Young Writers Society

Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou are, to dust thou returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than today.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, - act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sand of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solenm main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

I sat as if a statue,
and Hades brushed my hair
with a comb of iron and asphodel.

I sat as if an icon,
and Demeter brushed my hair
with a comb of crocus and water.

On either side of my candled body,
they held out my hair like wings,
and ran their fingers through it,
oars through black and separate rivers.

And Hades' hand was on my knee, saying:

You are safe here,
where we have brought you.

And Demeter's arms were close on mine, saying:

We only meant the dark
to be a quiet pool
where we can whisper
and remain unheard.

The sky is so bright, and so brazen.

Thank you for love, no matter what its outcome,
that leads us to the window in the dark,
that adds another otherness to others,
that holds our stars as if they were first diamonds
found in a mine that had been long closed down,
that hands out suns and makes us ask every morning:
What else do we need, picnickers in time?
Thank you for love that does not hang on answers,
that says, 'Enough's enough, to love is plenty...'
- by such signs do we know the world exists,
amo ergo sum, thank you for that.
The miles, the years, the lives that lie between
- they always lay there, and they always will,
but look, the loved one spans that dizzy distance
by the act of being, and we lovers turn
our faces steadily thou-wards as a field
of sunflowers like a tracking station turns,
charting its meaning by the westering sun.

This june 3
would be different

Time to draw lines

I've grown into the family pores
and the bronchitis

Even up east
I get by saying goddamnit

Who was that masked man
I left for dead
in the shadow of mt. shadow

Who crumbles there

Not touching anything
but satin and dandelions

Not laid his eyes
on the likes of you

Because the unconnected life
is not worth living

Thorntrees overtake the spot

Hands appear to push back pain

Because no poet's death

Can be the sole author
of another poet's life

What will my new instrument be

Just this water glass
this untunable spoon

Something else is out there
goddamnit

And I want to hear it

When our lost one left us
For the Shadow Land,
In bark we bound him,
A weeping band,
And we bore him, wailing
Our wild death croon
To his lonely tree-grave
By the Long Lagoon.

Our wandering fires
Are now far away,
But our thoughts are turning
By night and day
Where he lies for ever
Under the white moon,
By the lit waters
Of the still lagoon.

His hunts are over
And the songs he made;
Poor lonely fellow,
He will be afraid
When the night winds whisper
Their ghostly tune
In the haunted swamp-oaks
By the Long Lagoon.

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.


—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmM ... 1iizs.dpuf

This kiss, unfinished, lips to receiver in the parking lot,
a pucker shot through a fiber optic wire to an answering machine
toward switchboards and stations transmitting in blips to satellites,
this kiss thrown earthward and shooting down coils, around pipeline
and electric power lumbering underground,
up threads and transistors and transference points.
This kiss is zeroes and ones jumbled and tossed into a pneumatic system,
unscrambled at the end and scrawled onto a tape recorder slowly rolling
at the side of your bed,
then slapping back, reverbed off the ringer, a tinny phantom of the smooch
like a smack on an aluminum can,
up the same veins through the belly of the same satellite
and softly to the side of my head;
this kiss is home before the next exhalation leaves.
I'm stooped in the booth,
pounding quarters into the slot;
yellow light droops over the asphalt,
and your ghost, too cool and elusive with those hands and mouth
sings around me in the smell of gasoline;
whose mouth is this, scratched in static,
some droplet of a sigh, atomized, and sputtering digitized into my room?

When I die, I hope I don't see a bright light.
Those give me headaches.

After a long life, I don't want to stare into the sun.
I want a calm blackness-
The same shade that coats the back of my eyelids.