79. Thank Youse III

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Thank you Jorge Luis Borges
"....but in the afternoon that might be gold
he smiles at his curious fate
and feels that peculiar happiness
which comes from loved old things."

Thank you Jon Dressel
"...let's hear it for Goliath, a big
boy who got bad press but
who did his job, absorbed a flukey
shot, and died with a thud."

Thank you Kenneth Koch
"One friend may hide another, you sit at the
foot of a tree
With one and when you get up to leave there is another
Whom you’d have preferred to talk to all along."

Thank you Lawrence Raab
"At the end you looked back at your life and saw
how the pieces fit together — why there was weeping,
and what made it stop. So the past isn't over
until you understand it, which is one of the reasons
ghosts keep appearing. They need you to see
who they were, and sometimes
they won't rest until you forgive them."

Thank you Linda Pastan
"Perhaps we should have stayed
tied like mountain climbers
by the safe cord of the phone,
its dial our own small prayer wheel,
our voices less ghostly across the miles,
less awkward than they are now."

Thank you Mark Van Doren
"Then I would tell as best I could
The secrets of that shining place:
The web of the world, how thick, how thin,
How firm, with all things folded in;
How ancient, and how full of grace."

Thank you Mary Oliver
"You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though the melancholy
was terrible."

Thank you Miguel de Unamumo
"Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit;
sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
that brushes your heel as it turns going by,
the man who wants to live is the man in whom life is
abundant."

Thank you Naomi Shihab Nye
"But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to."

Thank you Norbert Krapf
"The rhythm swelled
like the sea, as I imagined it to sound.
I could see leaves of grass growing
on the graves of soldiers."

Thank you Pablo Neruda
"Love crosses its islands, from grief to grief,
it sets its roots, watered with tears,
and no one––no one––can escape the heart’s progress
as it runs, silent and carnivorous."