My Species
even
a small purple artichoke
boiled
in its own bittered
and darkening
waters
grows tender,
grows tender and sweet
patience, I think,
my species
keep testing the spiny leaves
the spiny heart
—Jane Hirshfield
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
—Mevlana Jelalludin Rumi
English version by Coleman Barks
the making of poems
the reason why i do it
though i fail and fail
in the giving of true names
is i am adam and his mother
and these failures are my job
—Lucille Clifton
Gift
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails.
—Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004)
Walking Beside a Creek
Walking beside a creek
in December, the black ice
windy with leaves,
you can feel the great joy
of the trees, their coats
thrown open like drunken men,
the lifeblood thudding
in their tight, wet boots.
—Ted Kooser
Say
I say egret and you
hear regret.
The long-necked wader,
so still, immobile
until I try to reach it.
It flies away
into the unknown unknown
without my regrets, or yours--
which stay
unmoving, unspoken.
—Susan Lloyd McGarry
Despair
Some lit theirs at both ends.
Some clutched theirs as a blind man does his cane.
Some sucked theirs like the only orange.
Some packed clean shirts and a few socks in theirs.
Some spent their lives looking for theirs and they
were wearing it all the time.
Some neglected theirs but the roots found a way.
Some buried theirs. The stones tell where and when.
— W. S. Merwin
The Time
Summer is the time to write. I tell myself this
in winter especially. Summer comes,
I want to tumble with the river
over rocks and mossy dams.
A fish drifting upside down.
Slow accordions sweeten the breeze.
The Sanitary Mattress factory says,
“Sleep is Life.”
Why do I think of forty ways to spend an afternoon?
Yesterday someone said, “It gets late so early.”
I wrote it down. I was going to do something with it.
Maybe it is a title and this life is the poem.
—Naomi Shihab Nye
To the Reader
As you read, a white bear leisurely
pees, dyeing the snow
saffron,
and as you read, many gods
lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian
are watching the generations of leaves,
and as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.
—Denise Levertov
Good Workers
Let us praise good workers (you know who you are)
Who come gladly to the job and do what you can
For as long as it takes to repair the car
Or clean the house—the woman or man
Who dives in and works steadily straight through,
Not lagging and letting others carry the freight,
Who joke around but do what you need to do,
Like the home caregiver who comes daily at eight
A.m. to wash and dress the man in the wheelchair
And bring him meals and put him to bed at night
For minimum wage and stroke his pale brown hair.
He needs you. “Are you all right?” “I’m all right,”
He says. He needs you to give him these good days,
You good worker. God’s own angels sing your praise.
—Gary Johnson
Lake Meadow Sky
It was only after I lost what I loved most,
saw it disappear as surely
as a fish feels the weight of water being pulled away
from its body, too terrified to give credence to the cold
hook buried deep in its throat,
that I, weightless in the skyward arc, knew
I would have to love everything.
—Mekeel McBride
Prayer
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
—Galway Kinnell
Everybody
I stood at a bus corner
one afternoon, waiting
for the #2. An old
guy stood waiting too.
I stared at him. He
caught my stare, grinned,
gap-toothed. Will you
sign my coat? he said.
Held out a pen. He wore
a dirty canvas coat that
had signatures all over
it, hundreds, maybe
thousands.
I’m trying
to get everybody, he
said.
I signed. On a
little space on a pocket.
Sometimes I remember:
I am one of everybody.
—Ted Kooser
In the All-Verbs Navajo World
“The Navajo world is made of verbs.”
Left-alone grow-things wait, rustle-grass, click-
trunk, whisper-leaf. You go-people miss the hold-still
dawn, arch-over sky, the jump-everywhere glances.
This woman world, fall-into-eyes, reaches out her
makes-tremble beauty, trolls with her body, her
move-everything walk. All-now, our breathe-always
life extends, extends. Change. Change your live-here,
tick-tock hours. Catch all the flit-flit birds,
eat the offer-food, ride over clop-clop land,
our great holds-us-up, wear-a-crown kingdom.
