#grace paley

[voxapollo]

grace paley

[sivavakkiyar]

Grace Paley

[shy-girl04]

September

Then the flowers became very wild

because it was early September

and they had nothing to lose

they tossed their colors every

which way over the garden wall

splattering the lawn shoving their

wild orange red rain-disheveled faces

into my window without shame

Grace Paley

[thoughtportal]

[dinonfissatoaffetto]

Volevo scrivere una poesia

invece ho fatto una torta ci ho messo

più o meno lo stesso tempo

ovvio la torta era una stesura

definitiva una poesia avrebbe richiesto

un pochino di più giorni e settimane e

parecchia carta straccia

la torta aveva già un suo

pubblico vociante e capriolante tra

camioncini e un’autobotte dei pompieri sul

pavimento della cucina

questa torta piacerà a tutti

ci saranno dentro mele e mirtilli

e albicocche secche molti amici

diranno e perché diavolo

ne hai fatta una sola

questo con le poesie non capita

- Grace Paley

[davidhudson]

Grace Paley, December 11, 1922 – August 22, 2007.

[wellconstructedsentences]

I want, for instance, to be a different person.

Wants by Grace Paley

[womanoncesaid]

 Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world. -Grace Paley

[squeakowl]

Art by Katie Daisy (source)

[petitjeanofficial]

The only thing you should have to do is find work you love to do.

- Grace Paley

[yoestuveaquiunavezfrases21]

1195- Hace falta salir fuerte de la madurez y llegar a la vejez con los músculos de la imaginación en buena forma, y con los músculos necesarios para nadar contra las mareas de la desinformación también muy fuertes. Igual que los de la espalda y las abdominales, tan fáciles de ejercitar por las mañanas”.

(Grace Paley -"La importancia de no entenderlo todo".)

[heenbeans]

("Anti-Love Poem" -- Grace Paley)

[biblioklept]

"Here" -- Grace Paley

[power-chords]

Eighty years, said her father, glad to be useful. Once he had explained electrical storms before you could find the Book of Knowledge. Now in the cave of old age, he continued to amass wonderful information. But he was sick with oldness. His arteries had a hopeless future. And conversation about all that obsolescent tubing often displaced very interesting subjects.

One day he said, Alexandra! Don’t show me the sunset again. I’m not interested anymore. You know that. She had just pointed to a simple sunset happen­ing outside his hospital window. It was a red ball—all alone, without its evening streaking clouds—a red ball falling hopelessly west, just missing the Hudson River, Jersey City. Chicago, the Great Plains, the Golden Gate—falling, falling.

Then in Russian he sighed some Pushkin. Not for me, the spring. Nye dyla menya . . . He slept. She read the large-print edition of The Guns of August. A half hour later, he opened his eyes and told her how, in that morning’s Times, the Phoenicians had sailed to Brazil in about 500 B.C. A remarkable people. The Vikings too were remarkable. He spoke well of the Chinese, the Jews, the Greeks, the Indians—all the old commercial people. Actually he had never knocked an entire nation. International generosity had been started in him during the late nineteenth century by his young mother and father, candle-holders inside the dark tyranny of the czars. It was childhood training. Thoughtfully, he passed it on.

In the hospital bed next to him a sufferer named John feared the imminent rise of the blacks of South Africa, the desperate blacks of Chicago, the yellow Chinese, and the Ottoman Turks. He had more reason than Alexandra’s father to dread the future be­cause his heart was strong. He would probably live to see it all. He believed the Turks when they came would bring to NYC diseases like cholera, virulent scarlet fever, and particularly leprosy.

Leprosy! For gods sakes! said Alexandra. John! Upset yourself with reality for once! She read aloud from the Times about the bombed, burned lepers’ colonies in North Vietnam. Her father said, Please, Alexandra, today, no propaganda. Why do you constantly pick on the United States? He remembered the first time he’d seen the American Flag on wild Ellis Island. Under its protection and working like a horse, he’d read Dickens, gone to medical school, and shot like a surface-to-air missile right into the middle class.

Then he said, But they shouldn’t put a flag in the middle of the chocolate pudding. It’s ridiculous.

It's Memorial Day, said the nurse’s aide, removing his tray.

Grace Paley, "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute," 1974

[6peaches]

Grace Paley - Anti-Love Poem

Sometimes you don’t want to love the person you love you turn your face away from that face whose eyes lips might make you give up anger forget insult      steal sadness of not wanting to love     turn away then turn away     at breakfast in the evening     don’t lift your eyes from the paper to see that face in all its seriousness     a sweetness of concentration     he holds his book in his hand     the hard-knuckled winter wood- scarred fingers     turn away     that’s all you can do     old as you are to save yourself     from love

- Anti-Love Poem by Grace Paley

[avithenaftali]

a brief anecdote about Grace Paley, from Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch