

Poem: The Quiet World

Source: Unknown

In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
the government has decided to allot
each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it
to my ear without saying hello.
In the restaurant I point
at chicken noodle soup. I am
adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover, 

proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond, I know
she's used up all her words
so I slowly whisper I love you,
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

~ Jeffrey McDaniel

A Choice of Weapons

Source: www.topit.me

Sticks and stones are hard on bones,
Aimed with angry art.
Words can sting like anything,
But silence breaks the heart.

~ Phyllis McGinley

A Choice of Weapons

Source: www.topit.me

Sticks and stones are hard on bones,
Aimed with angry art.
Words can sting like anything,
But silence breaks the heart.

~ Phyllis McGinley

The Lamp

Source: DHD Multimedia Gallery

I write in order to comprehend not to express myself
I don’t grasp anything I’m not ashamed to admit it
sharing this not knowing with a maple leaf
So I turn with questions to words wiser than myself
to things that will endure long after us
I wait to gain wisdom from chance
I expect sense from silence
Perhaps something suddenly will happen
and pulse with hidden truth
like the spirit of the flame in the oil lamp
under which we bowed our heads
when we were very young
and grandma crossed the bread with a knife
and we believed in everything
So now I yearn for nothing as much
as for that faith

~ Anna Kamienska

The Lamp

Source: DHD Multimedia Gallery

I write in order to comprehend not to express myself
I don’t grasp anything I’m not ashamed to admit it
sharing this not knowing with a maple leaf
So I turn with questions to words wiser than myself
to things that will endure long after us
I wait to gain wisdom from chance
I expect sense from silence
Perhaps something suddenly will happen
and pulse with hidden truth
like the spirit of the flame in the oil lamp
under which we bowed our heads
when we were very young
and grandma crossed the bread with a knife
and we believed in everything
So now I yearn for nothing as much
as for that faith

~ Anna Kamienska