#norman maccaig

[apoemaday]

Incident

by Norman MacCaig

I look across the table and think (fiery with love) Ask me, go on, ask me to do something impossible, something freakishly useless, something unimaginable and inimitable Like making a finger break into blossom or walking for half an hour in twenty minutes or remembering tomorrow. I will you to ask it. But all you say is Will you give me a cigarette? And I smile and, returning to the marvelous world of possibility I give you one with a hand that trembles with a human trembling.

#poetry #norman maccaig #incident

[these-summer-nights-in-december]

Toad by Norman MacCaig

#toad #norman maccaig #poetry #poem #poems #poet #poets #writing #toads #verse #lit #literature

[april-is]

April 6, 2023: Toad, Norman MacCaig

Toad Norman MacCaig Stop looking like a purse. How could a purse squeeze under the rickety door and sit, full of satisfaction, in a man's house? You clamber towards me on your four corners - right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot. I love you for being a toad, for crawling like a Japanese wrestler, and for not being frightened. I put you in my purse hand, not shutting it, and set you down outside directly under every star. A jewel in your head? Toad, you've put one in mine, a tiny radiance in a dark place.

--

More like this:  » No, Mark Doty » Spirit of the Bat, Peggy Shumaker   » Dog in Bed, Joyce Sidman

Today in:

2022: Antidotes to Fear of Death, Rebecca Elson 2021: Love Poem: Centaur, Donika Kelly 2020: Walking Home, Marie Howe 2019: not an elegy for Mike Brown, Danez Smith 2018: Trillium, Deborah Digges 2017: Good People, W.S. Merwin 2016: Traveling with Guitar, Debra Marquart 2015: Honey, James Wright 2014: For the Dead, Adrienne Rich 2013: Miracle Ice Cream, Adrienne Rich 2012: The Soul Bone, Susan Wood 2011: Pluto, Maggie Dietz 2010: Slant, Stephen Dunn 2009: Distressed Haiku, Donald Hall 2008: Question, May Swenson 2007: Song, Adrienne Rich 2006: Scheherazade, Richard Siken 2005: What the Living Do, Marie Howe

#animals #norman maccaig #reptiles and amphibians

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

- iPhone photo by Dimpy Bhalotia Flying boys, Varanasi, India, 2020

With this photo, taken with an IPhone 10, she received the grand prize in the 2020 IPhone Photography Awards. The boys are jumping off a man-made cliff into the Ganges River to beat the heat in the Indian summers.

[Jim Fagiolo]

* * * *

Space opens and from the heart of the matter sheds a descending grace that makes for a moment, that naked thing, Being, a thing to understand. 

-Norman MacCaig

[quidnunc]

#Jim Fagiolo #Dimpy Bhalotia #flying boys #quotes #Norman MacCaig #quidnunc

[drathanasius]

#norman maccaig #poetry #toadery #zenexton antepestilentiale #toadstone

[victusinveritas]

Uncle Roderick

Norman MacCaig

Published in The Many Days: Selected Poems of Norman MacCaig (Birlinn, 2013)

#norman maccaig #poetry #scottish poets

[timebythetail]

Summer Farm Norman MacCaig Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass And hang zigzag on hedges. Green as glass The water in the horse-trough shines. Nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines. A hen stares at nothing with one eye, Then picks it up. Out of an empty sky A swallow falls and, flickering through The barn, dives up again into the dizzy blue. I lie, not thinking, in the cool, soft grass, Afraid of where a thought might take me – as This grasshopper with plated face Unfolds his legs and finds himself in space. Self under self, a pile of selves I stand Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand Lift the farm like a lid and see Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.

#poetry #maccaig #norman maccaig

[embraphotos]

Edinburgh Park, EH12

#Edinburgh Park #South Gyle #Edinburgh #Scotland #United Kingdom #Street Photography #Photographers on Tumblr #2021 #Norman MacCaig

[poem-today]

A poem by Norman MacCaig

Between mountain and sea

Honey and salt – land smell and sea smell, as in the long ago, as in forever.

The days pick me up and carry me off, half-child, half-prisoner,

on their journey that I’ll share for a while.

They wound and they bless me with strange gifts:

the salt of absence, the honey of memory.

Norman MacCaig (1910-1996)

#norman maccaig #scottish poet #mountain and sea

[harrison-abbott]

#norman maccaig

[necklacings]

#norman maccaig #poetry

[alphareleasemedia]

The Root of It -- Norman MacCaig

On the rug by the fire a stack of vocabulary rose up, confidently piling adjectives and nouns and tiny muscular verbs, storey by storey, till they reached almost to the ceiling. The word at the bottom was love.

I rushed from the room. I did not believe it. Feverishly I turned over the pages of the dictionary to find the blank spaces they had left behind them--and there they were, terrible as eyesockets.

What am I to do? What am I to do? For I know that tall stack would collapse, every word would fly back and fill those terrible spaces, if I could snatch that word from the bottom of the pile--if I could learn again the meaning of love.

#poetry #poetry reading #poems and such #norman maccaig #the root of it

[seaanimalonland]

Recipe | Norman MacCaig

You have to be stubborn. You have to turn away from meditation, from ideologies, from the tombstone face of the Royal Bank of Scotland.

You have to keep stubbornly saying This is bread, though it’s in a sunset, this is a sunset with bread in it. This is a woman, she doesn’t live In a book or an imagination. Hello, water, you must say, Hello Good water.

You have to touch wood, but not for luck. You have to listen to that matter of pitches and crescendos without thinking Beethoven is speaking only for you And you must learn there are words with no meaning, words like consolation words like goodbye.

via @JohnMcCullough

#poetry #Norman MacCaig

[gaytobymeres]

Woo I wrote another endeavour fic!

#hmm okay bye #yes I did insert my love of norman maccaig in here I’ve been enjoying his work again recently #he cheers me up #endeavour #itv endeavour #morse #max debryn

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

In the meadows and clouds on Tsoodził (Mount Taylor) in the Sierra San Mateo, Cibola Co, NM. Photo: Seth Betterly (Sep 30, 2022) :: [Scott Horton]

* * * *

Space opens and from the heart of the matter sheds a descending grace that makes for a moment, that naked thing, Being, a thing to understand. -Norman MacCaig

#Sierra San Mateo #New Mexico #Seth Betterly #Scott Horton #Tsoodzil #Mount Taylor #mountains #poem #poetry #Norman MacCaig

[creekfiend]

Toad, Norman MacCaig

Published in The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Birlinn, 2011)

#todes #pls feel free to transcribe i dont have the energies #this is my new favorite poem.