Earthworm
Slim inquirer, while the old fathers sleep
you are reworking their soil, you have
a grocery store there down under the earth
and it is well stocked with broken wine bottles,
old cigars, old door knobs and earth,
that great brown flour that you kiss each day.
There are dark stars in the cool evening and
you fondle them like killer birds' beaks.
But what I want to know is why when small boys
dig you up for curiosity and cut you in half
why each half lives and crawls away as if whole.
Have you no beginning and end? Which heart is
the real one? Which eye the seer? Why
is it in the infinite plan that you would
be severed and rise from the dead like a gargoyle
with two heads?
poem by Anne Sexton
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Related quotes
Troth with the Dead
The moon is broken in twain, and half a moon
Before me lies on the still, pale floor of the sky;
The other half of the broken coin of troth
Is buried away in the dark, where the still dead lie.
They buried her half in the grave when they laid her away;
I had pushed it gently in among the thick of her hair
Where it gathered towards the plait, on that very last day;
And like a moon in secret it is shining there.
My half shines in the sky, for a general sign
Of the troth with the dead I pledged myself to keep;
Turning its broken edge to the dark, it shines indeed
Like the sign of a lover who turns to the dark of sleep.
Against my heart the inviolate sleep breaks still
In darkened waves whose breaking echoes o’er
The wondering world of my wakeful day, till I’m lost
In the midst of the places I knew so well before.
poem by David Herbert Lawrence
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Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!
quote by Anne Tyler
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Love in Twilight
There is darkness behind the light -- and the pale light drips
Cold on vague shapes and figures, that, half-seen loom
Like the carven prows of proud, far-triumphing ships --
And the firelight wavers and changes about the room,
As the three logs crackle and burn with a small still sound;
Half-blotting with dark the deeper dark of her hair,
Where she lies, head pillowed on arm, and one hand curved round
To shield the white face and neck from the faint thin glare.
Gently she breathes -- and the long limbs lie at ease,
And the rise and fall of the young, slim, virginal breast
Is as certain-sweet as the march of slow wind through trees,
Or the great soft passage of clouds in a sky at rest.
I kneel, and our arms enlace, and we kiss long, long.
I am drowned in her as in sleep. There is no more pain.
Only the rustle of flames like a broken song
That rings half-heard through the dusty halls of the brain.
One shaking and fragile moment of ecstasy,
While the grey gloom flutters and beats like an owl above.
And I would not move or speak for the sea or the sky
Or the flame-bright wings of the miraculous Dove!
poem by Stephen Vincent Benet
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Half The World
Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson
Half the world hates
What half the world does every day
Half the world waits
While half gets on with it anyway
Half the world lives
Half the world makes
Half the world gives
While the other half takes
Half the world is
Half the world was
Half the world thinks
While the other half does
Half the world talks
With half a mind on what they say
Half the world walks
With half a mind to run away
Half the world lies
Half the world learns
Half the world flies
As half the world turns
Half the world cries
Half the world laughs
Half the world tries
To be the other half
Half of us divided like a torn-up photograph half of us are
Trying to reach the other half
Half the world cares
While half the world is wasting the day
Half the world shares
While half the world is stealing away
song performed by by Rush
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Seeds with wings, between earth and sky
Seeds with wings, between earth and sky
Fluttering, flying;
Seeds of a lily with blood-red core
Breathing of myrrh and of giroflore:
Where winds drop them there must they lie,
Living or dying.
Some to the garden, some to the wall,
Fluttering, falling;
Some to the river, some to earth:
Those that reach the right soil get birth;
None of the rest have lived at all.—
Whose voice is calling:
'Here is soil for winged seeds that near,
Fluttering, fearing,
Where they shall root and burgeon and spread.
Lacking the heart-room the song lies dead:
Half is the song that reaches the ear,
Half is the hearing '?
poem by Augusta Davies Webster
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A Lost Opportunity
One dark, dark night--it was long ago,
The air was heavy and still and warm -
It fell to me and a man I know,
To see two girls to their father's farm.
There was little seeing, that I recall:
We seemed to grope in a cave profound.
They might have come by a painful fall,
Had we not helped them over the ground.
The girls were sisters. Both were fair,
But mine was the fairer (so I say).
The dark soon severed us, pair from pair,
And not long after we lost our way.
We wandered over the country-side,
And we frightened most of the sheep about,
And I do not think that we greatly tried,
Having lost our way, to find it out.
The night being fine, it was not worth while.
We strayed through furrow and corn and grass
We met with many a fence and stile,
And a quickset hedge, which we failed to pass.
At last we came on a road she knew;
She said we were near her father's place.
I heard the steps of the other two,
And my heart stood still for a moment's space.
Then I pleaded, `Give me a good-night kiss.'
I have learned, but I did not know in time,
The fruits that hang on the tree of bliss
Are not for cravens who will not climb.
We met all four by the farmyard gate,
We parted laughing, with half a sigh,
And home we went, at a quicker rate,
A shorter journey, my friend and I.
