Showing posts with label A Sleepless Night. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A Sleepless Night. Show all posts

Friday, March 16, 2007

A Sleepless Night by Philip Levine

April, and the last of the plum blossoms
scatters on the black grass
before dawn. The sycamore, the lime,
the struck pine inhale
the first pale hints of sky.
An iron day,
I think, yet it will come
dazzling, the light
rise from the belly of leaves and pour
burning from the cups
of poppies.
The mockingbird squawks
from his perch, fidgets,
and settles back. The snail, awake
for good, trembles from his shell
and sets sail for China. My hand dances
in the memory of a million vanished stars.

A man has every place to lay his head.


Wheatfield by Claude Monet

Return of the Prodigal Son by Rembrandt

The Fall of Icarus by Breugel

Still Life with Coffee Pot by Pissarro

The Birth of Venus by Botticelli

St. Paul's Basilica by Giovanni Paolo Pannini

Cypress Trees with Moon by Vincent Van Gogh

The Empire of Light by Rene Magritte

The Reader by Gerard

Jack-in-Pulpit Abstraction by Georgia O'Keeffe