—William Stafford
This Moment
A neighborhood.
At dusk.
Things are getting ready
to happen
out of sight.
Stars and moths.
And rinds slanting around fruit.
But not yet.
One tree is black.
One window is yellow as butter.
A woman leans down to catch a child
who has run into her arms
this moment.
Stars rise.
Moths flutter.
Apples sweeten in the dark.
—Eavan Boland
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
—Wendell Berry
Weather
Because of the menace
your father opened
like a black umbrella
and held high
over your childhood,
blocking the light,
your life now seems
exceptional to you
in its simplicities.
You speak of this,
throwing the window open
on a plain spring day,
dazzling
after such a winter.
—Linda Pastan
At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border
This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.
Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed — or were killed — on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.
—William Stafford
Praying
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
—Mary Oliver
Sloe Gin
The clear weather of juniper
darkened into winter.
She fed gin to sloes
and sealed the glass container.
When I unscrewed it
I smelled the disturbed
tart stillness of a bush
rising through the pantry.
When I poured it
it had a cutting edge
and flamed
like Betelgeuse.
I drink to you
in smoke-mirled, blue-
black sloes, bitter
and dependable.
—Seamus Heaney
The Supple Deer
The quiet opening
between fence strands
perhaps eighteen inches.
Antlers to hind hooves,
four feet off the ground,
the deer poured through.
No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.
I don’t know how a stag turns
into a stream, an arc of water.
I have never felt such accurate envy.
Not of the deer:
To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.
—Jane Hirshfield
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
—Robert Hayden
We Should Be Prepared
The way the plovers cry goodbye.
The way the dead fox keeps on looking down the hill with open eye.
The way the leaves fall, and then there’s the long wait.
The way someone says we must never meet again.
The way mold spots the cake,
The way sourness overtakes the cream.
The way the river water rushes by, never to return.
The way the days go by, never to return.
The way somebody comes back, but only in a dream.
—Mary Oliver
Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer
We turned into the drive,
and gravel flew up from the tires
like sparks from a fire. So much
to be done—the unpacking, the mail
and papers... the grass needed mowing....
We climbed stiffly out of the car.
The shut-off engine ticked as it cooled.
And then we noticed the pear tree,
the limbs so heavy with fruit
they nearly touched the ground.
We went out to the meadow; our steps
made black holes in the grass;
and we each took a pear,
and ate, and were grateful.
—Jane Kenyon
Inclination
One’s throat must be like a garden
and one’s eyes like windows
through which love passes;
and one’s stature
must be like a tree
that rises out of rocks;
and poetry must be like a singing bird,
perching on the highest branch of a tree,
breaking the heavy silence of the world.
—Hamid Reza Rahimi
I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.
—Walt Whitman
God Says Yes To Me
I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes
—Kaylin Haught
(Poem 1593)
There came a Wind like a Bugle—
It quivered through the grass
And a Green Chill upon the Heat
So ominous did pass
We barred the Windows and the Doors
As from an Emerald Ghost—
The Doom’s electric Moccasin
That very instant passed—
On a strange Mob of panting Trees
And Fences fled away
And Rivers where the Houses ran
Those looked that lived— that Day—
The bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings told—
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the World!
—Emily Dickinson
Eating Together
In the steamer is the trout
seasoned with slivers of ginger,
two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.
We shall eat it with rice for lunch,
brothers, sister, my mother who will
taste the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago. Then he lay down
to sleep like a snow-covered road
winding through pines older than him,
without any travelers, and lonely for no one.
—Li-Young Lee
The 1st
What I remember about that day
is boxes stacked across the walk
and couch springs curling through the air
and drawers and tables balanced on the curb
and us, hollering
and leaping up and around
happy to have a playground;
nothing about the emptied rooms
nothing about the emptied family.
—Lucille Clifton
Chocolate
Velvet fruit, exquisite square
I hold up to sniff
between finger and thumb—
how you numb me
with your rich attentions!
If I don’t eat you quickly,
you’ll melt in my palm.
Pleasure seeker, if I let you
you’d liquefy everywhere.
Knotted smoke, dark punch
of earth and night and leaf,
for a taste of you
any woman would gladly
crumble to ruin.
Enough chatter: I am ready
to fall in love!
—Rita Dove
If You Could Write One Great Poem, What Would You Want It To Be About?
(Asked of four student poets at the Illinois Schools for the Deaf and Visually Impaired)
Fire: because it is quick, and can destroy.
Music: place where anger has its place.
Romantic Love—the cold or stupid ask why.
Sign: that it is a language, full of grace,
That it is visible, invisible, dark and clear,
That it is loud and noiseless and is contained
Inside a body and explodes in air
Out of a body to conquer from the mind.
—Robert Pinsky
In the Nursing Home
She is like a horse grazing
a hill pasture that someone makes
smaller by coming every night
to pull the fences in and in.
She has stopped running wide loops,
stopped even the tight circles.
She drops her head to feed; grass
is dust, and the creekbed's dry.
Master, come with your light
halter. Come and bring her in.
—Jane Kenyon
poem on my fortieth birthday
to my mother who died young
well i have almost come to the place where you fell
tripping over a wire at the forty-fourth lap
and i have decided to keep running,
head up, body attentive, fingers
aimed like darts at first prize, so
i might not even watch out for the thin thing
grabbing toward my ankles but
i’m trying for the long one, mama,
running like hell and if i fall
i fall.
—Lucille Clifton
I Confess
I stalked her in the grocery store: her crown
of snowy braids held in place by a great silver clip,
her erect bearing, radiating tenderness,
the way she placed yogurt and avocadoes in her basket,
beaming peach like the North Star.
I wanted to ask “What aisle did you find
your serenity in, do you know
how to be married for fifty years, or how to live alone,
excuse me for interrupting, but you seem to possess
some knowledge that makes the earth burn and turn on its axis—”
but we don’t request such things from strangers
nowadays. So I said, “I love your hair.”
—Alison Luterman
We Real Cool
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
—Gwendolyn Brooks
I am the Song
I am the song that sings the bird.
I am the leaf that grows the land.
I am the tide that moves the moon.
I am the stream that halts the sand.
I am the cloud that drives the storm.
I am the earth that lights the sun.
I am the fire that strikes the stone.
I am the clay that shapes the hand.
I am the word that speaks the man.
—Charles Causley, England
Portraits
Mother came to visit today. We
hadn’t seen each other in years. Why didn’t
you call? I asked. Your windows are filthy, she said. I know,
I know. It’s from the dust and rain. She stood outside.
I stood in, and we cleaned each one that way, staring into each other’s eyes,
rubbing the white towel over our faces, rubbing
away hours, years. This is what it was like
when you were inside me, she said. What? I asked,
though I understood. Afterwards, indoors, she smelled like snow
melting. Holding hands we stood by the picture window,
gazing into the December sun, watching the pines in flame.
—Mark Irwin
Boarding House
The blind man draws his curtains for the night
and goes to bed, leaving a burning light
above the bathroom mirror. Through the wall,
he hears the deaf man walking down the hall
in his squeaky shoes to see if there’s a light
under the blind man's door, and all is right.
—Ted Kooser
Anywhere You Look
in the corner of a high rain gutter
under the roof tiles
new grasses’ delicate seed heads
what war, they say
—Jane Hirshfield
Prayer After Eating
I have taken in the light
that quickened eye and leaf.
May my brain be bright with praise
of what I eat, in the brief blaze
of motion and of thought.
May I be worthy of my meat.
—Wendell Berry
In a quiet forest,
Out of a pool of rain,
A rat laps the stars.