When we reached the house, it was late enough,
And many impertinent things were said,
Of time and distance, and such dull stuff,
But we said little, and went to bed.
We went to bed, but one at least
Went not to sleep till the black turned grey,
And the sun rose up, and the light increased,
And the birds awoke to a summer day.
And sometimes now, when the nights are mild,
And the moon is away, and no stars shine,
I wander out, and I go half-wild,
To think of the kiss which was not mine.
Let great minds laugh at a grief so small,
Let small minds laugh at a fool so great.
Kind maidens, pity me, one and all.
Shy youths, take warning by this my fate.
poem by Robert Fuller Murray
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Half The World
Half the world lives,
Half the world makes,
Half the world gives
While the other half takes.
Half the world hates,
Half the world runs away,
Half the world's late,
Half the world praises the day.
Half the world is,
Half the world was,
Half the world thinks,
Half the world does.
Half the world lies,
Half the world burns,
Half the world cries
While the other half turns.
Half the world cares,
Half the world weeps,
Half the world shares,
Half the world keeps.
Half the world sings,
Half the world laughs,
Half the world brings,
Half the world tries to be the other half.
End.
Sonata
The grave is empty.
Darkness, half lit by the blurred moon,
Chilled by the sea, the fog waiting,
The enthralled stars, nearly lost,
Searching for another earth,
The dark soil waiting for the seed.
Chaos-night.
The memory of a fireplace,
Warmth with music
Undulating arias
Like small birds falling into darkness.
Cold rain
Driving against my window.
Muffled music and dreams of water,
And another grave.
poem by Steven Federle
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Angels & Sailors
Angels and sailors
Rich girls
Backyard fences
Tents
Dreams watching each other narrowly
Soft luxuriant cars
Girls in garages, stripped
Out to get liquor and clothes
Half gallons of wine and six-packs of beer
Jumped, humped, born to suffer
Made to undress in the wilderness.
I will never treat you mean
Never start no kind of scene
Ill tell you every place and person that Ive been.
Always a playground instructor, never a killer
Always a bridesmaid on the verge of fame or over
He maneuvered two girls into his hotel room
One a friend, the other, the young one, a newer stranger
Vaguely mexican or puerto rican
Poor boys thighs and buttock scarred by a fathers belt
Shes trying to rise
Story of her boyfriend, of teenage stoned death games
Handsome lad, dead in a car
Confusion
No connections
Come ere
I love you
Peace on earth
Will you die for me?
Eat me
This way
The end
Ill always be true
Never go out, sneaking out on you, babe
If youll only show me far arden again.
Im surprised you could get it up
He whips her lightly, sardonically, with belt
Havent I been through enough? she asks
Now dressed and leaving
The spanish girl begins to bleed
She says her period
Its catholic heaven
I have an ancient indian crucifix around my neck
My chest is hard and brown
Lying on stained, wretched sheets with a bleeding virgin
We could plan a murder
Or start a religion.
song performed by by Doors
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I Vote For The Earth!
i vote for the earth....
her mountains tall and strong,
standing from time to time.
her trees the fathers of wisdom,
the image of change and the cycle...
her oceans dark and mysterious,
holding life from beginning to beginning!
her fields of grasses long and weeping
for the fallen and forgotten....
her breasts giving blood,
her arms wrapping around,
all that lives and dies and lives....
i vote for the earth,
and walk naked through her gardens!
poem by Eric Cockrell
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The Horses
Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
'They'll molder away and be like other loam.'
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.
poem by Edwin Muir
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Snow Is On The Rise Boys
Snow is on the rise boys,
Falling down again,
Dark’s the blood of politics,
Sprayed around the Bren.
Snow is on the rise boys,
Backward to the sky,
Young lives steel, but mettle bends,
As buddies start to die.
Snow is on the rise boys,
Trench foot plods his time,
Blown to smithereens dear,
On the Siegfried line.
Snow is on the rise boys,
Bellowing some thrill,
Never dreamt of Tumbledown,
Hopping up a hill.
Snow is on the rise boys,
Cool as whitened green,
Pray tomorrow’s sun alights,
On that frozen scream.
poem by Jerry Pike
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The Trees Are Down
and he cried with a loud voice: Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees - Revelation
They are cutting down the great plane-trees at the end of
the gardens.
For days there has been the grate of the saw, the swish of
the branches as they fall,
The crash of the trunks, the rustle of trodden leaves,
With the 'Whoops' and the 'Whoa', the loud common talk,
the loud common laughs of the men, above it all.
I remember one evening of a long past Spring
Turning in at a gate, getting out of a cart, and finding
a large dead rat in the mud of the drive.
I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a
god-forsaken thing,
But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.
The week's work here is as good as done. There is just
one bough
On the roped bole, in the fine grey rain,
Green and high
And lonely against the sky.
(Down now! -)
And but for that,
If an old dead rat
Did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, I might never
have thought of him again.
