Journal
Morning Poems
Every morning at eight, a poem lands in my texts, chosen against whatever I am carrying that week. Most are good. A few are mine the second I read them. This page keeps the whole run, and pulls the keepers out of the stream.
The keepers
Day 17 · July 26
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too. I’m going out to fetch the little calfThat’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,It totters when she licks it with her tongue.I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.
Robert Frost, The Pasture · 1914 · public domain
What I texted back
“i loveeeeeeeeee this poem ... its me. i feel seen i feel cute i feel loved.”
Day 18 · July 27
don’t swat it.look, the fly is wringing its hands,wringing its feet.(やれ打つな蝿が手をすり足をする) skinny frog,don’t give up:Issa is right here.(痩蛙まけるな一茶是に有り) come play with me,sparrow with no mother.(我と来て遊べや親のない雀)
Kobayashi Issa, three haiku · Japan, c. 1770s to 1821 · public domain, rendered from the Japanese
Hearted in the thread
Day 22 · July 31
honestly, i want to die.she was leaving me, weeping,and she said this to me over and over:“oh, what a terrible thing has happened to us.Sappho, i swear i go against my will.” and i answered her:“go, and be happy, and remember me,because you know how we cared for you.and if you don’t, then i wantto remind you [ ... ]of all the lovely things that happened to us: the many crowns of violetsand roses and [crocuses ... ] togetheryou put on, there beside me, and the many woven garlandsmade out of flowersyou threw around your soft throat [ ... ]” * someone, i say, will remember us,even in another time.
Sappho, Fragments 94 and 147 · 7th century BCE · public domain, rendered from the Greek; the brackets are where the papyrus is torn
Hearted in the thread
Day 24 · August 2
Muy cerca de mi ocaso, yo te bendigo, Vida,porque nunca me diste ni esperanza fallida,ni trabajos injustos, ni pena inmerecida; porque veo al final de mi rudo caminoque yo fui el arquitecto de mi propio destino; que si extraje las mieles o la hiel de las cosas,fue porque en ellas puse hiel o mieles sabrosas:cuando planté rosales, coseché siempre rosas. ...Cierto, a mis lozanías va a seguir el invierno:¡mas tú no me dijiste que mayo fuese eterno! Hallé sin duda largas las noches de mis penas;mas no me prometiste tú sólo noches buenas;y en cambio tuve algunas santamente serenas... Amé, fui amado, el sol acarició mi faz.¡Vida, nada me debes! ¡Vida, estamos en paz! * Very near my sunset, I bless you, Life,because you never gave me a hope that failed,nor unjust labor, nor undeserved sorrow; because I see at the end of my rough roadthat I was the architect of my own fate; that if I drew the honey or the bitterness out of things,it was because I put bitterness or good honey into them:when I planted rose bushes, I always harvested roses. True, winter is going to follow my green season,but you never told me May would be eternal! I did find the nights of my sorrows long,but you never promised me only good nights,and in return I had some that were holy and calm... I loved, I was loved, the sun touched my face.Life, you owe me nothing. Life, we are at peace.
Amado Nervo, En paz · Elevación, 1915 · public domain, Spanish with an English rendering
Hearted in the thread
Day 26 · August 4
Here is the ancient floor,Footworn and hollowed and thin,Here was the former doorWhere the dead feet walked in. She sat here in her chair,Smiling into the fire;He who played stood there,Bowing it higher and higher. Childlike, I danced in a dream;Blessings emblazoned that day;Everything glowed with a gleam;Yet we were looking away!
Thomas Hardy, The Self-Unseeing · 1901 · public domain
Hearted in the thread
Day 29 · August 9
As virtuous men pass mildly away, And whisper to their souls to go,Whilst some of their sad friends do say The breath goes now, and some say, No: So let us melt, and make no noise, No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;’Twere profanation of our joys To tell the laity our love. Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears, Men reckon what it did, and meant;But trepidation of the spheres, Though greater far, is innocent. Dull sublunary lovers’ love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admitAbsence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it. But we by a love so much refined, That our selves know not what it is,Inter-assured of the mind, Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss. Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yetA breach, but an expansion, Like gold to airy thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two;Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if the other do. And though it in the center sit, Yet when the other far doth roam,It leans and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home. Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun.
John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning · written 1611, published 1633 · public domain
Hearted in the thread
A poem earns this section by getting a real reaction out of me: a text back before 9am, or a heart left going back through the thread late at night. The bar is not quality. The bar is recognition.
The run · 61 mornings
Titles and poets only; the poems themselves stay in my texts unless they are keepers in the public domain.
