Poem of the Day
“This was the farewell …”
By Hannah Arendt
Many friends came with us
and whoever did not come was no longer a friend.
Many friends came with us
and whoever did not come was no longer a friend.
I lift my cone to hers
As if drinking a toast.
Her pink tongue, like a cat’s,
Powder-blue, deckle-edged,
And worn with fingering,
A batch of letters, filed
A woman of wool lies on a couch covered with pale shawls.
The way it holds her, she and the couch are almost one.
Cold fingers the shawls but she is warm. Though gravely ill.
Food for the fat is like air. It fills you up
and lifts you out of the chair where otherwise
you sit like a dead seal.
The morning’s horn extended a palmful of
sand. I felt a dry sprig on my face, frozen
The limerick walked by the shore,
and watched the night eat the sun raw.
It lay by the wharfs,
Now this is a city held by winter,
and this is a glass splinter.
Now this is a day as short as a short vowel,
Summer is hitting Gloucestershire like starlight spitting at a black slab of cloud.
The fields are not really made of greenness, it is the color of steel or a seabed.
Maybe you will be able to dig down into Gloucestershire as if it was a page to be turned,
I have a partridge egg,
a gift from a man
who found it in some field straw
The right movement of the right foot
on dirt under tree-green grass underfoot,
the right movement of the left foot: