42 Comments
User's avatar
Kaiti @ Favourie's avatar

The heart is a foreign country ❤️

Expand full comment
A. Aranda's avatar

I loved that line as well

Expand full comment
Corie Feiner's avatar

I have been studying the language of the heart... and it seems to live in the body. Our body speaks and we try to find the words for it.

Expand full comment
Jim Smith's avatar

The heart is the home country, all else is the foreign country

Expand full comment
Writer Pilgrim by So Elite's avatar

Beautifully expressed

Expand full comment
Jamie Millard's avatar

Gilbert is so good. It waits. Deep in our hearts. Our poetry will arise in a place that is not the mind. It patiently and mysteriously waits there and slowly it becomes our lives.

Expand full comment
Corie Feiner's avatar

The former poetry editor of the NYer once told me that she would not hear from

Gilbert for years and then he would send her a poem that would just floor her. Seems somehow to make sense.

Expand full comment
Jim Smith's avatar

"or not"

Expand full comment
Anshin B Kelly T.M. M.W.'s avatar

It will not, a while yet. "Miles to go before we sleep." The Soul is Timeless, and can endure it all.

Expand full comment
Jim Smith's avatar

I am 77 years old and suffering the same malady that my dad suffered:, friends are dying from natural causes. As I await my turn, I find myself singing to myself songs Ditties and TV commercials. We got our TV in 1947, and ever since, I have been a passive follower of commercials for everything frim healthy cigarettes to Oscar Meyer songs aand I find myself wondering that when I finish my repertoire I will pass. -Amen-

Expand full comment
Corie Feiner's avatar

In between moments are where the poems live.

Expand full comment
Jim Smith's avatar

Nina Simone wrote a quote years ago that "when listening to music, the melody is in the spacing between the notes not the notes themselves

Expand full comment
Jim Smith's avatar

The combination is a piece of the riddle that is as yet unspoken

Expand full comment
Deanna Lewis's avatar

Hauntingly beautiful.

Expand full comment
Richbee's avatar

Yes. The heart speaks a language we translate. The rhythm is heard between beats while we wait for the music to end.

Expand full comment
Deb Hillyer's avatar

Very appropriate for me, right now!

Expand full comment
Corie Feiner's avatar

It is....

Expand full comment
Jim Smith's avatar

The link betwen 'home ' and salvation. there's no loss as long as we have hope

Expand full comment
Writer Pilgrim by So Elite's avatar

Such beauty in the art of expressing the in between and repetition without being tiresome.

Expand full comment
David Picariello's avatar

A Winter's Tale holds many pathways. Dave P

Expand full comment
David Picariello's avatar

The heart is waiting for truth such as this egalitarian sentiment.Dave P

Expand full comment
Lamoreaux's avatar

Really excellent selection.

Expand full comment
mo mo's avatar

something IS stirring

Expand full comment
Eleanor Mac Gregor's avatar

I read this poem several times to get its meaning. It called to mind Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot". This two-act tragedy-comedy play from the fifties appears to have a similar message, yet I am not sure. The play is about pointlessness and repetitiveness in modern life (theatre of the absurd). The two men continue to wait day after day for Godot (change for the better) but he doesn't show up.

Expand full comment
Michael Cord's avatar

9 years since a threatening diagnosis??...other thoughts?

Expand full comment
Rolando Andrade's avatar

Heart warming words. Loved it

Expand full comment
Peter Borkowicz's avatar

A tribute/inspiration to Ferlinghetti's "I Am Waiting"?? Or am I just projecting?

Expand full comment