Poem of the Day
Yellow Striped Pajamas
By Shamsher Bahadur Singh
walking silently on his paws, he emerges from the semidarkness and disappears into it.
walking silently on his paws, he emerges from the semidarkness and disappears into it.
An emptied wineglass
White windows reflect in
Billowing like sails.
A man once rode away on a yellow crane,
leaving only this empty pavilion.
Once gone, the yellow crane never returns;
the farmer’s wife imagined she could hear them
slipping away like daughters
over the rough stone wall
This is not Dante.
This is a photograph of Dante.
This is a film showing an actor who pretends to be Dante.
It’s an awesome thing, when fate takes you at your word
at eighteen or twenty. If Dreams weren’t greater than Action. . .
Happiness on this earth! One has to be pretty vulgar
I stood by the dark barn and called
and called to her by name,
into the labyrinth of stalls
It is not consumption of meat,
the great food-chain waste, that makes one ugly.
Watching apes pelt enemies with dung
I.
I will tell you. Maybe
You’re leaning in the open
Doorway of some Irish bar,
The lighthouse as an image
of loneliness has its limits.
For as we stand on the shore
They won’t come to you. These nights, you could sit for a year
on the dock behind Arthur’s Gift Shop and General Store
before you’d spot with your flashlight