"unutterably" poems
Life flows down to death; we cannot bind
That current that it should not flee:
Life flows down to death, as rivers find
The inevitable sea.
Men work and think, but women feel;
And so (for I'm a woman, I)
And so I should be glad to die
And cease from impotence of zeal,
And cease from hope, and cease from dread,
And cease from yearnings without gain,
And cease from all this world of pain,
And be at peace among the dead.
Hearts that die, by death renew their youth,
Lightened of this life that doubts and dies;
Silent and contented, while the Truth
Unveiled makes them wise.
Why should I seek and never find
That something which I have not had?
Fair and unutterably sad
The world hath sought time out of mind;
The world hath sought and I have sought,--
Ah, empty world and empty I!
For we have spent our strength for nought,
And soon it will be time to die.
Sparks fly upward toward their fount of fire,
Kindling, flashing, hovering:--
Kindle, flash, my soul; mount higher and higher,
Thou whole burnt-offering!
2.4k
Young Love lies sleeping
In May-time of the year,
Among the lilies,
Lapped in the tender light:
White lambs come grazing,
White doves come building there;
And round about him
The May-bushes are white.
Soft moss the pillow
For oh, a softer cheek;
Broad leaves cast shadow
Upon the heavy eyes:
There winds and waters
Grow lulled and scarcely speak;
There twilight lingers
The longest in the skies.
Young Love lies dreaming;
But who shall tell the dream?
A perfect sunlight
On rustling forest tips;
Or perfect moonlight
Upon a rippling stream;
Or perfect silence,
Or song of cherished lips.
Burn odours round him
To fill the drowsy air;
Weave silent dances
Around him to and fro;
For oh, in waking
The sights are not so fair,
And song and silence
Are not like these below.
Young Love lies dreaming
Till summer days are gone,--
Dreaming and drowsing
Away to perfect sleep:
He sees the beauty
Sun hath not looked upon,
And tastes the fountain
Unutterably deep.
Him perfect music
Doth hush unto his rest,
And thro' the pauses
The perfect silence calms:
Oh poor the voices
Of earth from east to west,
And poor earth's stillness
Between her stately palms.
Young Love lies drowsing
Away to poppied death;
Cool shadows deepen
Across the sleeping face:
So fails the summer
With warm, delicious breath;
And what hath autumn
To give us in its place?
Draw close the curtains
Of branched evergreen;
Change cannot touch them
With fading fingers sere:
Here the first violets
Perhaps will bud unseen,
And a dove, may be,
Return to nestle here.
1.3k
If not for pain, I think life would be a grand mistake. It is the roadmap of my scars that I will follow to my life's destination. Without pain, there would be no growth. No change. No movement forward. Pain is what pushes us, what bends us and breaks us and molds us into what we are. It erodes our weaknesses, it tests our strengths. It riddles us with holes so that the winds of time don't blow us backwards, into mistakes we've already made. It burns us to the ground so that we can rise again, better. Not everyone is a phoenix. Not everyone gets up. I get that. But those who do live differently. Pain is what makes each moment a precious wound, an ache in our hearts, a treasure so unutterably valuable that we must grab hold of it, cherish it, that any departure from what we truly believe is right is a terrible crime, for we will never live that moment over again. Pain is what life is truly about. The feeling of it, the surviving of it, the avoidance of it, the overcoming of it, the attempt to forget it. Life revolves around pain. How much of it you've been dealt, and how you use yours. You bond with those who have suffered the same sorrows that you have. You seek out ways and people and moments that alleviate your suffering, whatever it may be. The fact that we can feel pain allows us to feel joy, to notice the little twinge in every happy moment that keeps it sweet, and lends it the necessary tension of something that will inevitably end. Pain is what it's all about. And once I accept mine, I thank those who caused me pain. Not because they were right to do so, not because I forgive them, but because I love who I am, and I have grown because I have suffered. Change isn't pretty. Change isn't slow and subtle, soft and sweet. Change is a lightning strike. Change is cataclysmic. An explosion, or implosion, of everything that you are. A wrecking ball to your mind and heart, an earthquake reducing the city of your soul to rubble. Change is meant to be deeply disturbing, deeply upsetting. (Yes, you're doing it right.) Because we do not tend to change unless something forces us. Change is the most agonizing thing you can go through. But as somebody I am quite fond of once said, "Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation." The roadmap of my scars will take me where I need to go, and it may not be an easy way, but at the end I know I will find happiness.
