For each like on the tweet below, I promised to put poetry on Twitter. It's hard work, tracking down some of my favourite poems! Here are the first 13 lines from extracts and whole poems, transcribed here because it's difficult to see the whole thread on Twitter. I will keep tweeting out lines of poetry as long as the tweet keeps getting liked, but I admit it's going to take me a while. I'm not complaining, it's a fantastic excuse to open up books I haven't had a chance to leaf through in a while.

🦄🦄🦄If you like this tweet I'll put lines of poetry on your twitter feed :D 🦄🦄🦄

— Irreducible Gersande (@gersandelf) February 19, 2016

When French was the music of the street, the café, the train, my own receded and became intimacy and sleep.

In the world it was the language of propaganda, the agreed upon lie, and it bound me to itself, demanding of my life an explanation.

Carolyn Forché extract from The Angel of History

2

le profil
posé à la fenêtre
on n'osait pas dormir
au fond de la glace
il y a ce visage
que je ne connais pas

Ivan de Monbrison extract from An Empty Lanscape Marseille 2.19.2014

3

Our saints, unlike us, live on offerings of fire.

I knelt, and lit three candles,
Lost in the streets of Borges.

Who will sit with you in the burning room?
Who will admit you?

There was no one to count the hours with at La Recoleta—
city of the dead, of mausoleums with marble staircases for those who will rise one day. Among roses and rosaries the mind forgets itself.

Alex Dimitrov extract from Beginning in Buenos Aires

4

Comme un guetteur mélancolique
J'observe la nuit et la mort

Guillaume Apollinaire Et toi mon coeur pourquoi bats-tu

5

I have walked on many battlefields
that once were liquid with pulped
men's bodies and spangled with exploded
shells and splayed bone
All of them have been green again
by the time I got there
Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day.
Sad marble angels brood like hens
over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.

Margaret Atwood extract from The Loneliness of the Military Historian

6

Fish bones walked the waves off Hatteras.
And there were other signs
That Death wooed us, by water, wooed us
By land: among the pines
An uncurled cottonmouth that rolled on moss
Reared in the polluted air.
Birth, not death, is the hard loss.
I know. I also left a skin there.

Louise Glück extract from Cottonmouth Country

7

whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing — oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead – or almost
I seem to me.
no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears
But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty

Sappho's "Fragment 31" as translated by Anne Carson

8

let me declare doorways,
corners, pursuit, let me say
standing here in eyelashes, in
invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake
in the tiny shops of untrue recollections,
the brittle, gnawed life we live,
I am held, and held
why, the touch of everything blushes me,
pigeons and wrecked boys,
half dead hours, blind musicians,
inconclusive women in bruised dresses
even the habitual gray-suited men with terrible briefcases,
how come, how come
I anticipate nothing as intimate as history

Dionne Brand thirsty

9

The way music is formed of
cloud and fire once actually

concrete now accidental as
half truth or as whole truth

Susan Howe This That

10

Well you know I wonder, it could be love running towards my life with its arms up yelling let's buy it what a bargain!

Anne Carson Short Talk on the Sensation of Aeroplane Takeoff

11

That is not a bowl you drink from
not a loving cup.
This is meditation's place
cold rapture's.
Moon floats here
belly, mouth, open-one-eye
any orifice
comes to nothing
dark as any mask
or light, more light/is
holy cirque
Serene, it says silence
in small fish
cups a sun
holds its shape
upon the sea,
howls, 'Spirit entered
black as any raven.'
Smiles -
and cracks your smile.
Is clean.

Phyllis Webb The Bowl

12

I went for a walk in a parka I bought.
Zipped up; the city as a fuzzy edged
dream sequence afloat to indicate thought
in the head of a smiling of a smiling protagonist. Cadge
a light from a passerby and now your head's
the lantern from the 28th Canto
shedding light on hell. "Oh me!" you'd said,
and no laughter, canned or

otherwise, leavened a life that felt filmic.

Ken Babstock extract from Palindromic

13

At sea: midsummer midnight. Night as (light as) day.

Ice so blue it's frozen sky lit from within, above, below.

In my cabin, pictures of my son and me in Nairobi, me and my father at the North Cape, Lionel at home in New York City.

On the ship's PA, Belafonte singing Day-O.

Ivory gulls, like memory, at the edge of vision.

My mother on the green green lawn, laughing up at me laughing, drying my eyes

Following channels through the ice (the mind) called leads

Awakened by a great crash of ice against the hull.

Pitching and rolling as if through water, grinding as if through rock.

Laurel Blossom extract from Degrees of Latitude