4 Poems: Kerouac, Bly, Orr, and Issa

Here are 4 poems, two by poets chosen from their books suggested for the Near Perfect Books of Poetry page. First, Jack Kerouac, from Book of Haikus:



Missing a kick
at the icebox door
It closed anyway

Jack Kerouac

Next, Robert Bly, from his first collection, Silence in the Snowy Fields:



"Taking The Hands"

Taking the hands of someone you love,
You see they are delicate cages . . .
Tiny birds are singing
In the secluded prairies
And the deep valleys of the hand.

Robert Bly

And here is Issa, who isn't on the list yet, but should be, in a Robert Hass translation:



All the time I Pray to Buddha

All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes.

Issa, translated by Robert Hass

Finally, poem-wise, a darkish little poem by Gregory Orr from the delightful collection Pocket Poems, edited by Paul Janeczko:



The Sweater

I will lose you. It is written
into this poem the way
the fisherman's wife knits
his death into the sweater.

Gregory Orr

And, finally, otherwise, another six titles have been added to the Near Perfect Books list: check it out.



best,
Don



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Also, it was pointed out to me that I made a mistake listing the email address on the sidebars of both the blog and the homepage. The email, spelled out to avoid spam bots, is:

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Remove the spaces, replace at with@ and dot with . and you're good to go.