How many poems celebrate the poet’s dream, or dreams? This one doesn’t.
It’s fair to say that American poet William Carlos Williams had a curmudgeonly streak. In this poem from his 1921 collection Sour Grapes he holds the line for the style that early Modernists had championed to break free from the poetic fancies that preceded them. By the 1920s the Modernists were moving on to new things, and it’s safe to say that many of them had developed new fancies. Indeed, in three-years-time the first Surrealist Manifesto would be published. The Surrealists went further than our usual sentiments about the value of an individual’s personal dream presented in the context of following one’s dream with the idea that it would integrate into our plans for work or a place in society. The Surrealists didn’t want to domesticate one’s dreams to society, they wanted to bring the full wildness…
Delicate frigid flakes layer and repeat As tracks trace a path of adventurous feet Soon to be melted by warming rays… Fading away with winter’s dreary days
“Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever….”
“If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Aren’t we all one-day butterflies, not aware of time. Searching for partners or honey until Death kisses us. Then in his arms, tenderly rocked, waiting for a new chance to fly away again and join the dance of the one-day butterfly
Mockingbird In Sabino Canyon — Image by kenne
