Walt Whitman The Meteor of 1860 by Frederic Church From Astronomy Picture of the Day Explanation: Frederic Church (1826-1900), American landscape painter of the Hudson River School, painted what he saw in nature. And on July 20th, 1860, he saw a spectacular string of fireball meteors cross the Catskill evening sky, an extremely rare Earth-grazing […]
Eating Poetry (XVIII) – Wait
Wait by C. K. Williams Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax— not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely, time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail, one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there […]
Eating Poetry (XVII) – Metaphysical Darkness
1. Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your thegns and counsellors. In the midst […]
Eating Poetry (XVI) – Two Poems to Mark a Moment
Yehuda Amichai (Ludwig Pfeuffer) was born in Würzburg, Germany, to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German. Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of 11 to Mandate Palestine in 1935, moving to Jerusalem in 1936. He was a member of the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, […]
Eating Poetry (XV)
The Numbers by Kim Addonizio How many nights have I lain here like this, feverish with plans, with fears, with the last sentence someone spoke, still trying to finish a conversation already over? How many nights were wasted in not sleeping, how many in sleep—I don’t know how many hungers there are, how much radiance […]