Inspired by the poetry reading on the YarnHarlot blog today, I decided to find a poem to share with everyone. The only problem...I couldn't decide which of my three all-time favorites was the worthiest. So, here they all are. Each wonderful in its own way.#1. I found this poem while I was pregnant for my third son and it made me weep. And it wasn't just the hormones!"Mooring"
Cathy Song
My daughter's long blackhair touches the waterwhere she sits, waist deep in the warmbath to receive her baby brother.I cup the running water,precious in the summer of drought,and enter the cool porcelain tub,my arms weighed with the sturdycargo of my infant son.He lies on his backand calmly gazes into the facesof those who love him.We adore him,delight in the kernel of toes,like the youngest of corn, the bracelets of flesh,the apricot glow of his skin.His sister anoints him with the sweetest soap.And love passes like this,cloudless in the face of a thousand years---for the mother who parts the waterand sendsthe baby in the reeds upstreamto a young girl who waits,arms and legsa small harbor.#2. This one is so unbelievably sensual I cannot take it! Pablo Neruda is amazing if you don't already know.
"Drunk As Drunk On Turpentine"
Pablo Neruda
Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made out of flowers,
Feasted, we guide it our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal
Over the sky's hot rim,
The day's last breath in our sails.
Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowzy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well.
Then, We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses.
#3. This one came to me after my divorce, as I was just falling in love with my husband, and was feeling uncertain if I had it in me again.
"To Have Without Holding"
Marge Piercy
Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open,
love with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind roaring
and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands in an open palm.
It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then of sharp knives.
It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch;
to love and let go again and again.
It pesters to remember the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave without air,
to love consciously, conscientiously, concretely, constructively.
I can't do it, you say
it's killing me,
but you thrive,
you glow on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding,
to have
and not to hold,
to love with minimized malice,
hunger and anger
moment by moment balanced.
This is the back, two wrap fronts, and partial first sleeve of Cari's Baby Yoda sweater. I am knitting it for friends who recently had a little pink one. I also just found out a co-worker is having a little pink one in June, so maybe I will knit another one up for her. It is such a cute pattern and knits up quickly when the Knitting Olympics don't interfere with the regular knitting line-up, that is.
