The poem fragments in the back of your mind
Emily Lloyd at Poesy Galore has tagged me with an irresistible meme:
"What are ten lines from poems that stick in your head when you are
walking around your day? Or, if you stop a minute and think of some
lines of poetry, what comes up? It’s fine if you distort the line as
you remember it, if you misremember it."
Here are mine. I suspect that I'd probably give a different set of answers tomorrow or next week; some are lines that come to me often, and others presented themselves when I started writing them all down.
- Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. [This one pops into my head all the time when I'm bored, reminding me that I probably have no Inner Resources.]
- And now that the end is near / The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
- …Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.
- Green is night, green kindled and appareled.
- Love's the boy stood on the burning deck / trying to recite "The boy stood on / the burning deck."
- Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind.
- For Juliana comes, and she / What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
- Small comfort the candle / Of moon on the maple; / The steeple of poplar, / The arch of the birch. [I don't know who wrote this poem; I read it in a children's poetry anthology at least twenty years ago, and Google hasn't yet been able to tell me anything about it.]
- And is the white sail free on its walled infinity? [Another one I read decades ago, on a placard in a bus in Santa Monica. I didn't think to write down the author's name, and the rest of it fell out of my head a long time ago. It's probably not nearly as good a poem as I thought at the time, but I remember it because it's something of a mystery.]
- Song, tuneful song, built a palace in the wild.
- [Bonus, because it was in my head all morning:] Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet, / Over the splendor and speed of thy feet.
I tag anyone who wants to be tagged. Have at it!
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