Poem a Day

We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.

-Helen Keller

He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.

-William Blake

You live by the light you find.

-William Stafford

Ode to the Book

When I close a book
I open life.
I hear
faltering cries
among harbours.
Copper ignots
slide down sand-pits
to Tocopilla.
Night time.
Among the islands
our ocean
throbs with fish,
touches the feet, the thighs,
the chalk ribs
of my country.
The whole of night
clings to its shores, by dawn
it wakes up singing
as if it had excited a guitar.

The ocean’s surge is calling.
The wind
calls me
and Rodriguez calls,
and Jose Antonio–
I got a telegram
from the “Mine” Union
and the one I love
(whose name I won’t let out)
expects me in Bucalemu.

No book has been able
to wrap me in paper,
to fill me up
with typography,
with heavenly imprints
or was ever able
to bind my eyes,
I come out of books to people orchards
with the hoarse family of my song,
to work the burning metals
or to eat smoked beef
by mountain firesides.
I love adventurous
books,
books of forest or snow,
depth or sky
but hate
the spider book
in which thought
has laid poisonous wires
to trap the juvenile
and circling fly.
Book, let me go.
I won’t go clothed
in volumes,
I don’t come out
of collected works,
my poems
have not eaten poems–
they devour
exciting happenings,
feed on rough weather,
and dig their food
out of earth and men.
I’m on my way
with dust in my shoes
free of mythology:
send books back to their shelves,
I’m going down into the streets.
I learned about life
from life itself,
love I learned in a single kiss
and could teach no one anything
except that I have lived
with something in common among men,
when fighting with them,
when saying all their say in my song.

-Pablo Neruda

Dawn

Ecstatic bird songs pound
the hollow vastness of the sky
with metallic clinkings—
beating color up into it
at a far edge,—beating it, beating it
with rising, triumphant ardor,—
stirring it into warmth,
quickening in it a spreading change,—
bursting wildly against it as
dividing the horizon, a heavy sun
lifts himself—is lifted—
bit by bit above the edge
of things,—runs free at last
out into the open—!lumbering
glorified in full release upward—
                             songs cease.

-William Carlos Williams

There was a star danced, and under that was I born.

-William Shakespeare

Poem to Be Read at 3 A.M.

Excepting the diner
On the outskirts
The town off Ladora
At 3 A.M.
Was dark but
For my headlights
And up in
One second-story room
A single light
Where someone
Was sick or
Perhaps reading
As I drove past
At seventy
Not thinking
This poem
Is for whoever
Had the light on.

-Donald Justice

But to be liked, you must never disagree. And if you never disagree, it’s like only breathing in and never breathing out! A man can suffocate on courtesy.

-Henry David Thoreau: The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

We love without knowing it. A man—or a woman—can’t love on schedule. I don’t wake up in the morning and say: “I shall start loving at nine-twenty, and continue until ten-fifteen.” Yes, it is accidental. And it’s everywhere—it’s the wind, the tide, the waves, the sunshine.

-Henry David Thoreau: The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail