Poetry for the weekend

“If one wishes to be a lover, he must start by saying ‘YES’ to love. A
lover says yes to life, yes to joy, yes to knowledge, yes to people,
yes to differences. He realizes that all things and people have
something to offer him, that all things are in all things.”

Leo Buscaglia

GRAMMAR

Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,

smiles like a big cat and says

that she’s a conjugated verb.

She’s been doing the direct object

with a second person pronoun named Phil,

and when she walks into the room,

everybody turns:

~

some kind of light is coming from her head.

Even the geraniums look curious,

and the bees, if they were here, would buzz

suspiciously around her hair, looking

for the door in her corona.

We’re all attracted to the perfume

of fermenting joy,

~

we’ve all tried to start a fire,

and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.

In the meantime, she is the one today among us

most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,

and when we see it, what we do is natural:

we take our burned hands

out of our pockets,

and clap.

~

by Tony Hoagland