The New Human Condition

Here is a bit of poetry for a rainy Tuesday morning (blame Hurricane Ida). This is one of my favorites from Linford Detweiler of Over the Rhine. 

Here’s an idea

Let’s grab this life and wring its neck with joy

So that when it comes time to die

When we find we have no breath left

It is because we willingly strangled ourselves

With love

Fell down dead

And mostly happy

Joe Poetry Life, Over the Rhine

There was a girl
in the eleventh grade
named Valerie
who told me
I would do great things
For God.

I’ve been trying to write a poem ever since.

(From the Selected Writings of Linford Detweiler of Over the Rhine)

Joe Poetry Spirituality

My friend Kimi passed away recently. I found this poem she had written on her blog:

call it a chair

i’m going to get a bunch of those beautifully colored leaves.

and some adhesive.

lots of that adhesive.

and slap the leaves onto cardboard.

with adhesive.

and call it a chair.

you can sit in it if you want.

Kimi Young 1986-2009

Joe Kimi Young, Poetry Kimi Young

Below is a poem that a very close friend shared with me. I think it’s beautiful.

A leaf, one of the last, parts from a maple branch:

it is spinning in the transparent air of October, falls

on a heap of others, stops, fades. No one

admired its entrancing struggle with the wind,

followed its flight, no one will distinguish it now

as it lies among the other leaves, no one saw what I did.

I am the only one.

Joe Poetry Bronislaw Maj