☀ Today's Poem: "Fade Out" Dean Young

May 21, 2019

The flashlight my sister swept
across the heavens got no response
either. When my brother leaves his lab,
he’s still limping and our governor’s demanding
funerals for aborted fetuses and where’s
a fetus gonna get the scratch for that?
So yes, there are dark shapes in doorways.
Can’t be helped. Today, I found a chunk
of amethyst with a face inside you could tell
was willing to wait another million years
for its scream to come out so let that
be a lesson. Ditto the same cuckoo
that followed Tomaz out of China
tries to follow me but gets slapped back
in security and I don’t
just don’t. Maybe Jay’s right that it all
comes down to one untranslatable
fragment of Parmenides. Like when
a dead child is covered with petals
or a goat receives a garland of bells.
It’s a thin red thread that holds
the soul to the earth. Visibility
is a disguise.

from the journal THE THREEPENNY REVIEW

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Forward

OMAR KHAYYAM: HOW THE POET AND ASTRONOMER CHANGED THE WAY PEOPLE MEASURE TIME

"[In] the Persian city of Isfahan, Khayyam worked in an observatory where he eventually succeeded in precisely measuring the length of the year, leading to the development of the new Jalali calendar.... based on the sun's movement, as well as quadrennial and quinquennial leap years.... In the West, however, it is Khayyam’s work as a poet and his collection of quatrains that is recognised and celebrated...translated by Edward FitzGerald in the 1800’s and published in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám."

via THE INDEPENDENT

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WHAT SPARKS POETRY:
ILYA KAMINSKY ON ALEKSANDR BLOK’S
[NIGHT, A STREET, A LAMP, A CHEMIST’S SHOP]

"Aleksandr Blok’s little poem wasn’t the first one I fell in love with, but it was the first poem I read that showed me that poetry isn’t there merely to relay information. The poem is not about the event. It is the event. This poem’s repetitions and syntax enact what it says."

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