Maria Hummel’s book House And Fire was the winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, 2013. “Station” is a pantoum, a Malay verse form, imitated in French and English, consisting of quotations.

by Maria Hummel

Days you are sick, we get dressed slow, find our hats, and ride the train. We pass a junkyard and the bay, then a dark tunnel, then a dark tunnel.

You lose your hat. I find it. The train sighs open at Burlingame, past dark tons of scrap and water. I carry you down the black steps.

Burlingame is the size of joy: a race past bakeries, gold rings in open black cases. I don’t care who sees my crooked smile

or what erases it, past the bakery, when you tire. We ride the blades again beside the crooked bay. You smile. I hold you like a hole holds light.

We wear our hats and ride the knives. They cannot fix you. They try and try. Tunnel! Into the dark open we go. Days you are sick, we get dressed slow.

Source: Poetry (September 2010)

published on Derek Walcott’s birthday — Jan. 23, 1930.

Love after Love

Derek Walcott

  The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

[Read more Poetry Posts]

Mercy by Rudy Francisco

She asks me to kill the spider. Instead I get the most peaceful weapons I can find.

I take a cup & a napkin I catch the spider put it outside and allow it to walk away.

If i am ever caught in the wrong place at the wrong time just being alive and not bothering anyone

I hope I am greeted with the same kind of mercy.

[Read more Poetry Posts]

Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.

— L.R. Knost.

BOOK QUOTE:

“The road is a river of ice, slick and unforgiving. A harsh sweep of white iron, smooth as glass and cold enough to freeze any uncovered inch of flesh to the surface. Hillocks and haystacks rise up, isles in a smoking brume. Here and there snow has blown aside, revealing the line of the great white stone road that slices through the hills.” 

  (St. Michael the Arch-Angel's Day -- Michaelmas, Sept 29)

  "Ten years ago, Michaelmas. Summer hours fading into dusk, day dying slow. I had fallen out of the straight path into a place of harsh rocks and broken brambles, like the legend tells Satan fell from heaven on St. Michael’s Day. But I had fallen from no heaven, and those who pursued me were no angels."

“Spring grew into summer, and the rhythm of my life now included Nell. I learned that her secret lavender and mint beds were deep in the woods, out by the chuckling stream that disappeared underground. She gathered plants she needed every day, and she was as a child who gathers flowers in May.”