id
int64 160k
1.59M
| url
stringlengths 46
285
| author
stringlengths 0
217
| title
stringlengths 1
241
| body
stringlengths 100
77.3k
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
183,438
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/25546/la-grande-jatte-sunday-afternoon
|
Thomas Cole
|
La Grande Jatte: Sunday Afternoon
|
Seurat looked well to see these people
Leisurely pass their Sunday on the Jatte:
Madame, exact and stiff yet utterly relaxed,
Parades her monkey. Her barely-there escort
Is elegant in his dark suit and top hat,
Cane and cigar. One feels at once the fine
Distortions. The little dog's excited bark
Fails to arouse the interest of the hound.
And the three idlers continue in their mood
Of contemplation. Nothing is stark
Or sudden in this scene, and one recalls,
With an inner smile, darling Degas' objection:
'Too little motion.' Finding the green is not
So green as sunny, the eye is beguiled
Out of proper focus. Here convention
Is flouted and flaunted in true French fashion.
There is coupled with rightness and poise
An innocent nonchalance in just proportions.
See how the girls amid their folded skirts
Hear but ignore the raucous noise
Of ducks, And there by the shore a lady's
Intent on fishing. Above her head white sails turn
In the breeze, the only sign of boundless energy.
The isle is full of noises, sounds, and airs;
Movement is the theme, yet all is still. To learn
The secrets of this atmosphere, I spend
The hour: before my eye the sun contracts
And grows where motion is. And here
In this sunlit shade beyond the frame
I note with what calm grace the French relax.
Tuomas CoLE
|
196,492
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/32180/kerenza-on-sand-dunes
|
D. M. Thomas
|
Kerenza on Sand-Dunes
|
Hovering on that consummate shell
Washed from the sea, I hear it say
'This is the true, the holy well,
Crystal and incorruptible.'
The sand has blown the wind away.
'Brush the grains as delicately
From this dark-clear parable,
Creases of a trustful smile,
As from the buried hermit's cell.'
The sand has blown the wind away.
All day there rings a warning-bell,
Or marriage-bell under the sea.
Under the white and trickling hill
We learn each other speechlessly.
The sand has blown the wind away.
Our coupled footprints crumble and fill
All down the lee side of this wall
Against the chill expedient sea;
And we shall never break the spell.
The sand has blown the wind away.
|
185,728
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/26737/bamboo
|
Donald Hall
|
Bamboo
|
'Wales'
Falmouth
Janaica, B.W.I.
In clumps like grass
By the road near Wales,
By the muddy river,
Bamboo prevails.
Big winds uproot
Fifty together,
A whole clump
In a bad weather.
The young bamboo,
Metallic green,
Spreads at the top
A feathered screen:
Green paint on steel
Of stalk; and higher,
Lighter fronds
As fine as wire.
At tropical Wales
The light is made
By types of green
In the hot shade,
And froma hill
The earth is masses
Of cane, bamboo,
And other grasses.
|
188,202
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/28002/empty-house
|
Jack Crawford Jr.
|
Empty House
|
JACK CRAWFORD, JR.
EMPTY HOUSE
The house is still, empty as a ghost.
My daughters just went out into the snow
New with a great softness falling
From soundless heavens, smoothing down the earth.
The fields are full; the yards, roads, as far
As eye can see; the house gapes emptily.
The voices of the girls just now
Filtered through floors and walls;
Bright-voiced talk full of colors,
Like a brilliant scarf around my throat
Shining and soft with sound.
The snow falls among their smiling lips,
Clinging to hoods and shoulders, and slipping.
Their eyes glitter in the softness, the flakes
Drifting like sleep, their gestures
Marvelous through the silence.
The house is still and I know,
Resonantly, how silence murders sound,
Throttling it with a noose of snow
Where my brilliant daughters play,
Leaving in the colors of their wake
A need for them as open as this door.
|
175,032
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/21140/globe-amaranth
|
Agnes Dongan Moore
|
Globe Amaranth
|
Take sod, I said,
And sod this garden over.
No one shall then discover
Rose-white or red;
Let there be nothing here
That speaks of a past year,
And none recall what was
Beneath this mat of grass.
Heart, now, I said,
Turn you to clay and never
Burn with your former fever.
