Home ⇒ 📌Mark Strand ⇒ Eating Poetry
Eating Poetry
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
And she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
Their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
She screams.
I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Related poetry:
- Poetry it Takes A lot of Desperation Dissatisfaction And Disillusion To Write A Few Good Poems. It’s not For Everybody Either to Write It Or even to Read It....
- Some Like Poetry Write it. Write. In ordinary ink On ordinary paper: they were given no food, They all died of hunger. “All. How many? It’s a big meadow. How much grass For each one?” Write: I don’t know. History counts its skeletons in round numbers. A thousand and one remains a thousand, As though the one had […]...
- A Poetry Reading At West Point I read to the entire plebe class, In two batches. Twice the hall filled With bodies dressed alike, each toting A copy of my book. What would my Shrink say, if I had one, about Such a dream, if it were a dream? Question and answer time. “Sir,” a cadet yelled from the balcony, And […]...
- Sandpipers Sandland where the salt water kills the sweet potatoes. Homes for sandpipers-the script of their feet is on the sea shingles-they write in the morning, it is gone at noon-they write at noon, it is gone at night. Pity the land, the sea, the ten mile flats, pity anything but the sandpiper’s wire legs and […]...
- Poetry I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because […]...
- Poetry In the same way that the mindless diamond keeps One spark of the planet’s early fires Trapped forever in its net of ice, It’s not love’s later heat that poetry holds, But the atom of the love that drew it forth From the silence: so if the bright coal of his love Begins to smoulder, […]...
- The New Poetry Handbook 1 If a man understands a poem, he shall have troubles. 2 If a man lives with a poem, he shall die lonely. 3 If a man lives with two poems, he shall be unfaithful to one. 4 If a man conceives of a poem, he shall have one less child. 5 If a man […]...
- HIS POETRY HIS PILLAR Only a little more I have to write: Then I’ll give o’er, And bid the world good-night. ‘Tis but a flying minute, That I must stay, Or linger in it: And then I must away. O Time, that cut’st down all, And scarce leav’st here Memorial Of any men that were; How many lie forgot […]...
- Depressed By A Book Of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward An Unused Pasture And Invite The Insects To Join Me Relieved, I let the book fall behind a stone. I climb a slight rise of grass. I do not want to disturb the ants Who are walking single file up the fence post, Carrying small white petals, Casting shadows so frail that I can see through them. I close my eyes for a moment and […]...
- Legs rivers and age with landbound legs a wish For the easy flow of a river – not The clambering up crags to seek More favour from the sun (or long-haired moon) harped for Since those sparks of who am i First clicked through consciousness How the river sidles round Rocks blocking the painful straight Seems to brush aside […]...
- Blackberry Eating I love to go out in late September Among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries To eat blackberries for breakfast, The stalks very prickly, a penalty They earn for knowing the black art Of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them Lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries Fall almost unbidden to my […]...
- The Spider “Oh, look at that great ugly spider!” said Ann; And screaming, she brush’d it away with her fan; “‘Tis a frightful black creature as ever can be, I wish that it would not come crawling on me. ” “Indeed,” said her mother, “I’ll venture to say, The poor thing will try to keep out of […]...
- On The Eating Of Mice A woman prepared a mouse for her husband’s dinner, Roasting it with a blueberry in its mouth. At table he uses a dentist’s pick and a surgeon’s scalpel, Bending over the tiny roastling with a jeweler’s loupe. . . Twenty years of this: curried mouse, garlic and butter Mouse, mouse sauteed in its own fur, […]...
- Eating and Drinking chapter VI Then an old man, a keeper of an inn, said, “Speak to us of Eating and Drinking.” And he said: Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light. But since you must kill to eat, and rob the young of its mother’s […]...
- Unlyric Love Song It is time to give that-of-myself which I could not at first: To offer you now at last my least and my worst: Minor, absurd preserves, The shell’s end-curves, A document kept at the back of a drawer, A tin hidden under the floor, Recalcitrant prides and hesitations: To pile them carefully in a desparate […]...
- Morning You know how it is waking From a dream certain you can fly And that someone, long gone, returned And you are filled with longing, For a brief moment, to drive off The road and feel nothing Or to see the loved one and feel Everything. Perhaps one morning, Taking brush to hair you’ll wonder […]...
- Dedication In youth I longed to paint The loveliness I saw; And yet by dire constraint I had to study Law. But now all that is past, And I have no regret, For I am free at last Law to forget. To beauty newly born With brush and tube I play; And though my daubs you […]...
- Goodbye To The Poetry Of Calcium Dark cypresses The world is uneasily happy; It will all be forgotten. Theodore Storm Mother of roots, you have not seeded The tall ashes of loneliness For me. Therefore, Now I go. If I knew the name, Your name, all trellises of vineyards and old fire Would quicken to shake terribly my Earth, mother of […]...
- John Horace Burleson I won the prize essay at school Here in the village, And published a novel before I was twenty-five. I went to the city for themes and to enrich my art; There married the banker’s daughter, And later became president of the bank- Always looking forward to some leisure To write an epic novel of […]...
- "I Love You Sweatheart" A man risked his life to write the words. A man hung upside down (an idiot friend Holding his legs?) with spray paint To write the words on a girder fifty feet above A highway. And his beloved, The next morning driving to work…? His words are not (meant to be) so unique. Does she […]...
- Cotton Song Come, brother, come. Lets lift it; Come now, hewit! roll away! Shackles fall upon the Judgment Day But lets not wait for it. God’s body’s got a soul, Bodies like to roll the soul, Cant blame God if we dont roll, Come, brother, roll, roll! Cotton bales are the fleecy way, Weary sinner’s bare feet […]...
- Exiles Her brown falcon perches above the sink As steaming water forks over my hands. Below the wrists they shrivel and turn pink. I am in exile in my own land. Her half-grown cats scuffle across the floor Trailing a slime of blood from where they fed. I lock the door. They claw under the door. […]...
- Excerpts from "Poetry" Poetry, I found you Where at last they chained and bound you; With devices all around you To torture and confound you, I found you-shivering, bare. They had shorn your raven hair And taken both your eyes Which, once cerulean as the skies, Had leapt at dawn to wild surmise Of what was waiting there. […]...
- A HOPE FOR POETRY: REMEMBERING THE SIXTIES There was a hope for poetry in the sixties And for education and society, teachers free To do as they wanted: I could and did teach Poetry and art all day and little else – That was my way. I threw rainbows against the classroom walls, Gold and silver dragons in the corridors and Halls; […]...
- The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye To His Poetry Students Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me Snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting You were beautiful; goodbye, Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain Brown envelopes for the return of your very Clinical Sonnet; goodbye, manufacturer Of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues Give the fullest treatment in literature yet To the sagging-breast motif; goodbye, you […]...
- The Poetry Reading at high noon At a small college near the beach Sober The sweat running down my arms A spot of sweat on the table I flatten it with my finger Blood money blood money My god they must think I love this like the others But it’s for bread and beer and rent Blood money […]...
- Through These Pale Cold Days Through these pale cold days What dark faces burn Out of three thousand years, And their wild eyes yearn, While underneath their brows Like waifs their spirits grope For the pools of Hebron again For Lebanon’s summer slope. They leave these blond still days In dust behind their tread They see with living eyes How […]...
- My Picture I made a picture; all my heart I put in it, and all I knew Of canvas-cunning and of Art, Of tenderness and passion true. A worshipped Master came to see; Oh he was kind and gentle, too. He studied it with sympathy, And sensed what I had sought to do. Said he: “Your paint […]...
- ON FIRST READING JOHN GOODBY'S 'IRISH POETRY SINCE 1950' Barbarous insult to Yeats’ memory and Claudel’s Allen, thank God you are dead, you who breathed the air of Apollinaire, Ghost of Reverdy bear witness to the mendacity of his clamour, Hart Crane, rise from the estuary of the great river you drowned in, John Clare, rise from your country churchyard grave, Gray, from your […]...
- The Progress of Poetry The Farmer’s Goose, who in the Stubble, Has fed without Restraint, or Trouble; Grown fat with Corn and Sitting still, Can scarce get o’er the Barn-Door Sill: And hardly waddles forth, to cool Her Belly in the neighb’ring Pool: Nor loudly cackles at the Door; For Cackling shews the Goose is poor. But when she […]...
- The Golf Walk Behold, my child, this touching scene, The golfer on the golfing-green; Pray mark his legs’ uncanny swing, The golf-walk is a gruesome thing! See how his arms and shoulders ride Above his legs in haughty pride, While over bunker, hill and lawn His feet, relentless, drag him on. And does the man walk always so? […]...
- Tommy I went into a public-‘ouse to get a pint o’ beer, The publican ‘e up an’ sez, “We serve no red-coats here.” The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die, I outs into the street again an’ to myself sez I: O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go […]...
- The Spirit of Poetry There is a quiet spirit in these woods, That dwells where’er the gentle south-wind blows; Where, underneath the white-thorn, in the glade, The wild flowers bloom, or, kissing the soft air, The leaves above their sunny palms outspread. With what a tender and impassioned voice It fills the nice and delicate ear of thought, When […]...
- Faithless Nelly Gray A Pathetic Ballad Ben Battle was a soldier bold, And used to war’s alarms; But a cannon-ball took off his legs, So he laid down his arms. Now as they bore him off the field, Said he, ‘Let others shoot; For here I leave my second leg, And the Forty-second Foot.’ The army-surgeons made him […]...
- THE COLOSSUS (Goya, an old man in exile, looks at his self-portrait) A bull’s neck, still much needed, Deserving exile or the guillotine, ‘Because you are an artist we forgave you’, Thus his royal highness gave thanks, My fingers itching for brush and canvas, Floury cheeks and rouge, legs a donkey would be ashamed of, A wife […]...
- Those Were The Days The sun came up before breakfast, Perfectly round and yellow, and we Dressed in the soft light and shook out Our long blond curls and waited For Maid to brush them flat and place The part just where it belonged. We came down the carpeted stairs One step at a time, in single file, Gleaming […]...
- From Citron-Bower From citron-bower be her bed, Cut from branch of tree a-flower, Fashioned for her maidenhead. From Lydian apples, sweet of hue, Cut the width of board and lathe, Carve the feet from myrtle-wood. Let the palings of her bed Be quince and box-wood overlaid With the scented bark of yew. That all the wood in […]...
- Authorship You say that father write a lot of books, but what he write I don’t Understand. He was reading to you all the evening, but could you really Make out what he meant? What nice stores, mother, you can tell us! Why can’t father Write like that, I wonder? Did he never hear from his […]...
- On the Death of Robert Browning He held no dream worth waking; so he said, He who stands now on death’s triumphal steep, Awakened out of life wherein we sleep And dream of what he knows and sees, being dead. But never death for him was dark or dread; “Look forth,” he bade the soul, and fear not. Weep, All ye […]...
- Listen, Lord: A Prayer O Lord, we come this morning Knee-bowed and body-bent Before Thy throne of grace. O Lord this morning Bow our hearts beneath our knees, And our knees in some lonesome valley. We come this morning Like empty pitchers to a full fountain, With no merits of our own. O Lord open up a window of […]...