Dec 29, 2012
Dec 29, 2012 at 8:07 PM UTC
There's something sensual about getting lost in oblivion
The way my legs wrap around his torso
Like a knot around an anchor
Without weight impeding our movement
There's something powerful about uttering each other's names
The way a sun burns between
Each of our lungs
Without gravity impeding our resonance
There's something addictive about inhaling the scent of his skin
The way a burst of passion explodes inside of me
Like a volcano erupting for the first time in centuries
Without pressure impeding our connection
There's something so unutterably
Remarkable about him,
That I can never seem
To find the right word for it.
There's something.
And it's the most beautiful something
That has ever found me.
Jan 20, 2014
Jan 20, 2014 at 8:44 PM UTC
To take a leap
Into the unknown
Is terrifying
For comets do flow
On the Tao on their own!
Alter the sweet sparks
Sizzle and crack
In bliss and surprise
~Where do you go Poet~
with divine affection
only mortal poems know how to
not
Hold on the edge of You~
Transcendence that soothes me~
Feathers from your flight~
Consciously chased by
The
Impermanence of
Your
Vivacious streams
Transforming into the Raven
Brooks
Whisperings of your favorite
Fountainescue poetry books
Dancing~embraced!
Radiance aglow~quadrophonics
Unutterably enchanting
Glorious Swans of Sound Nebulae
Swimming Endlessly~on Thou~
Laser beam gaze to my heart's
Golden dream Fabulae.
Oct 23, 2015
Oct 23, 2015 at 9:42 AM UTC
Something
―for the children of the Holocaust and the Nakba
by Michael R. Burch
Something inescapable is lost—
lost like a pale vapor curling up into shafts of moonlight,
vanishing in a gust of wind toward an expanse of stars
immeasurable and void.
Something uncapturable is gone—
gone with the spent leaves and illuminations of autumn,
scattered into a haze with the faint rustle of parched grass
and remembrance.
Something unforgettable is past—
blown from a glimmer into nothingness, or less,
which finality swept into a corner, where it lies
in dust and cobwebs and silence.
It was my honor and privilege to work with survivors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima on translations of their poems and accounts into English. What they have told us is unutterably sad, and saddest of all is hearing about the lives of children being full of horror and terror, only to be cut short. Unfortunately today Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank are experiencing something similar, a modern Trail of Tears ...
Feb 23, 2020
Feb 23, 2020 at 2:09 AM UTC
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
-- David Whyte
from Everything is Waiting for You
©2003 Many Rivers Press
May 26, 2014
May 26, 2014 at 2:07 AM UTC
I miss you but it does not hurt me.
It does not hurt me because
You say goodbye well.
The first time, in your car, when I finally kissed you
And I couldn't leave
You said, "No, this is a goodbye kiss."
And you took my face in your hands.
You say goodbye so well, my love.
I call you my love
But you are not mine.
It might be more apt to call me yours
For that is what I mean when I say love-
I mean
Be free and fly
But take me, have me,
Let me belong to you from wherever I am.
I have no desire to possess you
But I crave for you to let me be yours.
I ache for it.
That moment when you kissed me goodbye
You owned me
Not in a punishing way
But in a moment of pure knowledge:
You knew
That there was nowhere else on earth I'd rather be,
No one else on earth whose arms I'd rather be in,
Nothing else on earth I'd rather do than let you kiss me until my head
Spun.
You say goodbye
So well, darling.
That whole night
The last one
Was goodbye and hello
All at once.
I can expect nothing less from you-
You are everything, you are all things that conflict and entangle and war and embrace
You are goodbye and hello
Never and forever
Here and gone-
Unbearably close and unbearably distant.
I am not hurt because you touched me
With love.
I felt it in your fingers, in your lips, in the soft curves of you.
In the way you stopped and asked me if I was okay,
In the way you held my hand and told me not to let the world
Harden me.
I don't intend to. Your touch reminds me why I don't intend to.
You may be many things, my love,
You may even be gone,
But you are not cruel.
And that is so unutterably special to me-
For I have loved cruel people,
Some of the cruelest.
I suffer no delusions that I choose well.
I suffer no delusions
That I choose at all.
But this time...