Happy the dead;
And the unborn are wise.
Have done with agonies -
Take pattern from the old,
And shawl yourself with mould!
But through the sod,
Defying time and reason
That fixes seed and season,
Sudden a rod
Of blooms came slenderly -
An eloquence, a plea;
And all the happy past
Rose up, and held me fast!
Agnes D. Moore
|
208,746
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/38322/dear-god
|
Susan Abraham
|
Dear God
|
Dear lost one who lopes across the lush fields
dear heartless marcher who storms the small boats
and rails the shingles of shacks
dear hawk who taunts the swallows
and feeds goslings to the wolf
dear lightning evoker, boulder crumbler
dear god who strums the banjo branches of this tree
dear stone heart, stone hands
dear god whose footprints soil snow
god of the cocktail reception
server of spiked drinks, spearer of cubed lamb
dear feeder of caged monkeys, driver of dogs
bark-skinned god of the forest, god of the playpen
god of the tallest creature, god of the alien landings
god who was pushed from a plane
dear god of the urban deer who try to cross
Broadway
dear god of grinding gears and grease
dear god for whom I am one green marble
clacking in your pocket
|
233,440
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53989/harvest-song
|
Jean Toomer
|
Harvest Song
|
I am a reaper whose muscles set at sun-down. All my oats are cradled.
But I am too chilled, and too fatigued to bind them. And I hunger.
I crack a grain between my teeth. I do not taste it.
I have been in the fields all day. My throat is dry. I hunger.
My eyes are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time.
I am a blind man who stares across the hills, seeking stack'd fields
of other harvesters.
It would be good to see them . . . crook'd, split, and iron-ring'd handles
of the scythes . . . It would be good to see them, dust-caked and
blind. I hunger.
(Dusk is a strange fear'd sheath their blades are dull'd in.)
My throat is dry. And should I call, a cracked grain like the oats
. . . eoho-
I fear to call. What should they hear me, and offer me their grain,
oats, or wheat or corn? I have been in the fields all day. I fear
I could not taste it. I fear knowledge of my hunger.
My ears are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time.
I am a deaf man who strains to hear the calls of other harvesters whose
throats are also dry.
It would be good to hear their songs . . . reapers of the sweet-stalked
cane, cutters of the corn . . . even though their throats cracked, and
the strangeness of their voices deafened me.
I hunger. My throat is dry. Now that the sun has set and I am chilled.
I fear to call. (Eoho, my brothers!)
I am a reaper. (Eoho!) All my oats are cradled. But I am too fatigued
to bind them. And I hunger. I crack a grain. It has no taste to
it. My throat is dry . . .
O my brothers, I beat my palms, still soft, against the stubble of my
harvesting. (You beat your soft palms, too.) My pain is sweet.
Sweeter than the oats or wheat or corn. It will not bring me
knowledge of my hunger.
|
183,690
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/25676/the-umbrella
|
Weldon Kees
|
The Umbrella
|
two poems
THE UMBRELLA
Because, in the hot countries,
They worshipped trees; because,
Under the sacred figs, Gautama
Became a god; because of the rain,
Because the sun beats down,
Because we followed orders, building a tent
"Of ten curtains of fine twined linen,
And blue and purple and scarlet." And because
The ark required protection, with four pillars
Holding the curtains up, and "the veil
Shall divide unto you between the holy place
And the most holy." - I planted the seed
Of an elm and watered it. Rest
In the shelter of this shade. Black spines
Of metal and a tent of cloth
Are blooming where a tree stood up.
Discs float above the heads
Of the images
Of Indian gods. Sometimes
There are three of them, and each
Smaller than the one
That goes beneath. And sometimes
These tiers of aureoles
Are gone: umbrellas
Crown them in their place,
Two thousand years before the birth of Christ,
If there is any believing Chinese legend,
The wife of a carpenter named Lou Pan
Said to her husband one morning: "You and your father
Before you have built well, My Lord. But your houses
Are rigid, immovable. Now that the grass
Goes brown with autumn, I will build roofs
One can carry about. I will build a pagoda
On a stick, to give shelter wherever one goes."
And this she proceeded to do.
When the Son
Of Heaven strode to the hunt, twenty-four umbrellas
Went before him. The Mikado proceeded in similar fashion
Under a red silk umbrella: emblem of "absolute power."