— Richard Wright
Vermeer
So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn’t earned
the world’s end.
—Wislawa Szymborska
Of All That God has Shown Me
Of all that God has shown me
I can speak just the smallest word,
Not more than a honey bee
Takes on his foot
From an overspilling jar.
—Mechtild of Madgeburg
Translated by Jane Hirshfield
Fourteen
She is still mine — for another year or so —
but she’s already looking past me
through the funeral-home door
to where the boys have gathered in their dark suits.
—Marie Howe
I stood upon a high place
I stood upon a high place,
And saw, below, many devils
Running, leaping,
and carousing in sin.
One looked up, grinning,
And said, "Comrade! Brother!"
—Stephen Crane
Water Music
The words are a beautiful music.
The words bounce like in water.
Water music,
loud in the clearing
off the boats,
birds, leaves.
They look for a place
to sit and eat —
no meaning,
no point.
—Robert Creeley
Separation
Your absence has gone through me
like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
— W. S. Merwin
1108
The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon Earth —
The Sweeping up the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity —
—Emily Dickinson
How Poetry Comes to Me
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light
—Gary Snyder
Dangerous pavements…
But this year I face the ice
with my father’s stick
—Seamus Heaney
The Art of Being
The fern in the rain breathes the silver message.
Stay, lie low. Play your dark reeds
and relearn the beauty of absorption.
There is nothing beyond the rotten log
covered with leaves and needles.
Forget the light emerging with its golden wick.
Raise your face to the water-laden frond.
A thousand blossoms will fall into your arms.
—Anne Coray
Stepping Out of Poetry
What would you give for one of the old yellow streetcars
rocking toward you again through the thick snow?
What would you give for the feeling of joy as you climbed
up the three iron steps and took your place by the cold window?
Oh, what would you give to pick up your stack of books
and walk down the icy path in front of the library?
What would you give for your dream
to be as clear and simple as it was then
in the dark afternoon, at the old scarred tables?
—Gerald Stern
even
a small purple artichoke
boiled
in its own bittered
and darkening
waters
grows tender,
grows tender and sweet
patience, I think,
my species
keep testing the spiny leaves
the spiny heart
—Jane Hirshfield
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
—Mevlana Jelalludin Rumi
English version by Coleman Barks
the making of poems
the reason why i do it
though i fail and fail
in the giving of true names
is i am adam and his mother
and these failures are my job
—Lucille Clifton
Gift
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails.
—Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004)
Walking Beside a Creek
Walking beside a creek
in December, the black ice
windy with leaves,
you can feel the great joy
of the trees, their coats
thrown open like drunken men,
the lifeblood thudding
in their tight, wet boots.
—Ted Kooser
Say
I say egret and you
hear regret.
The long-necked wader,
so still, immobile
until I try to reach it.
It flies away
into the unknown unknown
without my regrets, or yours--
which stay
unmoving, unspoken.
—Susan Lloyd McGarry
Despair
Some lit theirs at both ends.
Some clutched theirs as a blind man does his cane.
Some sucked theirs like the only orange.
Some packed clean shirts and a few socks in theirs.
Some spent their lives looking for theirs and they
were wearing it all the time.
Some neglected theirs but the roots found a way.
Some buried theirs. The stones tell where and when.
— W. S. Merwin
The Time
Summer is the time to write. I tell myself this
in winter especially. Summer comes,
I want to tumble with the river
over rocks and mossy dams.
A fish drifting upside down.
Slow accordions sweeten the breeze.
The Sanitary Mattress factory says,
“Sleep is Life.”
Why do I think of forty ways to spend an afternoon?
Yesterday someone said, “It gets late so early.”
I wrote it down. I was going to do something with it.
Maybe it is a title and this life is the poem.
—Naomi Shihab Nye
To the Reader
As you read, a white bear leisurely
pees, dyeing the snow
saffron,
and as you read, many gods
lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian
are watching the generations of leaves,
and as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.