Day 62Sea Rose · H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), 1916
Day 61Adlestrop · Edward Thomas, 1917
Day 60Haru no umi (春の海終日のたりのたりかな) and Na no hana ya (菜の花や月は東に日は西に) · Yosa Buson, 1770s
Day 59Yo no soy yo (Eternidades) · Juan Ramón Jiménez, 1918
Day 58Self-Dependence · Matthew Arnold, 1852
Day 56In the Desert (Black Riders III) · Stephen Crane, 1895
Day 55À une passante · Charles Baudelaire, 1861
Day 54Rima XXI (¿Qué es poesía?) · Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, 1871
Day 53Loveliest of trees, the cherry now (A Shropshire Lad II) · A. E. Housman, 1896
Day 52En perseguirme, Mundo, ¿Qué interesas? ("Insinúa su aversión a los vicios") · Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, written before 1695; collected 1689-1692
Day 51Katami tote nani ka nokosan (形見とて何か残さん) and Nusubito ni torinokosareshi mado no tsuki (盗人にとり残されし窓の月) · Ryōkan (Taigu Ryōkan), late Edo period, before 1831
Day 50If I can stop one heart from breaking · Emily Dickinson, 1890
Day 49Shuidiao Getou (水調歌頭·明月幾時有), rendered in my own English translation · Su Shi (Su Dongpo), 1076
Day 48Meciendo · Gabriela Mistral, 1922
Day 47Auld Lang Syne · Robert Burns, 1788
Day 46Invitation to Love · Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1896
Day 45Carmen 50 (Hesterno, Licini, die otiosi) · Catullus (Gaius Valerius Catullus), 1st century BCE
Day 44Question for Liu Nineteen (問劉十九) · Bai Juyi, Tang dynasty, 9th century
Day 43Chicago · Carl Sandburg, 1914
Day 42Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, quatrains VII and XI · Edward FitzGerald (rendering Omar Khayyám), 1859
Day 41Kusa no to mo / Yuku haru ya (the two opening poems of Oku no Hosomichi, The Narrow Road to the Deep North) · Matsuo Bashō, 1702
Day 40The Bridge Builder (first printed as 'Building the Bridge') · Will Allen Dromgoole, 1898
Day 39Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 · William Wordsworth, 1807
Day 38Fable (also printed as 'The Mountain and the Squirrel') · Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1846
Day 37Your World · Georgia Douglas Johnson, 1922
Day 36In Memoriam A.H.H., canto 27 (I envy not in any moods) · Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1850
Day 35Lo fatal · Rubén Darío, 1905
Day 34Seeing Off Yuan the Second on a Mission to Anxi (渭城曲 / Song of Wei City) · Wang Wei, c. 730s
Day 33The Arrow and the Song · Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1845
Day 32Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth · Arthur Hugh Clough, 1862
Day 31So, We'll Go No More a Roving · Lord Byron (George Gordon, Lord Byron), 1817
Day 30It is not growing like a tree (the Noble Nature stanza, from 'To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison') · Ben Jonson, 1640
Day 29A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning · John Donne, 1633Keeper
Day 28Sonnet 29 (When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes) · William Shakespeare, 1609
Day 27On Teaching (from The Prophet) · Kahlil Gibran, 1923
Day 26The Self-Unseeing · Thomas Hardy, 1901Keeper
Day 25Drinking Alone Under the Moon (月下獨酌, first of four) · Li Bai (Li Po), Tang dynasty, c. 750
Day 24En paz · Amado Nervo, 1915Keeper
Day 23Recuerdo · Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1920
Day 22Fragments 94 and 147 · Sappho, 7th century BCEKeeper
Day 21Mother to Son · Langston Hughes, 1922
Day 20Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto (Sonnet, to Vittoria Colonna) · Michelangelo Buonarroti, c. 1538
Day 19Love (III) · George Herbert, 1633
Day 18Three haiku (yare utsu na / yasegaeru / ware to kite asobe ya) · Kobayashi Issa, c. 1770s-1821Keeper
Day 17The Pasture · Robert Frost, 1914Keeper
Day 16Ithaka · C. P. Cavafy, 1911
Day 15Eternity · William Blake, c. 1793
Day 14On First Looking into Chapman's Homer · John Keats, 1816
Day 13Hope · Emily Bronte, 1846
Day 12Come, come, whoever you are (quatrain, attributed) · Rumi (Jalal al-Din Rumi), 13th c.
Day 11Sonnet 43 (How Do I Love Thee), Sonnets from the Portuguese · Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1850
Day 10Este que ves, engaño colorido (Soneto 145) · Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1689
Day 9When You Are Old · W. B. Yeats, 1893
Day 8Liebes-Lied (Love Song) · Rainer Maria Rilke, 1907
Day 7Up-Hill · Christina Rossetti, 1861
Day 6Gitanjali (Song Offerings), poem 1 · Rabindranath Tagore, 1912
Day 5Song of Myself (section 51) · Walt Whitman, 1855
Day 4Proverbios y cantares XXIX (Caminante, no hay camino) · Antonio Machado, 1912
Day 3Pied Beauty · Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877
Day 2We never know how high we are · Emily Dickinson, 1896
Day 1Peace · Sara Teasdale, 1915