Protectors of kings and princes, floating
Over triumphal processions and battlefields,
Moving like a sea of tossing waves.
And in India, in 1877, the Prince of Wales
(Later Edward VII) moved in stately procession
Mounted on an elephant,
A gold umbrella before him. The Greeks
Hinted at secret rites of the umbrella cult.
At the Scirophoria, a priestess and a priest
"Went from the Acropolis to a place called Scira
Walking under a great white baldachino."
And during the Thesmophoria, slaves
Carried parasols over the heads of the women
Who brought gifts to Persephone at the temple,
Desiring fertility. - When we left the corpses
Out of doors, we put umbrellas over them,
Not to shield them from the sun, but rather
To protect the sunlight against pollution
By the dead. The Pope's was carried by a man in armor
On a white horse. The English and the French
Trimmed them with ruches, valances, pompoms,
Tassels, fringes, frills of lace, glass beads,
Sequins, artificial flowers, ostrich feathers,
God knows what else.
Over the empty harbor, gray and motionless,
The clouds have been gathering all afternoon, and now
The sea is pitted with rain. Wind shakes the house.
Here from this window lashed with spray, I watch
A black umbrella, ripped apart and wrong side out,
Go lurching wildly down the beach; a sudden gust
Carries it upward, upside down,
Over the water, flapping and free,
Into the heart of the storm,
|
240,600
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58024/a-gift-for-you
|
Eileen Myles
|
A Gift for You
|
around 530 is a beautiful peaceful time you can just hear the dog lapping David lifts his smoke to his lips forever dangling chain in the middle of everything bout the top shelf or so. The party at which I sd that's my col- lected works and every one stared my home was so small is it I'm not particularly into the task of humility at the moment but I'm not against it it's like that deflated beach ball on a tiny chair I think of as joking with the larger one on a painting floating in air my home is large love made it large once not to get all John Wieners & believe me love made it small once this place only had sex unlike the house I love a house I fear a house a house never gets laid frankly who doesn't like a hotel room I live in a hotel room a personal one. A young person very much like me was brutal no personal photographs please it was anyone's home perfect for a party now I'm going fast. How the description of a drug enters a room & changes the room thus with going fast say thus if you want to go slow. To drink the wrong thing for a moment for you to lick my thigh & your honey face I met a dog named Izzie once, I met a dog named Alan the calm person writing her calm poems now & then she shows her sacred heart she opens her chest & a monkey god is taking a shit swinging on his thing. You didn't know I had so much inside me buckets of malice bibles of peace I don't want to go all library on you now like my mother the mother of god or my brother named Jack who sat in a deck of cards getting hard when she squeezes in getting cozy I know less what I want to say. I can open an entire room comes out each moment that's what I mean not things widen & flow there's no purpose to this.
|
196,732
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/32300/the-puzzle
|
Howard Nemerov
|
The Puzzle
|
for Lewis Mumford
Two children bow their heads
Over the ruins of what is yet to be:
Sun, sky, and sand, the Pyramids, the Sphinx.
Under their fingers, under their eyes, .
Before their minds, enclaves of order
Begin to appear amid the heaped debris
As they go steadily sorting and rejecting,
Turning about and matching, finding the fit
By image, color, shape, or all at once,
Rebuilding the continuum from its bits,
Until the Sphinx's head falls into place
Completing the vision of a ruined world
Divided in the crackling glaze of forms,
The seams and fissures of a kind of brain
Thinking what properties must go together
To make, accordant with mosaic law,
The real world match the mindful one, to which
The children bow their heads.