—Denise Levertov
Good Workers
Let us praise good workers (you know who you are)
Who come gladly to the job and do what you can
For as long as it takes to repair the car
Or clean the house—the woman or man
Who dives in and works steadily straight through,
Not lagging and letting others carry the freight,
Who joke around but do what you need to do,
Like the home caregiver who comes daily at eight
A.m. to wash and dress the man in the wheelchair
And bring him meals and put him to bed at night
For minimum wage and stroke his pale brown hair.
He needs you. “Are you all right?” “I’m all right,”
He says. He needs you to give him these good days,
You good worker. God’s own angels sing your praise.
—Gary Johnson
Lake Meadow Sky
It was only after I lost what I loved most,
saw it disappear as surely
as a fish feels the weight of water being pulled away
from its body, too terrified to give credence to the cold
hook buried deep in its throat,
that I, weightless in the skyward arc, knew
I would have to love everything.
—Mekeel McBride
Prayer
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
—Galway Kinnell
Everybody
I stood at a bus corner
one afternoon, waiting
for the #2. An old
guy stood waiting too.
I stared at him. He
caught my stare, grinned,
gap-toothed. Will you
sign my coat? he said.
Held out a pen. He wore
a dirty canvas coat that
had signatures all over
it, hundreds, maybe
thousands.
I’m trying
to get everybody, he
said.
I signed. On a
little space on a pocket.
Sometimes I remember:
I am one of everybody.
—Ted Kooser
In the All-Verbs Navajo World
“The Navajo world is made of verbs.”
Left-alone grow-things wait, rustle-grass, click-
trunk, whisper-leaf. You go-people miss the hold-still
dawn, arch-over sky, the jump-everywhere glances.
This woman world, fall-into-eyes, reaches out her
makes-tremble beauty, trolls with her body, her
move-everything walk. All-now, our breathe-always
life extends, extends. Change. Change your live-here,
tick-tock hours. Catch all the flit-flit birds,
eat the offer-food, ride over clop-clop land,
our great holds-us-up, wear-a-crown kingdom.
—William Stafford
This Moment
A neighborhood.
At dusk.
Things are getting ready
to happen
out of sight.
Stars and moths.
And rinds slanting around fruit.
But not yet.
One tree is black.
One window is yellow as butter.
A woman leans down to catch a child
who has run into her arms
this moment.
Stars rise.
Moths flutter.
Apples sweeten in the dark.
—Eavan Boland
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
—Wendell Berry
Weather
Because of the menace
your father opened
like a black umbrella
and held high
over your childhood,
blocking the light,
your life now seems
exceptional to you
in its simplicities.
You speak of this,
throwing the window open
on a plain spring day,
dazzling
after such a winter.
—Linda Pastan
At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border
This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.
Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed — or were killed — on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.
—William Stafford
Praying
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
—Mary Oliver
Sloe Gin
The clear weather of juniper
darkened into winter.
She fed gin to sloes
and sealed the glass container.
When I unscrewed it
I smelled the disturbed
tart stillness of a bush
rising through the pantry.
When I poured it
it had a cutting edge
and flamed
like Betelgeuse.
I drink to you
in smoke-mirled, blue-
black sloes, bitter
and dependable.
—Seamus Heaney
The Supple Deer
The quiet opening
between fence strands
perhaps eighteen inches.
Antlers to hind hooves,
four feet off the ground,
the deer poured through.
No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.
I don’t know how a stag turns
into a stream, an arc of water.
I have never felt such accurate envy.
Not of the deer:
To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.
—Jane Hirshfield
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
—Robert Hayden
We Should Be Prepared
The way the plovers cry goodbye.
The way the dead fox keeps on looking down the hill with open eye.
The way the leaves fall, and then there’s the long wait.
The way someone says we must never meet again.
The way mold spots the cake,
The way sourness overtakes the cream.
The way the river water rushes by, never to return.
