Animals Have you forgotten what we were like then when we were still first rate and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth it’s no use worrying about Time but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves and turned some sharp corners the whole pasture looked like our meal we didn’t need speedometers we could manage cocktails out of ice and water I wouldn’t want to be faster or greener than now if you were with me O you were the best of all my days [1950] Frank O'Hara

Happy birthday Frank O'Hara #poetrybreak

Love Poem for An Apocalypse by Dave Lucas I wish I’d met you after everything had burned, after the markets crash and global sea levels rise. The forests scorched. The grasslands trespassed. My love, it is a whole life’s work to disappear— ask the god with his head in the wolf’s mouth or the serpent intent on swallowing all the earth. Ask the senate subcommittee for market solutions for late capitalism and early-onset dementia. You and a bird flu could make me believe in fate. I think we might be happy in the end, in the dark of a hollow tree, a seed bank or blast-proof bunker, if only you would sing the song I love, you know the one about our precious eschatology, the one I always ask to hear to lull me back to sleep

Anyone need a #PoetryBreak?

Just had a nice little walk and now I am itching to write.

This feels right for the day, the weekend, all of it. Dave Lucas is on Instagram (fakedavelucas) if this strikes your fancy.

I have a story about decay I'd love to get fully drafted tonight.

🤞🏻

#AmWriting

We Have Enough Dead Friends Lena Oleanderson Come over. The doors are open, my flat’s a mess and so is my heart but the doors are always open. Come over. I will make soup, probably from frozen but the important thing is we will both eat. You don’t have to be dying, but if you are, or you feel like you are, or if living’s been hard, call me, and I will show up. It doesn’t have to be that bad, it doesn’t have to be bad at all, but if it is, please call. Do you want me to do the groceries? Do you want me to mop the floors? Do you need to be held; you don’t have to be dying to be held. If you want me to be there, I want to. I’m on the bathroom floor again, and breathing is hard, and eating’s been hard, and sleeping, the world is a laden thing rolling around on my chest lately. Just being alive is heavy tonight, but we have enough dead friends. Come over.

I need a #PoetryBreak.

Maybe you need one, too?

Thank you to Lena Oleanderson (@lena-oleanderson.bsky.social) for this one, which makes the rounds often online because...

A lot of us probably need the reminder? The invitation?

"the world is a laden thing
rolling around on my chest lately"

🫂🕯️

Musée des Beaux Arts By W. H. Auden December 1938 About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1560)

W. H. Auden has always been my poet of choice for hard moments of world-grief.

Today is no exception, though I'm sharing both this classic ekphrastic poem, written in December 1938, and its source of inspiration by Breughel, so you can see for yourself the power of both.

#PoetryBreak #ArtBreak

My Life Was the Size of My Life By Jane Hirshfield My life was the size of my life. Its rooms were room-sized, its soul was the size of a soul. In its background, mitochondria hummed, above it sun, clouds, snow, the transit of stars and planets. It rode elevators, bullet trains, various airplanes, a donkey. It wore socks, shirts, its own ears and nose. It ate, it slept, it opened and closed its hands, its windows. Others, I know, had lives larger. Others, I know, had lives shorter. The depth of lives, too, is different. There were times my life and I made jokes together. There were times we made bread. Once, I grew moody and distant. I told my life I would like some time, I would like to try seeing others. In a week, my empty suitcase and I returned. I was hungry, then, and my life, my life, too, was hungry, we could not keep our hands off our clothes on our tongues from —2012

#PoetryBreak!

I am so behind on work. The teen ward needed some deep emotional care + troubleshooting last night after a long run of meetings, so my plans for #NightWork failed.

But so it goes, & we press on - living the best lives we can in our one and only true companions: our bodies, ourselves.

The Mower Philip Larkin The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found A hedgehog jammed up against the blades, Killed. It had been in the long grass. I had seen it before, and even fed it, once. Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world Unmendably. Burial was no help: Next morning I got up and it did not. The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.

Just a wee #PoetryBreak before I get cracking on today's tasks.

There are so many ways we can choose to live.

Choose to live in ways that are kind.

#Poetry

The glassy, ink-blue surface of Lake Windermere at dawn, reflecting the jagged, purple-hued silhouette of distant fells. Ethereal morning mist clings to the water's surface, illuminated by a cold, silver light. Cinematic photography with high contrast and sharp textures of rippling water.

"From the depths of Windermere to the peak of Skiddaw.
Every elevation covered.
*Cumbria In Verse - Lakes To Fells In Poetry*.
Alden Carrow. March 1st.
#Skiddaw #Windermere #NewBook #PoetryBreak #CumbriaLife"

HOW WE DISAPPEAR by A. Olanow I am in the store touching things. Linen napkins, a blue bowl. The world is on fire and I am choosing between two kinds of soap. Everyone here is doing this, filling carts with small comforts while somewhere a child goes to bed hungry, while the earth heats, while men make decisions about who gets to live. I know what this is, this careful arranging while everything collapses. This is how we survive. And also how we disappear.

#PoetryBreak

Today's poet was new to me. You can and should find Alessandra Olanow on Instagram. @aolanow

My last few months have been incredibly stressful, but poems like this one are fortifying.

Art doesn't fix the world. It simply reminds us we're not alone in the work that might get us there.

She Walks in Beauty - Wikipedia

( #JCKaelin here: This is about #AnneWilmotHorton, amateur botanist after whom the plant genus Hortonia was named. Byron, her husband’s cousin, saw Anne in mourning-clothes at a party, and composed the poem about her the next day.)
#OTD #TDIH #January13: Happy #PoetryBreakDay! #PoetryBreak #Poetry

Of The Empire We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness. Mary Oliver Red Bird (2008)

Leave it to Mary Oliver to sum up what I said in a long-winded essay in one beautiful, heart-wrenching poem. 🤨

(Seriously, though: When Oliver veers from her usual, gently-moving-through-our-aching-world structure to drive home line breaks, you KNOW she's not a happy camper.)

#Poetry #PoetryBreak

Late for the Gratitude Meeting by Paul Hostovsky The guy in front of me in traffic is letting everyone in, waving at the cars like a policeman or a pope-- and I really have no patience for all the indulgence and magnanimity at my expense because I'm late for the gratitude meeting, which is only an hour long. And if I miss the first ten minutes of silent meditation I'm going to scream, because it's my favorite part and because it helps me remember to breathe. And I'm going to throttle this guy if he doesn't stop deferring to all of the trundling humanity turning left onto Main at this intersection where I'm fuming, not feeling the love, not feeling the gratitude, feeling only resentment and disdain because I have the right of way. Would you rather be right or have peace? Let go, I can hear them say at the gratitude meeting three blocks away, striking the rim of the Tibetan singing bowl, which begins vibrating, and keeps on vibrating, like this steering wheel I can't stop clenching. --- From the 2019 poetry collection Late for the Gratitude Meeting, by Paul Hostovsky.

Cover of the poetry collection by Paul Hostovsky

#PoetryBreak, anyone?

This is from Paul Hostovsky's poetry collection of the same great name, LATE FOR THE GRATITUDE MEETING (2019).

However this day and weekend find you (lookin' atchu, estadounidense friends!), may there be kindness abounding.

www.amazon.com/Late-Gratitu...

Florida alligator on the bank.

I took two poetry workshops this morning and needed a walk after, to give the flesh a sunning.
Someone else felt the same way 😂

#poetrybreak #poetry #alligator

Sometimes Sheenagh Pugh Sometimes things don't go, after all, from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail; sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well. A people sometimes will step back from way; elect an honest man, decide they care enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor. Some men become what they were born form Sometimes our best efforts do not go amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to. The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

I feel hopelessly behind, and today is another such day with Too Much to Do, but here's a #PoetryBreak first.

The world is so awful.

The lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, about our kindness and courage and pursuit of real justice, so often heartbreakingly wrong.

But sometimes...

#Poetry

Tired Langston Hughes I am so tired of waiting, Aren't you, For the world to become good And beautiful and kind? Let us take a knife And cut the world in two-- And see what worms are eating At the rind.

#PoetryBreak before bed.

A simple one, but the kind you tuck away and recite to yourself whenever you need a reminder that the world hasn't necessarily become more cruel - only, regained a level of honesty around the cruelty it always had.

Let us ache and struggle for better all the same. 🕯️

The Gardener Have I lived enough? Have I loved enough? Have I considered Right Action enough, have I come to any conclusions? Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude? Have I endured loneliness with grace? I say this, or perhaps I’m just thinking it. Actually, I probably think too much. Then I step out into the garden, where the gardener, who is said to be a simple man, is tending his children, the roses. Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings, p. 7 © 2012 by NW Orchard, LLC First published by Penguin Press 2012

#PoetryBreak

Remember, ladles and jellyspoons--

The rules are made up and the points don't matter. Buffoons and brutes shape the vast majority of possibilities for us all.

What are you doing, doubting that you are enough, when you could be living the fullness of your "enough" right now?

#Poetry

midday bites & scribbled lines
words taste better with a side of sunlight
a little poem for lunch:

spoonful of silence,
a drizzle of thought
hunger for meaning
in each line I caught.
#PoetryBreak #LunchPoem #WritingCommunity #indieauthor #poetrycommunity #WritingCommunity #amwriting

#fyp #FtRump #FeLon #ourcountry2 #USA💙 #StandUp #StepUp #hiphopnews #mahalesmashups #genX Untitled… By. Mahalé M. S. I am a real Ameri... TikTok video by Mahalé💯

www.tiktok.com/t/ZT29RN1KD/
My take on the tragic & scary state of our country through poetry!!
#poetrybreak
Btw…
#FtRump & #FeLon
💙🇺🇸💙🇺🇸💙🇺🇸💙🇺🇸💙

#poetrybreak
Here’s my take through poetry! & btw…
#FtRump & #FeLon
💙🇺🇸💙🇺🇸💙🇺🇸💙🇺🇸💙

Breathe! #poetrybreak

Poetry Break Day! - Pause for Inspiration

Immerse yourself in the beauty of words. Whether reading or writing, poetry connects us to emotions and experiences. Share your favorite verse today! #PoetryBreak #WordsMatter #CreativeExpression #InspirationThroughPoetry #poetrylovers

Do yourselves a favour and take a two-minute #poetrybreak with @johnsiddique's 'Cheap Moisturiser': http://youtu.be/QPcJju8eJgs