bridgeXngs Poetry Center

              

I want nothing to do with this world or the next,
Yet I do not turn away.

My own heart is filled with a million wonders
Beholding this sight,
     what madness now keeps me
     from becoming totally mad?

--Rumi

A GARDEN OF RED photos by LLW

              

Silver key of fountain of tears,
     Where the spirit drinks till the brain is wild;
Softest grave of a thousand fears,
     Where their mother, Care, like a drowsy child,
     Is laid asleep in flowers.

--Percy Bysshe Shelley

              

Come to me.
Fertilize me.
Each day give me the zest of fruit.
Give me
the secret tenacity of roots,
and let my song to fall into the earth
and rise up again
each spring.

--Pablo Neruda
(Ode to the Earth's Fertility: lines 95-100)

              

Again, again, even if we know the countryside of love,
and the tiny churchyard with its names mourning,
and the chasm, more and more silent, terrifying, into which the others
dropped: we walk out together anyway
beneath the ancient trees, we lie down again,
again, among the flowers, and face the sky.

--Rainer Maria Rilke

              

RED: THE COLOR OF LIFE