What better way to celebrate World Poetry Day today than by writing or reading a poem? I wrote this poem a few days ago, on the night of the full moon.
full moon
watching its twin
In the pond
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Spring is like a perhaps hand (which comes carefully out of Nowhere) arranging a window, into which people look (while people stare arranging and changing placing carefully there a strange thing and a known thing here) and changing everything carefully spring is like a perhaps Hand in a window (carefully to and fro moving New and Old things, while people stare carefully moving a perhaps fraction of flower here placing an inch of air there) and without breaking anything.
By e. e. cummings (1894 – 1962), American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright.
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The old pond:
A frog jumps in,—
The sound of the water.
by Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694) was the most famous Edo period poet and a haiku master.
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Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.
By Izumi Shikibu (974–1034). Izumi Shikibu was a mid-Heian period Japanese poet and a member of the Thirty-six Medieval Poetry Immortals.
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What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.
By Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), a Japanese poet known for his haiku poems and journals. Issa is regarded as one of the four haiku masters in Japan, along with Bashō, Buson, and Shiki.
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The lark sings through the long spring day,
But never enough for its hearts’ content.
by Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694) was the most famous Edo period poet and a haiku master.
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I have caught up departing Spring
Here at the Bay of Waka-no-ura.
Matsuo Basho (1644 – 1694) was the most famous Edo period poet and a haiku master.
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My gift to you will be an abyss, she said,
but it will be so subtle you’ll perceive it
only after many years have passed
and you are far from Mexico and me.
You’ll find it when you need it most,
and that won’t be
the happy ending,
but it will be an instant of emptiness and joy.
And maybe then you’ll remember me,
if only just a little.
by Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003), Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist.
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When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
by Wendell Berry (b. 1934), American poet, novelist, and environmentalist.
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You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
– Mary Oliver (1935 – 2019), from the volume Dream Work (1986)
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