It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day;
These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem:
When the men with the 'Whoops' and the 'Whoas' have carted
the whole of the whispering loveliness away
Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them.
It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the
hearts of the planes;
Half my life it has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains,
In the March wind, the May breeze,
In the great gales that came over to them across the roofs from the great seas.
There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;
They must have heard the sparrows flying,
And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying -
But I, all day, I heard an angel crying:
'Hurt not the trees.'
poem by Charlotte Mary Mew
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Gates Of Steel
Twist away the gates of steel
Unlock the secret voice
Give in to ancient noise
Take a chance a brand new dance
Twist away the gates of steel
Twist away
Now twist and shout
The earth it moves too slow
But the earth is all we know
We pay to play the human way
Twist away the gates of steel
A man is real
Not made of steel
But the earth is all we know
We pay to play the human way
Twist away the gates of steel
The beginning was the end
Of everything now
The ape regards his tail
Hes stuck on it
Repeats until he fails
Half a goon and half a god
A mans not made of steel
Twist away
Now twist and shout
The earth it moves too slow
But the earth is all we know
We pay to play the human way
Twist away the gates of steel
A man is real thats how he feels
song performed by by Devo
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Unripe Apples Fall
Unripe apples fall
and lie wasting on the ground,
spots spreading into brown,
circles, decaying, waiting
for sun and time to gently take
seminal seeds into the warm earth.
Small birds fall
down low
from their high, swaying tree,
to where patient
fallen apples
melt and glow.
Two looming hawks rise
waiting for the time to be right,
to turn their dark wings
and with swift silent stroke
give feathered death
to these surprised souls,
casting them like seeds
into the dark soil.
poem by Steven Federle
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She Tells Her Love
She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And put out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.
poem by Robert Graves
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Gates Of Steel (demo Alternate Version)
Twist awy the Gates of Steel
Unlock the secret voice
Give in to ancient noise
take a chance a brand new dance
Twist away the Gates of Steel
Twist away, now twist and shout
The Earth it moves too slow.
But the Earth is all we know
We pay to play the human way..
Twist away the Gates of Steel (a man is real, not made of steel!)
But the Earth is all we know,
we pay to play the human way
twist away the Gates of Steel
The beginning was the end
(of every thing now)
The ape regards his tail
(he's stuck on it)
Repeats until he fails,
half a goon and half a god,
a man's not made of steel
song performed by by Devo
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The Earth Is
(graham russell, michael sherwood)
Theres a man with the smallest of worlds in his hand
And a tear fills his eyes as he tries to hang on
Holding his world together
Theres a girl in the other half of the sky
And shes wondering why her planet should sigh
Dont you want me round forever
The earth is too small to be divided
Sunrise, moonfall, deep in the heart
A part of everyone
And we cant wait anymore, the time has come
And those who need something more will feel the sun
Were sharing one
The earth is too small to be divided
Sunrise, moonfall, deep in the heart
A part of everyone
And we cant wait anymore, the time has come
Youve got your foot in the door
Get through somehow, break through somehow
The earth is too small to be divided
Sunrise, moonfall, deep in the heart
A part of everyone
song performed by by Air Supply
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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No Boy Knows
There are many things that boys may know--
Why this and that are thus and so,--
Who made the world in the dark and lit
The great sun up to lighten it:
Boys know new things every day--
When they study, or when they play,--
When they idle, or sow and reap--
But no boy knows when he goes to sleep.
Boys who listen--or should, at least,--
May know that the round old earth rolls East;--
And know that the ice and the snow and the rain--
Ever repeating their parts again--
Are all just water the sunbeams first
Sip from the earth in their endless thirst,
And pour again till the low streams leap.--
But no boy knows when he goes to sleep.
A boy may know what a long glad while
It has been to him since the dawn's first smile,
When forth he fared in the realm divine
Of brook-laced woodland and spun-sunshine;--
He may know each call of his truant mates,
And the paths they went,--and the pasture-gates
Of the 'cross-lots home through the dusk so deep.--
But no boy knows when he goes to sleep.
O I have followed me, o'er and o'er,
From the flagrant drowse on the parlor-floor,
To the pleading voice of the mother when
I even doubted I heard it then--
To the sense of a kiss, and a moonlit room,
And dewy odors of locust-bloom--
A sweet white cot--and a cricket's cheep.--
But no boy knows when he goes to sleep.
poem by James Whitcomb Riley
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We Just Come Here And Go - Original By Rabindranath Tagore
We just come here and go
And go with the time's flow!
We only see things
And touch while going
And look back crying!
Only new bleak hopes
Take our life forward!
We can see false hopes
If we look backward!
Broken strength carries endless desires
Both bright and dark
So broken output is obtained from
Do or die work!
We sail our broken boat in the sea with goods!
Our broken language can't express all moods!
Half acquaintance in our hearts!
Our half sentence needs more words!
In shame and fear our faith is half
So we offer only half love!
poem by Asif Andalib
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