The World is a Beautiful Place
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

The world is a beautiful place
                                                           to be born into
if you don’t mind happiness
                                             not always being
                                                                        so very much fun
       if you don’t mind a touch of hell
                                                       now and then
                just when everything is fine
                                                             because even in heaven
                                they don’t sing
                                                        all the time
 
             The world is a beautiful place
                                                           to be born into
       if you don’t mind some people dying
                                                                  all the time
                        or maybe only starving
                                                           some of the time
                 which isn’t half so bad
                                                      if it isn’t you
 
      Oh the world is a beautiful place
                                                          to be born into
               if you don’t much mind
                                                   a few dead minds
                    in the higher places
                                                    or a bomb or two
                            now and then
                                                  in your upturned faces
         or such other improprieties
                                                    as our Name Brand society
                                  is prey to
                                              with its men of distinction
             and its men of extinction
                                                   and its priests
                         and other patrolmen
                                                         and its various segregations
         and congressional investigations
                                                             and other constipations
                        that our fool flesh
                                                     is heir to
 
Yes the world is the best place of all
                                                           for a lot of such things as
         making the fun scene
                                                and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
                                         and singing low songs of having
                                                                                      inspirations
and walking around
                                looking at everything
                                                                  and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
                              and even thinking
                                                         and kissing people and
     making babies and wearing pants
                                                         and waving hats and
                                     dancing
                                                and going swimming in rivers
                              on picnics
                                       in the middle of the summer
and just generally
                            ‘living it up’
 
Yes
   but then right in the middle of it
                                                    comes the smiling
                                                                                 mortician

​Source: poets.org

Loud Prayer
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI                          

Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames]
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI    
 
I am signaling you through the flames.
The North Pole is not where it used to be.
Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.
Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words....

Source: poets.org
​

The Changing Light
​LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI                                

Boy Saint
PETER LeBERGE                                                                                                               
        
​         for Eric
In the beginning, we were one blood.
Then the body, stem of thorns, grew
its disagreement from the inside
out. Like all biblical stories, it begins
with a simple thorn, a natural secret
the body kept from itself. I open
the sealed envelope: everything in the sky
folded, gathered into one body. Shoulders,
the tightness of my mouth. Wounded
bird. Lightning fluttering between two boys
who want to be in a basement in a town
they dreamt up. Lightning in cities and towns
I’ve never been to, never heard of. I am
positive. I am not. I make a moon with sugar
and a damp thumb, watch its unlicked body
dissolve into memory. A couple of towns over
I am born and reborn. I am not. Not positive
until I say it. Until I taste it. Boys died and die
in bodies like this and don’t ghost, except
on voice messages their mothers play to keep
alive. They dress to grieve in churches. Inside
black moons. Blotted-out days. Separate from face,
posthumous thorn. Body liquefaction. I dream
about altar boys in ironed seersucker suits
pecking each other like swallows when dared. Boys
with whiskey-mark necks. Like a scream of darts
found them in the sanctuary’s locked basement
in the dark. One night, they drew it—the town
they dreamt of, fences yellowed, clouds like the static
on the tv. Their only light. Knowing any other light
would wake one’s sleeping sister, her body
in the corner of the room’s mouth. Faithful,
moving only as God does. One night
in a symphony of nights. And He likes us
until he doesn’t. Like trees struck by lightning,
we aren’t visible until we’re on fire. Everything
depreciates like this once it’s been said. Unless
it is overheard. Unless it is shot in flight.

If You Forget Me
PABLO NERUDA
 
I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

February
MARGARET ATWOOD
 
Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

​Source: poetryfoundation.org

Things to do Around a Lookout
GARY SNYDER

Good Bones 
MAGGIE SMITH
 
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
 
SOURCE: poetryfoundation.org

On Ceremony
WENDY VIDELOCK                                                      
                    Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
                                                                                                          —Abraham Verghese
In winter the house
of grief deepens.
Down
 
in the dark earth,
small mouths sipping.
Someone
 
reading, someone
seeking some
kind
 
of feeling. Some kind
of healing.
A child has eyed
 
a star
 
spangled banner,
the grey dove’s
feather,
 
another bleak
scandal. There,
 
in the window, someone
burns
a solitary candle.
 
Source: Rattle