merritt's Musings

Send us Fan Mail The Second Coming By William Butler Yeats Turning and turning in the widening gyre    The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere    The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst    Are full of passionate intensity. Surely...

Send us Fan Mail “In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime...

Send us Fan Mail God Says Yes to Me By Kaylin Huaght I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic and she said yes I asked her if it was okay to be short and she said it sure is I asked her if I could wear nail polish or not wear nail polish and she said honey she calls me that sometimes she said you can do just exactly what you want to Thanks God I said And is it even okay if I don't paragr...

Send us Fan Mail The Cure of Troy by Seamus Heaney Human beings suffer.  They torture one another.  They get hurt and get hard.  No poem or play or song  Can fully right a wrong  Inflicted and endured.  History says, Don’t hope  On the side of the grave,’  But then, once in a lifetime  The longed-for tidal wave  Of justice can rise up  And hope and history rhyme.  So hope for a great sea- change ...

Send us Fan Mail “I Am Not I” BY JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ I am not I.                    I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see, whom at times I manage to visit, and whom at other times I forget; who remains calm and silent while I talk, and forgives, gently, when I hate, who walks where I am not, who will remain standing when I die. Contact me via email:   svahatao@yahoo.com or message me on...

Send us Fan Mail I want to age like sea glass By Bernadette Noll I want to age like sea glass. Smoothed by tides, not broken. I want the currents of life to toss me around, shake me up and leave me feeling washed clean. I want my hard edges to soften as the years pass—made not weak but supple. I want to ride the waves, go with the flow, feel the impact of the surging tides rolling in and out. When...

Send us Fan Mail For a Dead Kitten       by Sara Henderson Hay Put the rubber mouse away, Pick the spools up from the floor, What was velvet shod, and gay, Will not want them, any more. What was warm, is strangely cold. Whence dissolved the little breath? How could this small body hold So immense a thing as Death?

Send us Fan Mail When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer  BY WALT WHITMAN When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising...

Send us Fan Mail The Mad Gardener’s Song by Lewis Carroll (pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898) He thought he saw an Elephant That practised on a fife: He looked again, and found it was A letter from his wife. "At length I realise," he said, "The bitterness of Life!" He thought he saw a Buffalo Upon the chimney-piece: He looked again, and found it was His Sister&apo...

Send us Fan Mail What I Learned From My Mother BY JULIA KASDORF I learned from my mother how to love the living, to have plenty of vases on hand in case you have to rush to the hospital with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole grieving household, to cube home-canned pears and peaches, to slice through ma...

Send us Fan Mail Song of the Open Road" by Walt Whitman (excerpts) 1. Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune, Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms...

Send us Fan Mail Those Winter Sundays              BY ROBERT HAYDEN Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing th...

Send us Fan Mail "Dust" BY DORIANNE LAUX Someone spoke to me last night, told me the truth. Just a few words, but I recognized it. I knew I should make myself get up, write it down, but it was late, and I was exhausted from working all day in the garden, moving rocks. Now, I remember only the flavor — not like food, sweet or sharp. More like a fine powder, like dust. And I wasn’t elated...

Send us Fan Mail "The White Knight's Song" by Lewis Carroll `I’ll tell thee everything I can; There’s little to relate. I saw an aged aged man, A-sitting on a gate. “Who are you, aged man?’ I said. “and how is it you live?” And his answer trickled through my head Like water through a sieve. He said “I look for butterflies That sleep among the wheat: I make them into mutton-pies, And...

Send us Fan Mail https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=40285 “DHARMA” BY BILLY COLLINS The way the dog trots out the front door every morning without a hat or an umbrella, without any money or the keys to her doghouse never fails to fill the saucer of my heart with milky admiration. Who provides a finer example of a life without encumbrance- Thoreau in his curtainless hu...

Send us Fan Mail https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45081/the-cremation-of-sam-mcgee The Cremation of Sam McGee BY ROBERT W. SERVICE There are strange things done in the midnight sun       By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales       That would make your blood run cold; The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,       But the queerest they ever did see Was tha...

Send us Fan Mail "What if a much of a which of a wind"      e. e. cummings   what if a much of a which of a wind gives the truth to summer's lie; bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun and yanks immortal stars awry? Blow king to beggar and queen to seem (blow friend to fiend: blow space to time) – when skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man what if a...

Send us Fan Mail The Listeners BY WALTER DE LA MARE ‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,       Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the grasses       Of the forest’s ferny floor: And a bird flew up out of the turret,       Above the Traveller’s head: And he smote upon the door again a second time;       ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said. But no one descended...

Send us Fan Mail https://stuff.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/poetry/poems/whiteKnightSong.html "The White Knight's Song" by Lewis Carrol `I’ll tell thee everything I can; There’s little to relate. I saw an aged aged man, A-sitting on a gate. “Who are you, aged man?’ I said. “and how is it you live?” And his answer trickled through my head Like water through a sieve. He said “I loo...

Send us Fan Mail The Bagel I stopped to pick up the bagel rolling away in the wind, annoyed with myself for having dropped it as if it were a portent. Faster and faster it rolled, with me running after it bent low, gritting my teeth, and I found myself doubled over and rolling down the street head over heels, one complete somersault after another like a bagel and strangely happy with myself. —Davi...

Send us Fan Mail You can find the full text of the poem below, and by visiting: https://poets.org/poem/waking “The Waking”           by Theodore Roethke I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.    I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.    I learn by going where I have to go. We think by feeling. What is there to know?    I hear my being dance from ear to ear.    I wake to sleep, and take my waking...

Send us Fan Mail "People Like Us" by Robert Bly There are more like us. All over the world there are confused people, who can’t remember The name of their dog when they wake up, and people Who love God but can’t remember where He was when they went to sleep. It’s All right. The world cleanses itself this way. A wrong number occurs to you in the middle Of the night, you dial it, it rings...

Send us Fan Mail Here is a link to this poem:  https://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/banneker/ Here is the text of this poem: Banneker By Rita Dove What did he do except lie under a pear tree, wrapped in a great cloak, and meditate on the heavenly bodies? Venerable, the good people of Baltimore whispered, shocked and more than a little afraid. After all it was said he took to strong drink. Why else w...

Send us Fan Mail Jason Merritt reads the poem "What the Dog Perhaps Hears" by Lisel Mueller and muses on why he loves this poem and what it means to educators/parents/ministers. Here is the text of this poem:  http://www.bio.brandeis.edu/~sekuler/senpro/topic_1_stuff/what_the_dog_hears_perhaps.html “WHAT THE DOG PERHAPS HEARS”        By LISEL MUELLER If an inaudible whistle blown between...

Send us Fan Mail https://allpoetry.com/Last-Night-As-I-Was-Sleeping Here is the text of this week's poem: “Last Night As I Was Sleeping”     By Antonio Machado  Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvelous error!— that a spring was breaking out in my heart. I said: Along which secret aqueduct, Oh water, are you coming to me, water of a new life that I have never drunk? Last night as I was...