Poetry Friday: Galway Kinnell

Sometimes, no matter who you are, what your life circumstance is, or how many years you've trudged the planet, you just need a good cry.

Ray Bradbury knew it:

"And besides, I like to cry. After I cry hard it's like it's morning again and I'm starting the day over."  

"I heard everything now."  

"You just won't admit you like crying, too. You cry just so long and everything's fine. And there's your happy ending. And you're ready to go back out and walk around with folks again...." 

"That don't sound like no happy ending to me."  

"A good night's sleep, or a ten-minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine, Doug."  

                                          ~ Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury 

Galway Kinnell knew it, too:


Crying
by Galway Kinnell
(from Three Books)

Crying only a little bit
is no use. You must cry
until your pillow is soaked!
Then you can get up and laugh.
Then you can jump in the shower
and splash-splash-splash!
Then you can throw open your window
and, "Ha ha! ha ha!"
And if people say, "Hey
what's going on up there?"
"Ha ha!" sing back, "Happiness
was hiding in the last tear!
I wept it! Ha ha!"

Wishing you a good cry, the feeling that it's morning again, and happiness that's been hidden.

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The Poetry Friday round-up is being hosted by 

Heidi Mordhorst at My Juicy Little Universe. 

Poetry Friday: For Once, Then, Something

I love the questing and questioning nature of this one by Robert Frost.

For Once, Then, Something
Robert Frost

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

("For Once, Then, Something" is in the public domain.)

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Molly is exploring the monotetra, a new form created by Michael Walker. I love her results! 

Go check out her work — and all the other Poetry Friday contributions — at Nix the comfort zone. 

Poetry Friday: Spotted in the backyard

Our ever-charming Poetry Friday host, Laura Purdie Salas, is thinking and talking about anxiety today. I'm right there with you, Laura. With a teacher-husband and a teacher-daughter returning to work next week and a governor who not only refuses to mandate masks but actually threatens legal action against leaders who want to protect the public with said mandated mask-wearing (I'm stupefied by this), well, I'm ... distracting myself.

So.

Spotted in the backyard yesterday, thanks to Anne-with-an-e (who, in her 20s, still stops what she's doing to notice an astonishing little bit of beauty, and then share it with others):

Munching monarch,

overlord of the milkweed,

unstoppable force.

~ Karen Edmisten

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The round-up is at Laura Purdie Salas: Small Reads for Brighter Days.