Couple Favorites - Colours & feeling

The translation I like best is this one:



Colours

When your face
appeared over my crumpled life
at first I understood
only the poverty of what I have.

Then its particular light
on woods, on rivers, on the sea,
became my beginning in the coloured world
in which I had not yet had my beginning.

I am so frightened, I am so frightened,
of the unexpected sunrise finishing,
of revelations
and tears and the excitement finishing.

I don't fight it, my love is this fear,
I nourish it who can nourish nothing,
love's slipshod watchman.

Fear hems me in.
I am conscious that these minutes are short
and that the colours in my eyes will vanish
when your face sets.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko


==================


since feeling is first


who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

and death i think is no parenthesis


e.e. cummings

Your Task

“Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find
all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.”

- Rumi

Not Anyone Who Says

Not anyone who says, “I’m going to be
  careful and smart in matters of love,”
who says, “I’m going to choose slowly,”
but only those lovers who didn’t choose at all
but were, as it were, chosen
by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable —
only those know what I’m talking about
in this talking about love.

- Mary Oliver

I Am Not I

Related Poem Content Details

I am not I. 

                   I am this one 

walking beside me whom I do not see, 

whom at times I manage to visit, 

and whom at other times I forget; 

who remains calm and silent while I talk, 

and forgives, gently, when I hate, 

who walks where I am not, 

who will remain standing when I die.

BY JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ

TRANSLATED BY ROBERT BLY

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.


- William Stafford