so I thought I would share from a book of poems I picked up at the library the other day. It's from Margaret Atwood's The Door, which is about aging, death and aged poets. Pretty good stuff in general but a few stand out.

Share poems that are new for you here. I want to read them.

this one is about her cat who died.

JANUARY

Crisp scent of white narcissus:
January, and full snow.
So cold the pipes freeze.
The front steps are slick and treacherous;
at night the house crackles.

you came in and out at will,
but this time of year you'd stay indoors,
plump in your undertaker's fur,
dreaming of sunlight,
dreaming of murdered sparrows,
black cat who's no longer there.

If only you could find your way
from the river of chill flowers,
the forest of nothing to eat,
back through the ice window,
back through the locked door of air.

__________________
I think that lifting a barbell is probably the single most important thing that women can do to improve their body image. Lifting heavy and feeling stronger and seeing how muscle mass changes your body is a phenomenal experience. - Tamara Cohen

of course i love this. it made me weep today. weep like a lady.

YOUR CHILDREN CUT THEIR HANDS...

Your children cut their hands on glass
by reaching through the mirror
where the beloved one was hiding.

You weren't expecting this:
you thought they wanted happiness,
not laceration.

You thought the happiness
would appear simply, without effort
or any kind of work,

like a bird call
or a pathside flower
or a school of silvery fish

but now they've cut themselves
on love, and cry in secret,
and your own hands go numb

because there's nothing you can do,
because you didn't think to tell them not to
because you didn't think

you needed to
and now there's all this broken glass
and your children stand red-handed

still clutching at moons and echoes
and emptiness and shadow,
the way you did.

__________________
I think that lifting a barbell is probably the single most important thing that women can do to improve their body image. Lifting heavy and feeling stronger and seeing how muscle mass changes your body is a phenomenal experience. - Tamara Cohen

and finally

TEN O'CLOCK NEWS

The shot bird topples from the air,
and others note it:
they need to know what's going on.
Tree leaves rustle, deer twitch their tails, rabbits
swivel their ears.
The grass-eaters crouch, the scavengers
lick their teeth.
Spilled life does not appall them.

What alerts us? What are we feeding on?
We take everything in,
one wound after another.
Rubble rubble, say the guns.
Our faces gleam in the glassy flicker,
the night rises like smoke.

Oh hide your eyes -
better to sit in a muffled room,
doors locked, appliances unplugged,
with nothing but the photo view
of Niagara Falls you bought last summer -
all that soothing water
like warm green toffee flowing
in slow motion over a cliff,

trying not to see the weak swimmer,
or the two children in their yellow boat.

__________________
I think that lifting a barbell is probably the single most important thing that women can do to improve their body image. Lifting heavy and feeling stronger and seeing how muscle mass changes your body is a phenomenal experience. - Tamara Cohen

Its making me sad that my cat will die one day :-(

I'll quote an equally uncheery poem but I do love it:

Desert Places- Robert Frost

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it--it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

And Yeats, The Second Coming:

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

of course i love The Second Coming. it's an amazing poem.
i'd never read the frost poem. thanks. i can see why you thought of it when you read January.

__________________
I think that lifting a barbell is probably the single most important thing that women can do to improve their body image. Lifting heavy and feeling stronger and seeing how muscle mass changes your body is a phenomenal experience. - Tamara Cohen