Thirty spokes converge on a hub
but it’s the emptiness
that makes a wheel work
pots are fashioned from clay
but it’s the hollow
that makes a pot work
windows and doors are carved for a house
but it’s the spaces
that make a house work
existence makes a thing useful
but nonexistence makes it work.
— Lao-tzu from ‘Taoteching: With Selected Commentaries from the Past 2,000 Years’, tr. from Chinese by Red Pine
I hear you call, pine tree, I hear you upon the hill, by
the silent pond
where the lotus flowers bloom, I hear you call, pine tree.
What is it you call, pine tree, when the rain falls,
when the winds
blow, and when the stars appear, what is it you call, pine
tree?
I hear you call, pine tree, but I am blind, and do not
know how to
reach you, pine tree. Who will take me to you, pine tree?
-- 'I Hear You Call, Pine Tree' by Yone Noguchi
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches Tigers
In red weather.
-- 'Disillusionment of Ten O'clock' by Wallace Stevens
The Wind is sewing with needles of rain.
With shining needles of rain
It stitches into the thin
Cloth of earth. In,
In, in in.
Oh, the wind has often sewed with me.
One, two, three.
Spring must have fine things
To wear like other springs.
Of silken green the grass must be
Embroidered. One and two and three.
Then every crocus must be made
So subtly as to seem afraid
Of lifting colour from the ground;
And after crocuses the round
Heads of tulips, and all the fair
Intricate garb that Spring will wear.
The wind must sew with needles of rain,
With shining needles of rain,
Stitching into the thin
Cloth of earth, in,
In, in, in,
For all the springs of futurity.
One, two three.
-- 'Two Sewing' by Hazel Hall #VerseThursday#poetry@poetry
I watched the turquoise pastel
melt between your fingerpads;
how later you flayed
the waxen surface back
to the sunflower patch
of a forethought, your
instrument an upturned
brush, flaked to the grain -
the fusty sugar paper buckled.
You upended everything,
always careless of things:
finest sables splayed
under their own weight,
weeks forgotten - to emerge
gunged, from the silted
floor of a chemical jamjar.
I tidied, like a verger
or prefect, purging
with the stream from the oil-
fingered tap. Stop,
you said, printing
my elbow with a rusty index,
pointing past an ancient
meal's craquelured dish
to the oyster-crust
at the edge of an unscraped palette -
chewy rainbow, blistered jewels.
-- 'A Painting' by Sarah Howe #VerseThursday#TodaysPoem#poetry@poetry