TO THE POETS
Song sparrow's limited creativity,
Three eighth-notes and a trill all summer long,
The falling second of the chickadee-
It's a pretty humble business, singing song.
|
253,467
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/159633/ramadan-63d98c8027ebd
|
Yahya Hassan
|
RAMADAN
|
BEARDED CREATURE IN THE REARVIEW OF THE WHIP
BEFORE YOU EVEN REACHED THE SANDHOLM CENTER
YOUR MOM WAS A PHOTOGRAPH ON THE WALL
AND AN URN PACKED WITH SLAG AND FLY ASH
WE FASTED THAT MONTH AND BOUGHT A SHEEP AT BAZAAR WEST
YOU DEPOSITED THE MONEY WE GOT FROM OUR AUNTS
AND SAID IT'S NOT DECENT
FOR A KID TO HAVE SO MUCH MONEY
BUT I AM PROUD OF YOU
AS YOU STAND THERE AND GRILL HALAL
NOT JUST A REFUGEE WITH A BIG BEARD AND TRACKSUIT
NOW A DRAGONFLY LANDS ON YOUR ARM
Translated from the Danish
|
229,182
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51497/ode-to-a-yellow-onion
|
C. Dale Young
|
Ode to a Yellow Onion
|
And what if I had simply passed you by,
your false skins gathering light in a basket,
those skins of unpolished copper,
would you have lived more greatly?
Now you are free of that metallic coating,
a broken hull of parchment,
the dried petals of a lily-
those who have not loved you
will not know differently.
But you are green fading into yellow-
how deceptive you have been.
Once I played the cithara,
fingers chafing against each note.
Once I worked the loom,
cast the shuttle through the warp.
Once I scrubbed the tiles
deep in the tub of Alejandro.
Now I try to deciper you.
Beyond the village, within a cloud
of wild cacao and tamarind,
they chant your tale, how you,
most common of your kind,
make the great warrior-men cry
but a woman can unravel you.
|
223,002
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47146/my-violin
|
Bruce Lansky
|
My Violin
|
My mom brought home a violin
so I could learn to play.
She told me if I practiced hard
I'd play it well someday.
Without a single lesson,
I tried to play a song.
My fiddle squeaked, my fiddle squawked.
The notes came out all wrong.
My little brother fled the room.
Mom covered up her ears.
My puppy dog began to howl.
My sister was in tears.
My dad pulled out his wallet.
He handed me a ten.
He made me swear I'd never play
that violin again.
|
240,322
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57876/music-man
|
Rigoberto González
|
Music Man
|
Oh father, oh music man
with a whistle instead of a coin
to toss on your walks,
keep these things for us
until we're ready to come home:
our baby teeth, fragments of bone
that rattle in a domino box.
Tuck it in your pocket but please
don't gamble it away
the way you lost our
christening gowns in poker.
We had outgrown them, true,
but what other proof
did we have that all seven
of our outfits could be stacked
and shuffled like a deck
of cards. Keep the bottle cap
opener hanging by a string.
Wear it like a locket
and stay collared to our after-school
bliss when we found you
underneath a tree that scattered
glass fruit around your feet.
The boys lined them up
for death by slingshot,
and the girls giggled
when the bodies shattered.
Take good care of our drawings,
our crooked handwriting
exercises, the scribbles of our names,
and sew a suit with sailboats
on the sleeves, a coat with Qs
sliding down a wire, and pants
that celebrate our prepubescent
autographs. And in your shoe-
don't tell us which! let us guess!-
save the coin you told us
came from China. It had a hole
in the middle because the merchants
slid their change on chopsticks.
We pictured them on market
Sundays holding up their earnings
like a shish kabob. We know
you hid the coin because all seven
of us wanted it and so you
took it with you. Or so I claimed.
Can I be blamed, oh father, oh story
man, for wanting to possess
the single thing that couldn't be shared?
You saw me slide it out
the window of your wallet
while you napped and didn't
snap to attention to complain.
Of all your sons and daughters
it is I who wanted to escape the most,
to anywhere. I learned the desperate
alchemy of flowering a barren day
with song from you, oh master.
A minstrel needs his freedom.
And so you let me take it.
|
207,238
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/37566/maybe-natural-analogies
|
Annalisa Cima
|
("Maybe natural analogies...")
|
ANNALISA CIMA
da IPOTESI D'AMORE
1. ACHERUBINO
Forse analogie naturali
danzano la gioia
forse scolorita la noia
dell'inganno
vanno
le ipotesi d'amore.
Forse bastava
una lama
per trinciare pensieri
futilita, e darci
in un fusorio incontro
compattezza
temperatura
brama.
Le sorti della guerra
sono incerte.
Vincerö: perché Venere
da a me i regni
che Marte dona agli altri.
2. A CHERUBINO
1.
