Poems Rethabile Likes

Summer by Rethabile Masilo | Poems Rethabile Likes Summer by Rethabile Masilo More alien to us is what flows into plant stalk and stem at first, then in the long-legged flesh of girls who are the prophets of its coming, hats like asters in the light. Mother says we in the tropics are blessed by it, she says one day just as crickets stopped singing, dawn opened our palms into its light and we, dumbfounded, loved the earth. She startled the world by singing a melody, a 3-step beat her voice carried to the street. But here it is, hanging above like a naked bath bulb in the wet afternoon. ...

Happy Birthday, Stanley Kunitz! | Poems Rethabile Likes 🎂 Happy Birthday, Stanley Kunitz! Poet • Pulitzer Winner • U.S. Poet Laureate • born 29 July 1905 Today we celebrate the birthday of Stanley Kunitz — one of America's most enduring and beloved poets. Here is his masterful poem, "The Layers," a meditation on loss, resilience, and the ongoing work of transformation. The Layers I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy w...

Happy Birthday, Kwame Dawes! | Poems Rethabile Likes 🎂 Happy Birthday, Kwame Dawes! Poet • Novelist • Critic • born 28 July 1962 Today we celebrate the birthday of Kwame Dawes — a Ghanaian-Jamaican poet, novelist, and critic. Here is his tender and devastating poem, "Cleaning," an act of love and dignity between a son and his father. Cleaning After a while, you don't bother with the brief and the pajamas; you leave him on the sheet, make him shit himself, then shift over to the other side until I can come, lift up the body, wipe his bottom with a soft cotton cloth, bundle up the sheet with two more in the corner, straighten out the plastic over the mattress— sometimes you have to wipe it, too, then put a towel under him until the other sheet dry, and all the time, you don't say...

On The Pulse Of Morning by Maya Angelou | Poems Rethabile Likes "On The Pulse Of Morning" by Maya Angelou Poet Maya Angelou reads "On The Pulse Of Morning" — delivered at President Clinton's 1993 inauguration. Find her books 📖 Read along On The Pulse Of Morning A Rock, A River, A Tree Hosts to species long since departed, Marked the mastodon. The dinosaur, who left dry tokens Of their sojourn here On our planet floor, Any broad alarm of their hastening doom Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages. But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully, Come, you may stand upon my Back and face your distant destiny, But seek no haven in my shadow. I will give you no hiding place down here. You, created only a little lower than The angels, have crouched too long ...

Love Is Not All by Edna St. Vincent Millay | Poems Rethabile Likes Love Is Not All by Edna St. Vincent Millay Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain, Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink and rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, pinned down by need and moaning for release, or nagged by want past resolution's power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace...

Warning by Jenny Joseph | Poems Rethabile Likes Warning by Jenny Joseph When I am an old woman I shall wear purple With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me. And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter. I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells And run my stick along the public railings And make up for the sobriety of my youth. I shall go out in my slippers in the rain And pick flowers in other people's gardens And learn to spit. You can wear terrible shirts and grow...