Poems Rethabile Likes

Affirmation by Donald Hall | Poems Rethabile Likes Affirmation by Donald Hall To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage, that began without harm, scatters into debris on the shore, and a friend from school drops cold on a rocky strand. If a new love carries us past middle age, our wife will die at her strongest and most beautiful. New women come and go. All go. The pretty lover who announces...

A Crazed Girl by W. B. Yeats | Poems Rethabile Likes A Crazed Girl by W. B. Yeats That crazed girl improvising her music. Her poetry, dancing upon the shore, Her soul in division from itself Climbing, falling she knew not where, Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship, Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing Heroically lost, heroically found. No matter what disaster occurred She stood in desperate music wound, Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph Where the bales and the baskets lay No common intelligible sound But sang, 'O sea-starved, hun...

If I Must Die by Refaat Alareer | Poems Rethabile Likes If I Must Die by Refaat Alareer If I must die, you must live to tell my story to sell my things to buy a piece of cloth and some strings, (make it white with a long tail) so that a child, somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye awaiting his dad who left in a blaze — and bid no one farewell not even to his flesh not even to himself — sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above, and thinks for a moment an angel is there bringing back love. If I must die let it bring hope, ...

When Death Comes by Mary Oliver | Poems Rethabile Likes When Death Comes by Mary Oliver 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 comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, ...

Wellwater by Karen Solie | Poems Rethabile Likes “Wellwater,” by Karen Solie Poet Karen Solie reads from “Wellwater,” from her collection Wellwater (Picador Poetry, 2025), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize. Read more about the collection "The poems of Wellwater come from the whole of an adventurously lived life. They hold the two sentiments 'The world is a beautiful place / The world is a terrible place', in perfect equipoise. They offer no happy endings, no salvation in past or future, in epiphany or private happiness. And yet they are anything but grim, with an ironic humour that plays over our increasingly euphemism-hungry culture." — Michael Hofmann Here is how “Wellwater” opens: I didn’t know what I had, drove the watertruck underage to the well in a swimsuit, anoi...

The Amen Stone by Yehuda Amichai (translated by Chana Bloch & Chana Kronfeld) | Poems Rethabile Likes The Amen Stone by Yehuda Amichai On my desk there is a stone with the word "Amen" on it, a triangular fragment of stone from a Jewish graveyard destroyed many generations ago. The other fragments, hundreds upon hundreds, were scattered helter-skelter, and a great yearning, a longing without end, fills them all: first name in search of family name, date of death seeks dead man's birthplace, son's name wishes to locate name of father, date of birth seeks reunion with soul that wishes to rest in peace. And until they have found on...