Amante amato amandoti
ho gocce negli occhi
e sale nel palato
ANNALISA CIMA
From HYPOTHESES ON LOVE
1. TO CHERUBINO
Maybe natural analogies
dance for joy
maybe once the boredom of deceit
has dimmed
they go:
hypotheses on love.
Maybe all it took
was a blade
to cut through thoughts
futilities, and give us
in one fusing meeting
closeness
fire
desire.
The fortunes of war
are unsure.
But I shall win: for Venus
grants me realms
that Mars bestows on others.
2. TO CHERUBINO
1.
Beloved lover loving you
I have tears in my eyes
and salt on my tongue
non vi € iato tra noi
siamo
calore calato nel vivere obliando
e quando guardo
vedo che sei sole
colore che muta e invita a perdersi
nel solco che dall'ansia dirama.
2.
Gettati gli ultimi fiori
lo troviamo bianco
questo campo di seminagioni.
Vi sono stagioni di pianto
e stagioni dove il canto dei giorni
muta il passato congelato.
E allora percorrere cammini di muschi
uniti nei vapori-sudari
saper cogliere il ritorno
di un giorno smarrito.
4. A CHERUBINO
Cominciö per gioco
poi poco a poco
improvviso il richiamo
degli occhi che mi fanno
impallidire.
Chiaro é il nesso tra noi
trame eran gia sottese
correvano magie di venti.
All'alato chiedo
che non fermi il gioco
conosco i segni dell'antico fuoco:
dolce & deporre la saggezza
a tempo e luogo.
ANNALISA CIMA
there's no distance between us
we are
heat fallen into life forgetting
and when I look
I see you're the sun
color that changes and wants to be lost
in the furrow that forks out of yearning.
2.
After the last flowers are tossed
we find this field
of sowings white.
There are times for tears
and times when the song of days
transforms the frozen past.
And then to go down mossy paths
together in the shrouds of haze
able to reap the return
of a lost day.
4. TO CHERUBINO
It began as a game
then little by little
suddenly the claim
of your eyes that turn me
pale.
The link between us is clear
the web was already taut
charms of winds were whispering.
I asked the winged one
not to end the game
I know the signs of the ancient flame:
it's sweet to set wisdom aside
in the right time and place.
5. A CHERUBINO
E quando
ripercorri il cammino
elsa, stelo, regno
del fiorire,
non vi é arroganza
nel tuo ardire:
aquila che torni nella roccia
goccia di mille spirali
risali i viali dell'impallidire
quasi terra d'esilio
che t'accolse guerriero
e ti ritrova figlio.
9, A CHERUBINO
Dimmi senti anche tu
il correre del tempo.
Sembra lontano il giorno
dell'incantamento.
Muovo i passi
a sottili ritrovi,
tesi fili di archi
verso acque furtive
dove arcadi insieme andiamo.
11. A CHERUBINO
Anche tu invecchierai
e morirai del male del finire.
Resta il tempo per cantare
una mattina ritrovata.
ANNALISA CIMA
5. TO CHERUBINO
And when you
take the way again
hilt, shaft and reign
of flowering,
there's no arrogance
in your burning:
eagle that returns to the rock
drop of a thousand spirals
you climb the paths of paling again
like a land of exile
that received you as a warrior
and rediscovers you a son.
9. TO CHERUBINO
Tell me do you too feel
time flowing on.
The day of enchantment seems
long gone.
I take steps
toward subtle meeting places
stretched lines of arcs
toward furtive waters
where, Arcadians, we go together.
11. TO CHERUBINO
You too will age
and die of the sickness of ending.
There's time enough to sing
one recovered morning.
Translated by Jonathan Galassi
|
183,146
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/25396/to-an-unknown-dead
|
Buddhadeva Bose
|
To an Unknown Dead
|
two poems
TO AN UNKNOWN DEAD
I could never have believed her dead
When they carried her along the afternoon street,
Followed by mourners, themselves so purified,
That their bare, unhurried, unhesitant feet
Seemed to tread on air. And two or three in a closed
Slow-pacing car, sitting erect, and gazing straight ahead,
Seeing nothing. The traffic made way; passers-by paused.
But I could never, never believe her dead.
