Beautiful Songs (3)

Beautiful Songs (2)

Wing


I was a wing in heaven blue 
soared over the ocean 
soared over Spain 
and I was free 
needed nobody 
it was beautiful 
it was beautiful 


I was a pawn 
didn't have a move 
didn't have nowhere 
that I could go 
but I was free 
I needed nobody 
it was beautiful 
it was beautiful 


and if there's one thing 
could do for you 
you'd be a wing 
in heaven blue 


I was a vision 
in another eye 
and they saw nothing 
no future at all 
yet I was free 
I needed nobody 
it was beautiful 
it was beautiful 


and if there's one thing 
could do for you 
you'd be a wing 
in heaven blue 


and if there's one thing 
could do for you 
you'd be a wing 
in heaven blue 


and if there's one thing 
could do for you 
you'd be a wing 
in heaven blue 

Patty Smith

Beautiful Songs (1)

Rapture

With photographs
And magnetic tape
We capture
Pretty animals in cages
Pretty flowers in vases
Enraptured

And doesn't the tree
Write great poetry?
Doing itself so well

Do you blame Monet?
His gardens in Giverny
He captured
And lovely Bashô
His plunking ponds and toads
Enraptured

The fate of Kurt Cobain
Junk coursing through his veins
And young Virginia Woolf
Death came and hung her coat

Love of color, sound and words
Is it a blessing or a curse?
Enraptured

Laura Veirs

Une belle chanson (2)

Je t'offre un verre d'eau glacée
N'y touche pas distraitement
Il est le fruit d'une pensée
Sans ornement


Tous les plaisirs de l'amitié
Combien cette eau me désaltère
Je t'en propose une moitié
La plus légère


Regarde, je suis pur et vide
Comme le verre où tu as bu
Il ne fait pas d'être limpide
Une vertu


Plus d'eau mais la lumière sage
Donne à mon présent tout son prix
Tel un poète aux dieux s'engage
Et reste pris


Je t'offre un verre d'eau glacée
N'y touche pas distraitement
Il est le fruit d'une pensée
Sans ornement

Julos Beaucarne

Summer Twilight

Color

What is pink? a rose is pink
By a fountain's brink.
What is red? a poppy's red
In its barley bed.
What is blue? the sky is blue
Where the clouds float thro'.
What is white? a swan is white
Sailing in the light.
What is yellow? pears are yellow,
Rich and ripe and mellow.
What is green? the grass is green,
With small flowers between.
What is violet? clouds are violet
In the summer twilight.
What is orange? Why, an orange,
Just an orange

Christina Rossetti

Kitsch ecards from the terrasse

Osteospermum fruticosum, African daisy

Wildflowers

Wildflowers

Coleridge carefully wrote down a whole page  

of them, all beginning with the letter b.  

Guidebooks preserve our knowledge

of their hues and shapes, their breeding.

Many poems have made delicate word-chimes—

like wind-chimes not for wind but for the breath of man—

out of their lovely names.

At the edge of the prairie in a cabin

when thunder comes closer to thump the roof hard   

a few of them—in a corner, brittle in a dry jar  

where a woman’s thoughtful hand left them to fade—

seem to blow with the announcing winds outside  

as the rain begins to fall on all their supple kin

of all colors, under a sky of one color, or none.

Reginald Gibbons, “Wildflowers” from Saints (New York: Persea Books, 1986). Copyright © 1986 by Reginald Gibbons. Reprinted with the permission of the author.