The way the days go by, never to return.
The way somebody comes back, but only in a dream.
—Mary Oliver
Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer
We turned into the drive,
and gravel flew up from the tires
like sparks from a fire. So much
to be done—the unpacking, the mail
and papers... the grass needed mowing....
We climbed stiffly out of the car.
The shut-off engine ticked as it cooled.
And then we noticed the pear tree,
the limbs so heavy with fruit
they nearly touched the ground.
We went out to the meadow; our steps
made black holes in the grass;
and we each took a pear,
and ate, and were grateful.
—Jane Kenyon
Inclination
One’s throat must be like a garden
and one’s eyes like windows
through which love passes;
and one’s stature
must be like a tree
that rises out of rocks;
and poetry must be like a singing bird,
perching on the highest branch of a tree,
breaking the heavy silence of the world.
—Hamid Reza Rahimi
I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.
—Walt Whitman
God Says Yes To Me
I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes
—Kaylin Haught
(Poem 1593)
There came a Wind like a Bugle—
It quivered through the grass
And a Green Chill upon the Heat
So ominous did pass
We barred the Windows and the Doors
As from an Emerald Ghost—
The Doom’s electric Moccasin
That very instant passed—
On a strange Mob of panting Trees
And Fences fled away
And Rivers where the Houses ran
Those looked that lived— that Day—
The bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings told—
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the World!
—Emily Dickinson
Eating Together
In the steamer is the trout
seasoned with slivers of ginger,
two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.
We shall eat it with rice for lunch,
brothers, sister, my mother who will
taste the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago. Then he lay down
to sleep like a snow-covered road
winding through pines older than him,
without any travelers, and lonely for no one.
—Li-Young Lee
The 1st
What I remember about that day
is boxes stacked across the walk
and couch springs curling through the air
and drawers and tables balanced on the curb
and us, hollering
and leaping up and around
happy to have a playground;
nothing about the emptied rooms
nothing about the emptied family.
—Lucille Clifton
Chocolate
Velvet fruit, exquisite square
I hold up to sniff
between finger and thumb—
how you numb me
with your rich attentions!
If I don’t eat you quickly,
you’ll melt in my palm.
Pleasure seeker, if I let you
you’d liquefy everywhere.
Knotted smoke, dark punch
of earth and night and leaf,
for a taste of you
any woman would gladly
crumble to ruin.
Enough chatter: I am ready
to fall in love!
—Rita Dove
If You Could Write One Great Poem, What Would You Want It To Be About?
(Asked of four student poets at the Illinois Schools for the Deaf and Visually Impaired)
Fire: because it is quick, and can destroy.
Music: place where anger has its place.
Romantic Love—the cold or stupid ask why.
Sign: that it is a language, full of grace,
That it is visible, invisible, dark and clear,
That it is loud and noiseless and is contained
Inside a body and explodes in air
Out of a body to conquer from the mind.
—Robert Pinsky
In the Nursing Home
She is like a horse grazing
a hill pasture that someone makes
smaller by coming every night
to pull the fences in and in.
She has stopped running wide loops,
stopped even the tight circles.
She drops her head to feed; grass
is dust, and the creekbed's dry.
Master, come with your light
halter. Come and bring her in.
—Jane Kenyon
poem on my fortieth birthday
to my mother who died young
well i have almost come to the place where you fell
tripping over a wire at the forty-fourth lap
and i have decided to keep running,
head up, body attentive, fingers
aimed like darts at first prize, so
i might not even watch out for the thin thing
grabbing toward my ankles but
i’m trying for the long one, mama,
running like hell and if i fall
i fall.
—Lucille Clifton
I Confess
I stalked her in the grocery store: her crown
of snowy braids held in place by a great silver clip,
her erect bearing, radiating tenderness,
the way she placed yogurt and avocadoes in her basket,
beaming peach like the North Star.
