Weekly Edition #10
Expect Nothing by Alice Walker
Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.
Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.
Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
Art by Charlotte Ager
Other poems I read this week: (read the full poem in the links)
"Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,
like winter, which even now is passing.
For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart." -Sonnets XIII, Part II Sonnets to Orpheus Rainer Maria Rilke "My grandmothers are full of memories
Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay
With veins rolling roughly over quick hands
They have many clean words to say.
My grandmothers were strong.
Why am I not as they?" -Lineage by Margaret Walker "There will be other days,
there will be other voices.
You will smile alone.
The cats will know.
You will hear words
old and spent and useless
like costumes left over
from yesterday’s parties." -The Cats Will Know by Cesare Pavese, translated by Geoffrey Brock
(Thanks for this poem, Maria Elena)
"At night I dream that you and I are two plants
that grew together, roots entwined,
and that you know the earth and the rain like my mouth,
since we are made of earth and rain. Sometimes
I think that with death we will seep below,
in the depths at the feet of he effigy, looking over
the ocean which brought us here to build and make love." -Rain (Rapa Nui) by Pablo Neruda "Ginsberg came to my house one afternoon
and said he was giving up poetry
because it told lies, that language distorts.
I agreed, but asked what we have
that gets it right even that much.
We look up at the stars and they are
not there. We see the memory
of when they were, once upon a time.
And that too is more than enough." -The Lost Hotels of Paris. by Jack Gilbert
Recommended Listening:
Indian Podcast Directory
i was all over her - salvia palth Homesick - Kings of Convenience + this rehearsal video with Feist still feel - half alive kookaburra - Madràs Conserve the Sound, the online museum for vanishing and endangered sounds
Links of the Week:
349 (a celebration of dance and the human connection)
Now More Than Ever - Zadie Smith
The Controversial Life and Art of Post-Impressionist Painter Paul Gauguin