Poems Rethabile Likes

Allegro by Tomas Tranströmer | Poems Rethabile Likes Allegro by Tomas Tranströmer Translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly After a black day, I play Haydn, and feel a little warmth in my hands. The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall. The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence. The sound says that freedom exists and someone pays no tax to Caesar. I shove my hands in my haydnpockets and act like a man who is calm about it all. I raise my haydnflag. The signal is: "We do not surrender. But want peace." The music is a house of glass standing on a slope; rocks are flyin...

Frederick Douglass by Robert Hayden | Poems Rethabile Likes “Frederick Douglass,” by Robert Hayden read by Shawntay Henry Shawntay Henry reads the poem 'Frederick Douglass' by Robert Hayden . Read along 📖 What I love about Robert Hayden’s “Frederick Douglass” is how it refuses the easy anthem. Hayden doesn't just praise the abolitionist hero; he redefines freedom itself. Freedom, he says, is not a monument or a single man's victory — it is a long, communal breath, something “ever to be earned.” This sonnet hums with restraint and quiet power. Here is the poem in full (listen as you read along): Frederick Douglass by Robert Hayden When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as ...

In a Dark Time by Theodore Roethke | Poems Rethabile Likes In a Dark Time by Theodore Roethke In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood— A lord of nature weeping to a tree, I live between the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. What's madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall, That place among the rocks—is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have. A steady storm of correspondences! ...