My Blog

Otto Rene Castillo

The most beautiful thing
for those who have fought a whole life
is to come to the end and say;
we believed in people and life,
and life and the people
never let us down.

Only in this way do men become men,
women become women,
fighting day and night
for people and for life.

And when these lives come to an end
the people open their deepest rivers
and they enter those waters forever.
And so they become, distant fires, living,
creating the heart of example

The most beautiful thing
for those who have fought a whole life
is to come to the end and say;
we believed in people and life,
and life and the people
never let us down.

John Donne

No man is an island, entire of itself; every
man is a piece of the continent, a part of the
main. If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory
were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or
of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes
me, because I am involved in mankind, and
therefore never send to know for whom the bells
tolls; it tolls for thee.

Robert Lowell

My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,

a captive as Racine, the man of craft,

drawn through his maze of iron composition

by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.

When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body

caught in its hangman’s-knot of sinking lines,

the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .

I have sat and listened to too many

words of the collaborating muse,

and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,

not avoiding injury to others,

not avoiding injury to myself–

to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,

an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting

my eyes have seen what my hand did.

Ruth L. Schwartz

It is the breast I remember seeing,
the nipple pink and round, the lustrous flesh,
before I saw the woman had no arms
in the locker room. Her teeth were excellent,
tugging her blouse on,

but it is her breast I remember
when I see again how what is perfect
lives beside what is tragic and damaged,
how silence arcs between these two,
each making the other possible.

Sappho
Edited by Richard Lattimore 

Like the very gods in my sight is he who
sits where he can look in your eyes, who listens
close to you, to hear the soft voice, its sweetness
          murmur in love and

laughter, all for him. But it breaks my spirit;
underneath my breast all the heart is shaken.
Let me only glance where you are, the voice dies,
          I can say nothing,

but my lips are stricken to silence, under-
neath my skin the tenuous flame suffuses;
nothing shows in front of my eyes, my ears are
          muted in thunder.

And the sweat breaks running upon me, fever
Shakes my body, paler I turn than grass is;
I can feel that I have been changed, I feel that
          death has come near me.

Carl Sandburg

I am the people–the mob–the crowd–the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and
     clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me
     and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons
     and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing.
     Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out
     and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes
     me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history
     to remember. Then–I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the
     lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year,
     who played me for a fool–then there will be no speaker in all the
     world say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a sneer in his
     voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob–the crowd–the mass–will arrive then.

Jack Hirschman 

There’s a happiness, a joy
in one soul, that’s been
buried alive in everyone
and forgotten.

It isn’t your barroom joke
or tender, intimate humor
or affections of friendliness
or big, bright pun.

They’re the surviving survivors
of what happened when happiness
was buried alive, when
it no longer looked out

of today’s eyes, and doesn’t
even manifest when one
of us dies, we just walk away
from everything, alone

with what’s left of us,
going on being human beings
without being human,
without that happiness.

Charles Harper Webb

Sandi doesn’t like Dan much, but loves his house. She comes over before he’s home from work, to gaze into its window-eyes.
She wheedles her own key. ("That’s good," Dan thinks. "We’re getting close.") Now she can visit when he isn’t there to interrupt as her bare feet caress the hardwood floors, as her hands linger on gleaming knobs and faucets, as she strokes the long, smooth balustrade, and explores every chamber of this heart she adores.
Though Dan’s frog-belly makes her wince, his slobbery kiss makes her shudder, the feel of him inside her can only be endured if she is drunk or stoned, she marries him, pretending it’s the house on top of her, the house into whose ear she cries, to whom she whispers, "I love you. Good night."
How awful when, after a year of bliss, Dan wins promotion to a better town.
The "For Sale" sign in the yard pierces her heart.
She makes phone calls. She hires workmen and machines. Dan comes home with two First Class tickets, to find wife and house gone.
"We’ll move from state to state," she mouths through the rear window of the truck that tows her love. "We’ll paint, remodel, whatever it takes." 
When rain begins to fall, she climbs from the truck to the house, and as asphalt hisses by, kisses the wet windows one by one. "It’s hard for me, too, Sweetheart," she whispers. "Please don’t cry."

Mark Strand

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

James Tate

They didn’t have much trouble
teaching the ape to write poems:
first they strapped him into the chair,
then tied the pencil around his hand
(the paper had already been nailed down).
Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
And whispered into his ear:
"You look like a god sitting there.
Why don’t you try writing something?"