This time I found you.
And you held my fingers in yours so tenderly.
And you brushed my hair out of my eyes.
And you told me
That you love the way my hands look
And I
Could never be sad
Remembering that.
It was the best goodbye
I ever had.
Nov 19, 2014
Nov 19, 2014 at 12:34 AM UTC
life, i cannot begin you to describe beyond my dreaming self your how divine moments of simple nothing.
your body is not, and i love it the how it is not. it is
and not it's
some muscles firing with hurt
seething to ache
so horribly
wondrous. it's driving
to the beach
too early in morning and you're heads not clear the sky is so wide and the sun is barely. it is
the uncurling of your fingers between
dishwater
and the winsome triteness
of the caving instant of your breath
caching in your throat
as you realize the dying
of your frail self,
clutching furiously the mundane heady song
of a coffee cup
(and in perfect silence emitting
the most enormous roar
of surging electric stillness) . Life
you are half terribly
painful to. and life, you
are half splendorous to ****
sweating in the heap of your
car behind
the creeping sweep
of raging vein. Life
you are perhaps nothing. But lifE
you are the most,
and nothing hurriedly to slowly
take between the unutterably tiny *******
of snowgirls
their coldest song of closing lips,
and speak something hot
(something big).
Jan 29, 2014
Jan 29, 2014 at 7:46 AM UTC
Today I began to hem,
rein in the threads that grow free
when left unstitched
I ticked a set of books
and, though I love my charges,
my heart hurt
My language is another,
my experience of this globe
unutterably different,
though geographically the same
And I want to help them play the game, I do,
but I don’t trust those
telling me how to
My instincts,
honed by humans I trust, unless
I’m lost in my own Truman Show,
show me the right way to go,
divergent from this current shitshow
The pedagogy of care
is somewhere way, way
over there
Jan 4, 2022
Jan 4, 2022 at 11:39 AM UTC
Touched by the Divine
Kissed by a strange breeze where does it lead first to the still only a star can tell
In the den and rush we push and shove all distorted we traded blessings for naught
The thunder announces a secret we twist and turn all our concern reveals just an empty well
Into the depths we stare nothing outwardly exposed then why do you suppose all is unutterably well
Moments before the world all was a tangled mess who understood this darkest wood
All ventured forth can there be any more clueless confused lot all seemed lost
The stirring in the mulberry trees now separations hardship in full bloom now truth understood
Expectation emerges out of the deepest well that faith alone can only delve victory at midnights twelve
At the last hour the seat of power totters by him alone God chose to divide to himself
No one can find the arm of invincibility while he craves the comfort of the crowd
The unquenchable never ending cry of a perfected soul will taste the thorn and die to self
For the promise born since youth no other cause or purpose ever given a thought
The pinnacle is only reached by those who consider shame and dishonor worthwhile attainments
Submission the ultimate reverse of human endeavor by this blade alone can ignorance be cut away
The future holds change do you really intend to give everything to be a loser through estrangement
This fading gem you would hold when he offers you the universe and your deed to heavens wealth
Jan 8, 2012
Jan 8, 2012 at 11:30 PM UTC
New heart
Old heart
Fused together so perfectly
The torn pieces
The frayed
All sewed and mended
But not new,
No they wouldn’t be, would they?
I am sitting here
At 9:39
At night
In the cold
Chilling silence
Of my childhood bedroom
A place of pain I forgot to abandon
And I’m feeling manic
Enraged and enticed
By foggy drunk memories
Of your soft tangly hair
In my mouth
And between my fingers
But this poem isn’t for you
My peach
My perfect pear
(but isn’t it always really
about you, my love?
Don’t you live forever
In the back of my mind?)
No
Not now, I won’t think
I can’t think
I’ll just watch the curser
Flashing curiously at the top of the page
And dwell on how unutterably
******
my life has become
My life
With it’s twists and turns
It’s cruel little jokes
I am a punching bag for the universe
I am the teacher
The one the boys learn to be better from
Only to practice on soft
Untattered
Unbroken women
Those who can’t do
Teach
And I can’t do love.
Jan 3, 2012
Jan 3, 2012 at 8:36 PM UTC
"You're hurting yourself by stressing out too much!"
You think you know what you may be saying,
But you are completely and unutterably wrong.
You took a class or two of psychology and believe that you are an expert on MY stress.
That is where you're wrong again.
My dear, I was born a stressful child, I inherited my parents genes who did nothing but stress their entire lives. And as I grew up, they stressed me even more, hoping to someday build the "perfect" obedient child. So what do you want me to do? To erase every bit of worry that I have ever come upon. I'm sorry but I cannot. Maybe it"s because I care so much about the things and people that will never matter. Maybe I shouldn't talk about my problems, it seems better for both me, for you, and for everyone else who listens. Or maybe I should begin bottling it deep inside me again, I was doing pretty well with that procedure. Why should I tell you all my worries and everything that goes on in my life? I thought I ibhad a good reason, but I guess that doesn't really matter anymore. I hurt you with my worries, and I hurt you with my pain. If I shut it off, then you will be better off as well. Yes my love, I am stubborn and no it is not your fault. I don't need to "vent" about anything am I right? After all, I am made of titanium.
Nov 4, 2014
Nov 4, 2014 at 10:47 PM UTC
Silence weighs so heavy
Like a conscience
Like a hunger
Like a baby
Vacuous and greedy
Devouring and needy
And totally insatiable
I could talk of death here
But why lighten the mood
For silence is a serious thing
A damning thing
Immaculate
Incapable of compromise
And unforgiving
No movement is possible
For silence is
As solid as space
A rare and terrible concept
And this perfection
Is unutterably arid
Only time is worse
Aug 20, 2016
Aug 20, 2016 at 7:24 AM UTC
Hey guys!
Remember not to **** or **** anyone.
I know modern life is hard
with, like, credit cards and stuff
but just because you can do
something unutterably terrible
doesn’t mean you should
Ok?
And yeah, we don’t have a monopoly
on being shitbergs
In the general pissy sea of life
but statistically, with numbers and stuff,
we ****
So, y’know, try not to.
See how that feels.
Oct 2, 2021
Oct 2, 2021 at 2:47 AM UTC
__Part 1: JOY & SORROW__
It was around 3am…
When I learned that the
Sweetest Joy
Could, simultaneously, be the
Bitterest Sorrow
As I held my newborn son, Ezra
Close to my chest [Joy]
As he was (inconsolably) screaming his head off
Just below my right ear! [Sorrow]
But, oh, Ezra himself is a single joy
Who outweighs 10,000 sorrows!
And his parents CANNOT IMAGINE
Life without him
(Though our bodies ache to know, again,
The comforts
And rest
Our past life afforded us)
---
__Part 2: THE BABIES ON THE PORCH__
We COULD NOT WAIT to introduce Ezra
To everyone (and anyone)!
And the first time we took him outside
Onto the front porch
To meet the neighbors,
The most curious thing happened:
The one-and-a-half year old neighbor girl, Remi –
Short for “Remington” (yes, named after the rifle!) –
Hobbled over with her Daddy,
And pointed to Ezra, and said, “Baby!”
And I smiled
And said
(In a high-pitched, baby-talk voice),
“Yeah, he’s a Baby…”
---
__Part 3: “BABIES” TO BABIES__
Later, I was replaying this interaction
In my head –
Amused by the irony
Of the situation:
That this one-and-a-half year old BABY
Identified a thing
Smaller and younger than HERSELF
As a “Baby!”
And I wondered if she knows that
SHE too is a Baby –
If she ever looks in the mirror,
And points to HERSELF,
And says,
“Baby!”
---
__Part 4: BABY GIRLS & BABY DOLLS__
And then, I recalled
Having witnessed this ironic phenomenon before…
…As I watched our friend’s little girl, Addy,
Pushing her baby doll in a toy stroller
Around her house
As if it was her Baby
And I thought about how amazing it is
That “pre-programmed” into little girls
Is the nurturing and emotional concern of
A Mother,
And that, it’s not uncommon to find
Baby girls
Pretending to be Mommy’s to their
Baby dolls
---
__Part 5: THIS “BABY”__
And then, I thought about myself
In relation to my Heavenly Father –
Who, in His Infinite Character,
And Bigness,
And Greater-Than-Us-Ness,
Is so unutterably HIGH above (and beyond) me…
And a thought popped into my head –
In the form of an absurd question:
“Are we all just ‘playing with dolls’?”
.
Dec 21, 2019
Dec 21, 2019 at 11:02 AM UTC