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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84

A Couple of Revisions, Some Sketches, and a Sunrise



Well, I have to be honest. Apparently, my regular readers are not too keen on reading revised poems. Generally, each blog post gets between 15 and 20 individual views. Only four people looked at the last two sets of revisions. Sooooo...I have to ask. Would you rather not see the revised poems until I have them all together as a book? Please let me know. It is much faster for me to revise if I am not posting the revisions.

I also asked about finding someone who might "illustrate" the book. I have some ideas about the sketches that I would like to see. I will post a couple below that are what I am looking for to accompany the poem Nature Boy:



As a sketcher/drawer, first of all, I am not very good, but I do tend to lean strongly toward surrealism/impressionism. My poems are all modern romantic style, but I do not "see" the same things in words as what I produce when I let my mind go on a page with a pencil to create an image--Oh! and I get tired of creating the stuff in the background. It always begins looking more and more like lines than anything else.

Anyhow, until some reader tell me that they do not want to read revised poems, here are a couple more that I finished last week. As always, ENJOY!



Look at me! Do not dare turn your eyes away!

This is the crumbling shell in which we live,

It prickles with stiff hairs of white and gray

And wracks with rigid pains that won’t forgive.

I know this face’s features. I’ve seen those eyes

Teeming with joie de vie and boyish twinkles.

All green and gold, the colors of surprise,

Beneath a brow free of senescent wrinkles.

I recall those pliant lips, the easy smile

That crinkled in each cheek a handsome dimple,

A hairless chin when whiskers weren’t in style

And razoring the silky skin was simple.

I remember how I paused at every mirror

Because what I saw there I loved the most.

I blamed it on the glass as flaws got clearer,

And I saw my body failing as a host.

Do we still love me, Narcissus, or no?

Your silence begs the questions cast from mine?

What time we’ve wasted talking, let it go

And read this wordless meeting as a sign.


If I’m to live life well, then I must pass

Each surface that reveals us in its glass

And set my gaze on future, wiser ends

Where ego, truth, and time are still my friends.



The wind races over a stone-strewn hill,

Chasing shadows beneath swaying pines,

Kicking up whispers in crackly brown leaves,

And whistling across the prickly pears’ tines.

The green-needled cedar bobs in the breeze,

The leafless oak clatters and clacks.

A beam of piercing sunlight shines,

Dispersing the shade’s stubborn blacks.

Ghostly mist rises wraith-like and dissolves

On the faces of gray sandstone cliffs.

A chipmunk wonders what gambols about,

Pops up from her burrow, and snorts a few sniffs.

In this windswept forest, stippled and striped,

Infused with the sun’s resurrection,

Only I and the stones seem to stand still

Or to move without any direction.

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I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

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