#modern poetry

[sweatermuppet]

Blessed Be by Sol Rios, published in Ghost of my Ghosts

[luciferslilith7]

"They both failed at the end-She couldn't hate him and he couldn't love her" ~Anonymous

[sorata-ayumi]

El sol y sus flores, Rupi Kaur

[mkhancock]

“A Life on Paper”

By M.K. Hancock

We start so small,

Charming zygotes, ganglions, cells

Sparks of electrical communication

Joining together and making new

Formations that bind us together

We live if we’re lucky

We grow tall or short, until we stop

And then we begin to shrink

The space between most

Currently living skeleton’s discs

Disintegrates little by little

If we don’t care for our bodies

They shrink rapidly, with our backs and necks

Curled downward to our core

As though ready to leave at a moment’s notice

Snuffing out the light inside so

The soul can join again with

The electric Earth,

The body to the soil,

Warm in the sun

Soon to grow

New life

[cryinginmelodrama]

Grief is a cruel promise. Everyone says it will get better, as if that’s some consolation, as if that’s not the greatest tragedy of all. Because one day, I’ll wake up, and the edges of this pain will be dulled. The world will turn a little softer, the weight on my chest a little lighter. And that feels like betrayal. It feels dishonorable to live in a world where the hurt doesn’t claw at my insides with the same ferocity. Because I’ll still be here, and they won’t, and it feels obscene to move forward when they cannot. I don’t want it to get better. I want this grief to linger, to carve itself into my bones, to nestle deep inside my chest, close to the heart that still aches for them. This pain is the last gift they left me; it’s the proof that they mattered. That they shook my world and left it unsteady, that they changed the shape of my days and nights. It’s the scar their love left behind, the tender reminder that I was once touched by a life that has slipped away. I’m in no hurry to be better. I want this ache to echo for as long as it can, like a name spoken into the wind, like a memory that refuses to fade. Because in this grief, I find traces of them still—teaching me in silence, guiding me through the darkness they left behind. It is a broken kind of wisdom, one that reminds me that to love is to lose and still reach out with trembling hands.

[bones-ivy-breath]

Inward by Yung Pueblo

[nwarrior777]

Remember i said i writing a poem

[mylittlepoemworld]

when did I stop looking up at the sky and wondering about the endless space? when to beauty did I turn a blind eye and youth's sparkle disappeared from my face?

was it somewhere down this sinuous road that I lost track of who I was before? was it when I began to bear this load that I noticed I was enough no more?

I want again to lay under the sun like a kid, play and lose track of the time I want to run through green hills and have fun and don't give a damn if my verses rhyme

I want to change, to be worthy of you I want you to know the child I once knew

[e-mptyflowerfields]

I’d crawl into his ribcage if he let me, like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, I’d curl up in him like he was a dead horse and I was desperate for warmth

[pomegranateandcoffee]

Forough Farrokhzad poetry for today

[hacked-wtsdz]

Modern poetry often doesn’t seem like poetry to me. If you take away the structure and write it down into a normal one-paragraph text, it takes nothing away from the poem. The author could have said it in prose better than in poetry, even. And I know that poetry is a very subjective art, with its edges blurred, with many styles and ways to express oneself. You have haikus and different kinds of rhyming poetry and blank verse. But I’ve seen many poems, and blank verse isn’t the same as putting prose in poetry format.

To me, poetry is allegory. Poetry is symbolism. Poetry is metaphor. Poetry is the ‘wine-dark sea’. You read Whitman or Margaret Atwood or Richard Siken or Mary Oliver or Anna Akhmatova, and you know that if the structure is taken away, you are left with something nearly nonsensical. You think that you’re reading, when in reality you’re looking at a painting and listening to a symphony and watching geese fly to the south.

You read Nikita Gill and think ‘yes, I agree. I agree but I don’t feel anything. You could’ve written for journals, and your talent wouldn’t have gone to waste’.

Not to upset any Nikita Gill fans but i am tired of calling something that only looks like poetry to me poetry.

[sweatermuppet]

worm joy by silas denver melvin, published by bullshit lit

[theaskew]

You Have the Lovers, a poem by Leonard Cohen, from Leonard Cohen: Selected Poems, 1956-68 [Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969]

[mkhancock]

An Artist’s Strategy

By M.K. Hancock

Fear is a simulator

A painful illusion

It doesn’t tell the truth

Only possible outcomes

Aim for where you want to go

Don’t brace for pain

Embrace your journey

This life

An adventure

When you dive in

Choose the deep

Explore and search

Free, open, and focused

Grace is a given

[cryinginmelodrama]

My mother loves like she has time enough to wait. Like every touch, every drop of water is a promise, and she’s never been one to break those. I watch her kneel over a dying plant, whispering life back into leaves that have forgotten what green feels like. Two and a half years, she spends with her hands in the soil, her fingers damp and stubborn. I watch her love it to life, pouring herself into something that may never flourish, that takes its time unfolding, that tests her patience. Yet, she stays. It grows. She was right. And I see her do the same with us, my siblings and me, her marriage, the quiet stitching of her care that never comes undone, no matter how tired she gets. She’s there, persistent, her love a soft hope that time cannot hurry or erode. It settles in the cracks and stays, not because it is easy, but because she chooses it, chooses us, over and over again. I stand at the far end of her kind of love, arms crossed, ready to retreat when it is not returned to me in full. I crave immediacy, a reflection that gives back in equal measure or not at all. If I give, I want the return to land as swiftly as a thrown stone. But her love, her love bends towards things and waits for them to bend back. I wonder if mine is weaker, or if it is just different. I wonder if loving so conditionally makes me lose something that she gains with every slow, steady act of devotion. So, I keep watching, learning what it means to love without keeping score, to stretch one’s heart across time and not demand anything back, just let it grow, however slowly. And I wonder if I will ever learn to love like that. If there is wisdom in it, or just a quiet kind of bravery.

[thecloudyheart]

An Antidote to Death

All the tears that fell on too dry soil are today the beginning of a better universe.

Memories, torn from the chest of this wind, resemble a shadow that has lost its owner.

I succumb to thoughts that can lead you beyond borders of tomorrow, straight into the heart of the storm.

Lost in my own heart, I want to thank you for the future I did not believe in.

Wild illusions torment reality, blurred imaginations are associated with longing. I am withering, entangled in the arms of fear - too much love can also be harmful.

Inseparable from the sky, disinherited by the earth, I try to create an antidote to death.