Poem: On Blossoms.

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I’ve been posting a weekly poem for the last month or so, but one has yet to come to me this Tuesday. My poetry is spontaneous, born of a quiet moment or a thought that refuses to leave me alone.
Other poetry is like that for me, too. Sometimes the pieces I come across echo in my mind for days, weeks, months, years, forever. I read this poem in this book a few years ago, and then I memorized it for a recitation in my Oral Interpretation class my senior year in college. It’s been reverberating in my thoughts ever since. Fragments of it come to me in the shower, in the car, on a walk, over the stove, on my porch on sunny mornings, or in the chair next to my mom’s hospital bed, like this past weekend when I found myself wishing for a day like the one Lee describes here.

From Blossoms
BY LI-YOUNG LEE

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward   
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into   
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Do you have any poems that do that for you? Please share.
P.S. Thanks for the well wishes and sweet comments on Thursday’s post; she was sent home today and is probably enjoying a bowl of chicken soup for the first time in a couple weeks as you read this. Much love, friends.
[Image found here.]

Poem: A Prayer for the Balance.

I asked to know real Grace.
It is my namesake
and I have a feeling I need it.
Instead,
I fight.
I break things.
I break.

So I ask,
God, what can this mean?

Is it a name,
or a thing that lives and breathes?
Does it pardon me, or teach me that I’ve been wrong?

On Sunday mornings,
I believe that there is more to it than a church pew.

On other days, I am caught.

Between hospital beds
and the place where harsh words are said,
in that precarious, miraculous balance
between life 

and death,

I then feel it sustaining me.

Poem : The Zest.

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My fist tight,
I learn to squeeze the lemon
with the same might and firmness that life requires of me.
Whether working with my hands,
fingers sticky with pith and juice,
or working with my head,
thoughts bursting forward toward mind-bending possibilities,
I demand fruit,
flavor,
all that it can give me.
So that when I sit down to rest,
I find the spread delicious,
my self satisfied and spent.

Poem: In Sleep

In sleep I dream of strange things
Closets, lobsters, dead dogs
and old friends
Boats and voices
Vivid colors that fade to black and white
Earnest feelings that ache in waking life.
When I’m tired I wish for sleep
When I sleep,
I fall
Hoping to find something -
A sweet lie,
A vacation,
A kiss I needed -
But always I wake up
And my mind is too revealed.

On a Hot, Beautiful Day.

The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean–
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down–
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Happy Tuesday, friends.