In the Morning
The sea smells like cucumber,
thinly sliced
straight from the fridge,
and with the sunrise
shadows shrink —
the cove is steaming like a bath.
Showing posts tagged Poetry
Again, these photographs remind me of a poem.
The Raspberry Room — Karin Gottshall
It was solid hedge, loops of bramble and thorny
as it had to be with its berries thick as bumblebees.
It drew blood just to get there, but I was queen
of that place, at ten, though the berries shook like fists
in the wind, daring anyone to come in. I was trying
so hard to love this world—real rooms too big and full
of worry to comfortably inhabit—but believing I was born
to live in that cloistered green bower: the raspberry patch
in the back acre of my grandparents’ orchard. I was cross-
stitched and beaded by its fat, dollmaker’s needles. The effort
of sliding under the heavy, spiked tangles that tore
my clothes and smeared me with juice was rewarded
with space, wholly mine, a kind of room out of
the crush of the bushes with a canopy of raspberry
dagger-leaves and a syrup of sun and birdsong.
Hours would pass in the loud buzz of it, blood
made it mine—the adventure of that red sting singing
down my calves, the place the scratches brought me to:
just space enough for a girl to lie down.
“
This is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
William Carlos Williams
“
THE PROBLEM OF DESCRIBING COLOR
If I said - remembering in summer,
The cardinal’s sudden smudge of red
In the bare gray winter woods -
If I said, red ribbon on the cocked straw hat
Of the girl with pooched-out lips
Dangling a wiry lapdog
In the painting by Renoir -
If I said fire, if I said blood welling from a cut -
Or flecks of poppy in the tar-grass scented summer air
On a wind-struck hillside outside Fano -
If I said, her one red earring tugging at her silky lobe,
If she tells fortunes with a deck of falling leaves
Until it comes out right -
Rouged nipple, mouth -
(How could you not love a woman
Who cheats at Tarot?)
Red, I said. Sudden, red.
Robert Hass
(Haiku Moment)
At the water’s edge
a boat waiting to be freed —
captured by my lens
sea lyrics.
the sky swallows a fire
to the west,
as i feed the ocean poetry
in an empty bottle.
LINE UP AT THE ROTI HUT
The line runs from the hut along the dock
and into the sun that beats down on their backs.
They slowly shuffle forward
to watch her brushing butter on a disc of dough
and slap it on the smoking plate inside the hut.
The roti skin is brown
and blistered when she stirs the well-worn pot
of stew as yellow as a school bus.
She scoops the sauce
with cubes of curried chicken onto the flatbread,
then folds it neatly, like a package.
I take the parcel
thick with chickpeas fused with flavours
from the spices of a thousand summers.
And move into the shade
as gravy dribbles down my chin and on my feet
and down my arms and to my elbows.
The line runs from the hut
along the dock and into the sun that beats down
on their backs and on their necks.
She scrapes the bottom of the pot.
“
The storm is raging up above,
And waves are dashing high,.
The sea birds, screaming, fly to land,
As thunder rocks the sky.
But down below in waters calm
The oyster sleeps away;
Quite heedless of the wind and waves,
He snoozes, night and day.
He does not shout and rant and rave,
Nor bolts of lightning hurl,
He’s dozing in the oyster bed,
And dreaming up a pearl!
And waves are dashing high,.
The sea birds, screaming, fly to land,
As thunder rocks the sky.
But down below in waters calm
The oyster sleeps away;
Quite heedless of the wind and waves,
He snoozes, night and day.
He does not shout and rant and rave,
Nor bolts of lightning hurl,
He’s dozing in the oyster bed,
And dreaming up a pearl!
by Frances Gorman Risser
“
I am in love with Ocean
lifting her thousands of white hats
in the chop of the storm,
or lying smooth and blue, the
loveliest bed in the world.
In the personal life, there is
always grief more than enough,
a heart-load for each one of us
on the dusty road. I suppose
there is a reason for this, so I will be
patient, acquiescent. But I will live
nowhere except there, by Ocean, trusting
equally in all the blast and welcome
of her sorrowless, salt self.
by Mary Oliver —
