Another Angry Reader

“The Pond"

August of another summer, and once again
I am drinking the sun
and the lilies again are spread across the water.
I know now what they want is to touch each other.
I have not been here for many years
during which time I kept living my life.
Like the heron, who can only croak, who wishes he
could sing,
I wish I could sing.
A little thanks from every throat would be appropriate.
This is how it has been, and this is how it is:
All my life I have been able to feel happiness,
except whatever was not happiness,
which I also remember.
Each of us wears a shadow.
But just now it is summer again
and I am watching the lilies bow to each other,
then slide on the wind and the tug of desire,
close, close to one another,
Soon now, I'll turn and start for home.
And who knows, maybe I'll be singing.”
― Mary Oliver, Felicity

“When I am happy it is so rare. I need to dwell on it, to contemplate it. What a hunger, a craving for beautiful things.”
― Anaïs Nin, Nearer the Moon: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1937-1939

“Monologue At 3 AM"

Better that every fiber crack
and fury make head,
blood drenching vivid
couch, carpet, floor
and the snake-figured almanac
vouching you are
a million green counties from here,

than to sit mute, twitching so
under prickling stars,
with stare, with curse
blackening the time
goodbyes were said, trains let go,
and I, great magnanimous fool, thus wrenched from
my one kingdom.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything--as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek