Month: May 2020

W H A T   I T   F E E L S   L I K E

As if I’ve swallowed
A watermelon
And
Sidestepping
My digestive tract
It has lodged
In my heart.
There it lies
Green
& whole
with a luscious
red
heart of its own
daring me
to cut.

Alice Walker

Today, some sunshine,
then increasing clouds,
breezy, cool,
just everything.

The crosswords by day,
the sounds of the blues by night
a delicate symbol of spring
may crumble by summer

And the way we look
standing to lose the most
on the way to somewhere else
on the train, any train, ourselves, others.

—Composed of words pulled from a New York Times newspaper

 

L E T T E R   T O   N . Y .

In your next letter I wish you’d say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you’re pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you’re in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can’t catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

—Wheat, not oats, dear. I’m afraid
if it’s wheat it’s none of your sowing,
nevertheless I’d like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

—Elizabeth Bishop, 1940

From an early morning walk—
On Cumberland at Dekalb, Fort Greene, Brooklyn