Robert Bly Poems

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• Best Robert Bly Poems
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Let's count the bodies over again.

If we could only make the bodies smaller 
The size of skulls 
We could make a whole plain white with skulls in the moonlight!

If we...Read More

As I drive my parents home through the snow 
their frailty hesitates on the edge of a mountainside.
I call over the cliff 
only snow answers.
They talk quietly
of hauling water of...Read More

How strange to think of giving up all ambition!
Suddenly I see with such clear eyes
The white flake of snow
That has just fallen in the horse's mane!...Read More

Nigh and day arrive and day after day goes by 
And what is old remains old and what is young remains young and grows old.
The lumber pile does not grow...Read More

Conversation brings us so close! Opening
The surfs of the body 
Bringing fish up near the sun 
And stiffening the backbones of the sea!

I have wandered in a face for hours...Read More

 The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

"In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I'd like all the odor of your roses."

"I have no...Read More

In rainy September when leaves grow down to the dark 
I put my forehead down to the damp seaweed-smelling sand.
What can we do but choose? The only way for human...Read More

These insects golden
And Arabic sailing in the husks of galleons 
Their octagonal heads also
Hold sand paintings of the next life....Read More

1

Oh on an early morning I think I shall live forever!
I am wrapped in my joyful flesh 
As the grass is wrapped in its clouds of green.

2

Rising from a bed...Read More

There has been a light snow.
Dark car tracks move in out of the darkness.
I stare at the train window marked with soft dust.
I have awakened at Missoula Montana utterly happy....Read More

 Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six
feet from the house ...
Thoughts that go so far.
The boy gets out of high school and reads no more
books;
the son stops...Read More

1

The grass is half-covered with snow.
It was the sort of snowfall that starts in late afternoon 
And now the little houses of the grass are growing dark.

2

If I reached my...Read More

Inside the veins there are navies setting forth 
Tiny explosions at the water lines 
And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.

It is the morning. The country has...Read More

I start out for a walk at last after weeks at the desk.
Moon gone plowing underfoot no stars; not a trace of light!
Suppose a horse were galloping toward me in...Read More

All day I loved you in a fever holding on to the tail of the horse.
I overflowed whenever I reached out to touch you.
My hand moved over your body covered
With...Read More