Some poems
                     Offer reflection
                     Memories
                     On still water
                    
Some poems
                     Become the water
                     Converse
                     As ripples
                     In a breeze

Some poems
                     Become infectious
                     Inflame emotion
                     Penetrate your skin
                     Have a half life
                     That lasts generations

We were artists
But you had the brush
And I had the pen
You drew the worlds, the people
I wrote down the feelings, explanations

You captured the images perfectly
While I can only guess at the words
The way you moved your brush
While I can only stick to lines
Beauty versus perfection

You express your worlds radiantly 
But I can only write in black and white
I wished I traded my pen for a brush
To feel the colors you weaved 
To see the world beyond my script

Maybe if I knew how to color
If my pen drew more than rigid letters
You would have understood me 
In a world of black and white 
You were the color in my life

I didn’t say what I needed to say
I said what I wanted

This is poem written by Lisel Mueller (according to google). I just wanted to share it because I couldn't find it on here and it's one of my favourite poems ever.

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Some expressions are complex—
ingenious work of eyes and lips.
Can you guess the one
that has been with me forever?

It shifts and bends, serves many ends—
at times it lingers for a bit
before it flees,
but it always comes unbidden.

It shields me when I'm caught off guard,
deceives those who seek my tears.
It does so much and asks so little,
but above all—it contradicts.

They told us tears were trouble,
a crack in the mask,
a plea for attention,
a sign we weren’t strong enough—
so we swallowed storms whole,
let the thunder shake inside our chests,
never daring to let it pour.

They taught girls that crying was dramatic,
a script rewritten to seem small,
a fault in the fabric of being “too much.”
They told boys it made them weak,
that strength was silence,
that pain should be caged behind quiet eyes.

But tears are not weakness.
They are rivers that carry the weight,
a language of the soul
when words fail to hold what aches.
They do not make you less,
only more—
more human, more real, more free.

So cry if you need to.
Let it fall like rain on thirsty ground,
and know—
I will never see you any differently.

Ink bleeds softly on thin paper,
your words, like strokes of painted light,
arrive, a week delayed, a world away.
I trace the curve of your imagined hand,
the ghost of pigment, the scent of distant rain,
a landscape formed from sentences, and sighs.
My desk, a cluttered altar, holds your art,
a still life of our unspoken dreams,
within a Garden of Whispers, softly spun.

The brush you wield, a whispered secret,
creates worlds I can only touch in thought.
Your canvas blooms with colors I have missed,
a vibrant echo of your absent smile.
Each letter, a portrait of your soul,
revealed in glimpses, shadows, and soft hues.
We build a Garden of Whispers, line by line,
a sanctuary where our spirits meet,
a place where distance cannot truly steal.

The moon, a silent witness to our words,
hangs heavy in the night, a silver coin.
I write by candlelight, the shadows dance,
a phantom audience to my devotion.
My pen, a clumsy instrument of love,
attempts to capture what your art conveys.
I yearn for touch, for shared and simple breath,
within this Garden of Whispers, we reside,
a moment where the ink and paint collide.

The year revolves, a slow and aching dance,
of paper ships that sail across the miles.
I wait for spring, for your returning hand,
to paint the landscape of a living day.
My heart, a canvas stretched and waiting still,
for your arrival, for your vibrant touch.
The letters fade, the ink begins to pale,
yet in this Garden of Whispers, love remains,
a masterpiece, etched in the soul’s long hall.

A sea of silent people with
Zippers instead of lip and teeth
So long it’s been since they’ve unzipped
They calcified like coral reef
And sometimes it is hard to breathe
When your captor is a feeling.
Their words are knives stuck in their sheathes,
At nightfall, they dream of screaming.

Their shoulders slumped, they knew that if
They sang or sighed or gave a speech
Before it was too late, their scythe
Would never have to reap and reap
And reap, but no, they sowed the seed,
If only they’d been believing
But they dug a grave, where they sleep
At nightfall, to dream of screaming.

Their kids don’t cry, instead, they writhe
Inheriting their voiceless grief
No words to soothe the kind of life
That never, ever knows relief
As it was stolen by a thief
And his name is Never Needing.
Their fear, it thrums to its own beat
At nightfall, they dream of screaming.

They waste away, they cannot eat
But now, death itself is freeing.
Their dreams once were the sun and sea—
Tonight, they just dream of screaming.

Why do I cower behind this pen
Ducking behind expression in the form of comfort
No problems solved
People less wronged
Just words on a page
And yet here I am
Pen in hand