The Tuesday Platform

[To Find A Kiss Of Yours]

by Federico García Lorca - 1898-1936

To find a kiss of yours
what would I give
A kiss that strayed from your lips
dead to love

My lips taste
the dirt of shadows     

To gaze at your dark eyes
what would I give

Dawns of rainbow garnet
fanning open before God— 

The stars blinded them
one morning in May

And to kiss your pure thighs
what would I give
Raw rose crystal
sediment of the sun

(Translated by Sarah Arvio)

[Por encontrar un beso tuyo] Spanish Version

Por encontrar un beso tuyo,
¿qué daría yo?
¡Un beso errante de tu boca
muerta para el amor!

(Tierra de sombra
come mi boca.)

Por contemplar tus ojos negros,
¿qué daría yo?
¡Auroras  de carbunclos irisados
abiertas frente a Dios!

(Las estrellas los cegaron
una mañana de mayo.)

Y por besar tus muslos castos,
¿qué daría yo?
(Cristal de rosa primitiva,
sedimento de sol.)

Born on June 5, 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada province, Spain, Federico Garcia Lorca was the most influential and popular poet of Spanish literature in the 20th century. He possessed quite a unique style of writing in which he liked to make use of various symbols in order to convey the meaning behind his work. 

Throughout his writing journey he used vast amount of metaphors as powerful literary tools. Whereas in terms of themes, Lorca’s work consisted of folklore and fables combined with a modernist sensibility of despair and depth of soul or heart.

I am also including one of my favorite songs by Sixpence None The Richer:

Welcome to the Tuesday Platform, the weekly open stage for sharing poems in the Imaginary Garden. Please link up a poem, old or new, and spend some time this week visiting the offerings of our fellow writers.

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Such Were Syllables That Possessed May ~

Born on August 8, 1884 in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. her first published poem appeared in the St. Louis, Missouri, weekly Reedy’s Mirror in May 1907 and later her first volume of verse, Sonnets to Duse, and Other Poems during the same year. Sara Trevor Teasdale's poems were noted for their classical simplicity and quiet intensity. She wrote technically excellent, pure, openhearted lyrics usually in such conventional verse forms as quatrains or sonnets. Her growth as a poet is nonetheless evident in Flame and Shadow (1920), Dark of the Moon (1926), and Stars To-night (1930).

For today's challenge, I want you to draw inspiration from the poem above and write one of your own as blossoms arrive like cream cheese frosting on trees in delectable yellows and pinks.

Choose your own form or write in free verse, if preferred. I look forward to reading what you guys come up with. Please do visit others and remember to comment on their poems. Have fun!🍰

The Tuesday Platform

Geoffrey G. O’Brien (May 10, 1969) is an American poet. Educated at Harvard University and University of Iowa, he has taught at Brooklyn College, The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and has been a Distinguished Poet in Residence at St. Mary's College of California. I recently came across a poem written by him was deeply touched by the emotion in his writing:

May

This is a love poem. It has no business. It happens

in that anyway world where the bodies are by now
decided to get all the way up, accompanied

by changes in temperature and light welcome and
unwelcome both, lie down, get up, go prone again,

get nowhere in time. I won’t reduce to a single
preposition a relation to the one person about it 

like grass. Who has a pronoun, a name, three or
four even, which globe, without containing,
her experience, of which I chase awareness till  

her letters are with one exception all over this
deepening sheet, name- blind blue of a cloudless
day. Unconcerned with property disputes,
the poem gradually permits itself to figure grass,
the blue of the sky because we see those first kinds

of immense quiet as sleepers while walking the dog
in the hills and store them for future use as simile
and metaphor, each ancient and suspiciously free of
present disaster. (Read full poem here)

As a poet, O’Brien is meditative, given to neither satire nor parody and is anything but un-selfconsciously literal, the highs and lows keep the reader engrossed, but most of the poem's appeal is found in quiet passages, in the rich detail and the savouring of moments.

Welcome to the Tuesday Platform, the weekly open stage for sharing poems in the Imaginary Garden. Please link up a poem, old or new, and spend some time this week visiting the offerings of our fellow writers.

SHARE * READ * COMMENT * ENJOy