maggie and milly and molly and may maggie and milly and molly and may went down to the beach(to play one day) and maggie discovered a shell that sang so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and milly befriended a stranded star whose rays five languid fingers were; and molly was chased by a horrible thing… Continue reading E.E. Cummings
A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to the sea with the—surely not always strong—hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on the shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed towards. Toward what?… Continue reading Paul Celan
If the birds were among us to be mirrored In the tranquil lake above our heads WE MIGHT UNDERSTAND Death would be a long and beautiful voyage And an endless holiday for the flesh for structure for bone — Tristan Tzara, from “The Death of Apollinaire (La Mort de Guillaume Apollinaire),” (1919) The… Continue reading Tristan Tzara
One must picture everything in the world as an enigma, and live in the world as if in a vast museum of strangeness. — Giorgio de Chirico
You Are Tired (I Think) You are tired, (I think) Of the always puzzle of living and doing; And so am I. Come with me, then, And we’ll leave it far and far away— (Only you and I, understand!) You have played, (I think) And broke the toys you were fondest of, And are a… Continue reading E.E. Cummings
But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight, And I knock with a rose at the hopeless gate of your heart– Open to me! For I will show you the places nobody knows, And, if you like, The perfect places of Sleep. — E.E. Cummings, from “You Are Tired (I Think),” Etcetera: The… Continue reading E.E. Cummings
in time of all sweet things beyond whatever mind may comprehend, remember seek (forgetting find) and in a mystery to be (when time from time shall set us free) forgetting me, remember me. — E.E. Cummings, “in time of daffodils,” E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904-1962, Revised, Corrected, and Expanded Edition (Liveright, 1994) a