I wanted to ask “What aisle did you find
your serenity in, do you know
how to be married for fifty years, or how to live alone,
excuse me for interrupting, but you seem to possess
some knowledge that makes the earth burn and turn on its axis—”
but we don’t request such things from strangers
nowadays. So I said, “I love your hair.”
—Alison Luterman
We Real Cool
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
—Gwendolyn Brooks
I am the Song
I am the song that sings the bird.
I am the leaf that grows the land.
I am the tide that moves the moon.
I am the stream that halts the sand.
I am the cloud that drives the storm.
I am the earth that lights the sun.
I am the fire that strikes the stone.
I am the clay that shapes the hand.
I am the word that speaks the man.
—Charles Causley, England
Portraits
Mother came to visit today. We
hadn’t seen each other in years. Why didn’t
you call? I asked. Your windows are filthy, she said. I know,
I know. It’s from the dust and rain. She stood outside.
I stood in, and we cleaned each one that way, staring into each other’s eyes,
rubbing the white towel over our faces, rubbing
away hours, years. This is what it was like
when you were inside me, she said. What? I asked,
though I understood. Afterwards, indoors, she smelled like snow
melting. Holding hands we stood by the picture window,
gazing into the December sun, watching the pines in flame.
—Mark Irwin
Boarding House
The blind man draws his curtains for the night
and goes to bed, leaving a burning light
above the bathroom mirror. Through the wall,
he hears the deaf man walking down the hall
in his squeaky shoes to see if there’s a light
under the blind man's door, and all is right.
—Ted Kooser
Anywhere You Look
in the corner of a high rain gutter
under the roof tiles
new grasses’ delicate seed heads
what war, they say
—Jane Hirshfield
Prayer After Eating
I have taken in the light
that quickened eye and leaf.
May my brain be bright with praise
of what I eat, in the brief blaze
of motion and of thought.
May I be worthy of my meat.
—Wendell Berry
In a quiet forest,
Out of a pool of rain,
A rat laps the stars.
— Richard Wright
Vermeer
So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn’t earned
the world’s end.
—Wislawa Szymborska
Of All That God has Shown Me
Of all that God has shown me
I can speak just the smallest word,
Not more than a honey bee
Takes on his foot
From an overspilling jar.
—Mechtild of Madgeburg
Translated by Jane Hirshfield
Fourteen
She is still mine — for another year or so —
but she’s already looking past me
through the funeral-home door
to where the boys have gathered in their dark suits.
—Marie Howe
I stood upon a high place
I stood upon a high place,
And saw, below, many devils
Running, leaping,
and carousing in sin.
One looked up, grinning,
And said, "Comrade! Brother!"
—Stephen Crane
Water Music
The words are a beautiful music.
The words bounce like in water.
Water music,
loud in the clearing
off the boats,
birds, leaves.
They look for a place
to sit and eat —
no meaning,
no point.
—Robert Creeley
Separation
Your absence has gone through me
like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
— W. S. Merwin
1108
The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon Earth —
The Sweeping up the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity —
—Emily Dickinson
How Poetry Comes to Me
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light
—Gary Snyder
Dangerous pavements…
But this year I face the ice
with my father’s stick
—Seamus Heaney
The Art of Being
The fern in the rain breathes the silver message.
Stay, lie low. Play your dark reeds
and relearn the beauty of absorption.
There is nothing beyond the rotten log
covered with leaves and needles.
Forget the light emerging with its golden wick.
Raise your face to the water-laden frond.
A thousand blossoms will fall into your arms.
—Anne Coray
Stepping Out of Poetry
What would you give for one of the old yellow streetcars
rocking toward you again through the thick snow?
What would you give for the feeling of joy as you climbed
up the three iron steps and took your place by the cold window?
Oh, what would you give to pick up your stack of books
and walk down the icy path in front of the library?
What would you give for your dream
to be as clear and simple as it was then
in the dark afternoon, at the old scarred tables?
—Gerald Stern
