Kit Ellis

“This is the time and place
 to be alive:

when the daily furniture of our lives
 stirs,
when the improbable arrives.
Pots and pans bang together

in celebration, clang
 past the crowd of garlic, onions, spices,
fly by the ceiling fan.

No one is looking for the door.

In all this excitement
I'm wondering where

I've left my feet, and why


my hands are outside, clapping.
”
― Imtiaz Dharker

“You seemed all brown and soft, just like a linnet,
Your errant hair had shadowed sunbeams in it,
And there shone all April
In your eyes.”
― Robert Leighton

“I am here to live out loud.”
― Emila Zola

“The old women in black at early Mass in winter
are a problem for him. He could tell by their eyes
they have seen Christ. They make the kernel
of his being and the clarity around it
seem meager, as though he needs girders
to hold up his unusable soul. But he chooses
against the Lord. He will not abandon his life.
Not his childhood, not the ninety-two bridges
across the two rivers of his youth. Nor the mills
along the banks where he became a young man
as he worked. The mills are eaten away, and eaten
again by the sun and its rusting. He needs them
even though they are gone, to measure against.
The silver is worn down to the brass underneath
and is the better for it. He will gauge
by the smell of concrete sidewalks after night rain.
He is like an old ferry dragged on to the shore,
a home in its smashed grandeur, with the giant beams
and joists. Like a wooden ocean out of control.
A beached heart. A cauldron of cooling melt.”
― Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven: Poems