Poems Rethabile Likes

American Smooth by Rita Dove | Poems Rethabile Likes American Smooth by Rita Dove We were dancing—it must have been a foxtrot or a waltz, something romantic but requiring restraint, rise and fall, precise execution as we moved into the next song without stopping, two chests heaving above a seven-league stride—such perfect agony, one learns to smile through, ecstatic mimicry being the sine qua non of American Smooth. And because I was distracted by the effort of keeping my frame (the leftward lean, head turned just enough to gaze out past your ear and a...

When You Are Old by W.B. Yeats | Poems Rethabile Likes "When You Are Old" by William Butler Yeats Actor Cillian Murphy reads "When You Are Old" by W.B. Yeats — a tender, timeless poem of enduring love. Find his books W.B. Yeats's "When You Are Old" is one of the most tender and enduring love poems in the English language. Written for Maud Gonne, the woman he loved and proposed to multiple times — and was rejected by — the poem imagines a future in which she looks back on her life and recognizes the one man who loved not just her beauty but her "pilgrim soul." This recording, by the Irish actor Cillian Murphy , captures the quiet ache and dignity of Yeats's lines. Murphy's voice — soft, measured, with the weight of deep feeling — brings the poem to l...

For Virginia Chavez by Lorna Dee Cervantes | Poems Rethabile Likes For Virginia Chavez by Lorna Dee Cervantes It was never in the planning, in the life we thought we'd live together, two fast women living cheek to cheek, still tasting the dog's breath of boys in our testy new awakening. We were never the way they had it planned. Their wordless tongues we stole and tasted the power that comes of that. We were never what they wanted but we were bold. We could take something of life and not give it back. We could utter the rules, mark the lines and cross them oursel...

Silet by Ezra Pound | Poems Rethabile Likes Silet by Ezra Pound When I behold how black, immortal ink Drips from my deathless pen - ah, well-away! Why should we stop at all for what I think? There is enough in what I chance to say. It is enough that we once came together; What is the use of setting it to rime? When it is autumn do we get spring weather, Or gather may of harsh northwindish time? It is enough that we once came together; What if the wind have turned against the rain? It is enough that we once came together; Time has seen this, and will not turn again; And who are we, ...

Mercy by Tyehimba Jess | Poems Rethabile Likes Mercy by Tyehimba Jess The war speaks at night with its lips of shredded children, with its brow of plastique and its fighter jet breath, and then it speaks at daybreak with the soft slur of money unfolding leaf upon leaf. It speaks between the news programs in the music of commercials, then sings in the voices of a national anthem. It has a dirty coin jingle in its step, it has a hand of many lost hands, a palm of missing fingers, the stump of an arm that it lost reaching up to heaven, a foot that digs a trench for its dead. ...