Category: Favorite Poems
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I love you because your spirit flickers like a candle left by a window. I love you because when I think you’re mine, the flame blows out, and it isn’t so. I love you because you don’t carry on about wedding bells and vows and things, a love like ours, so fleeting and precious, should…
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When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox; when death comeslike an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:what…
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Either you will go through this door or you will not go through. If you go through there is always the risk of remembering your name. Things look at you doubly and you must look back and let them happen. If you do not go throughit is possibleto live worthily to maintain your attitudesto hold…
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First, there was the horse. Imagine creatures as majestic, standing. All their lives they stand, withholding. Imagine being tamed. Learning to be still, to be speed. Imagine birds as large as horses. We would be flying, grabbing a majestic creature by its collar. In cylinders of metal, we are four-legged beast-lives of liminal spaces. One…
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They say I looked back out of curiosity, but I could have had other reasons. I looked back mourning my silver bowl. Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap. So I wouldn’t have to keep staring at the righteous nape of my husband Lot’s neck. From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead he wouldn’t so much…
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Into the topaz the crystalline signals of Manhattan the nightplane lowers my body scintillate with longing to lie positive beside the electric waters of your flesh and I will never tell you the meaning of this poem: Just say, “She wrote it and I recognize the reference.” Pleaselet it go at that. Althoughit is all…
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Love is like a garden in the heart, he said. They asked him what he meant by garden. He explained about gardens. “In the cities,” he said, “there are places walled off where color and decorum are magnified into a civilization. Like a beautiful woman,” he said. How like a woman, they asked. He remembered…
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First, you must realize you’re homesick for all the lives you’re not living. Then, you must commit to the road and the rising loneliness. To the sincere thrill of coming apart. Divorce yourself from routine and control. Instead, find a desert and fall in. Take the trail that promises a view. Get lost. Break your…
Emily Vance Brown 