Beautiful and calm, her face held up
To the stooping sun, beautiful, open,
Full and whole she was like a fruit just ripened,
Without embarrassment, effort or hope,
No longer waiting for something to happen,
But final, perfected, ready to drop.
|
224,106
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47986/1941
|
Ruth Stone
|
1941
|
I wore a large brim hat
like the women in the ads.
How thin I was: such skin.
Yes. It was Indianapolis;
a taste of sin.
You had a natural Afro;
no money for a haircut.
We were in the seedy part;
the buildings all run-down;
the record shop, the jazz
impeccable. We moved like
the blind, relying on our touch.
At the corner coffee shop,
after an hour's play, with our
serious game on paper,
the waitress asked us
to move on. It wasn't much.
Oh mortal love, your bones
were beautiful. I traced them
with my fingers. Now the light
grows less. You were so angular.
The air darkens with steel
and smoke. The cracked world
about to disintegrate,
in the arms of my total happiness.
|
214,964
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/41443/at-the-beach-56d21f9923578
|
Robert Wrigley
|
At the Beach
|
What are they, those burrowing crustaceans, the ones
my son and I unbeach each summer
building sandcastles? Thumb-large
helmets with dainty, iridescent feet
and as far as I can see no eyes,
no head, no front or back at all, only
the shove and pull of the waves,
or only the quick, attentive gulls, who love them
just as they would love us, my son and me, if they could,
and who, the truth be told, cannot name us either.
|
1,544,003
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43090/the-lady-in-kicking-horse-reservoir
|
Richard Hugo
|
The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir
|
Not my hands but green across you now.
Green tons hold you down, and ten bass curve
teasing in your hair. Summer slime
will pile deep on your breast. Four months of ice
will keep you firm. I hope each spring
to find you tangled in those pads
pulled not quite loose by the spillway pour,
stars in dead reflection off your teeth.
Lie there lily still. The spillway's closed.
Two feet down most lakes are common gray.
This lake is dark from the black blue Mission range
climbing sky like music dying Indians once wailed.
On ocean beaches, mystery fish
are offered to the moon. Your jaws go blue.
Your hands start waving every wind.
Wave to the ocean where we crushed a mile of foam.
We still love there in thundering foam
and love. Whales fall in love with gulls
and tide reclaims the Dolly skeletons
gone with a blast of aching horns to China.
Landlocked in Montana here
the end is limited by light, the final note
will trail off at the farthest point we see,
already faded, lover, where you bloat.
All girls should be nicer. Arrows rain
above us in the Indian wind. My future
should be full of windy gems, my past
will stop this roaring in my dreams.
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. But the arrows sing:
no way to float her up. The dead sink
from dead weight. The Mission range
turns this water black late afternoons.
One boy slapped the other. Hard.
The slapped boy talked until his dignity
dissolved, screamed a single 'stop'
and went down sobbing in the company pond.
I swam for him all night. My only suit
got wet and factory hands went home.
No one cared the coward disappeared.
Morning then: cold music I had never heard.
Loners like work best on second shift.
No one liked our product and the factory closed.
Off south, the bison multiply so fast
a slaughter's mandatory every spring
and every spring the creeks get fat
and Kicking Horse fills up. My hope is vague.
The far blur of your bones in May
may be nourished by the snow.
The spillway's open and you spill out
into weather, lover down the bright canal
and mother, irrigating crops
dead Indians forgot to plant.
I'm sailing west with arrows to dissolving foam
where waves strand naked Dollys.
Their eyes are white as oriental mountains
and their tongues are teasing oil from whales.
|
254,295
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/160951/ode-to-plastic-cups
|
Naomi Ortiz
|
Ode to Plastic Cups
|
Weight of both reusable glass plus liquid means
my wrist twists down
the only direction it bends
sends drink to splash on carpets or slippery floor
Worse yet
non-flexing elbow means arm
smacks cup across room with accidental gusto
at least once a week
Beloved coffee cups
shatter into h u n d r e d s of p i e c e s
must dredge energy to clean up now
hot beverages, my expensive habit
At restaurants, I have to ask for a straw
slick perspiring drink
pointless to even try to lift
to lips with fingers, hand, shoulder
Instead, I bat and slide glass across tabletop
position straw below mouth, sip
then push it back, nudge, shift
Except, every once in a while, I miscalculate
or glass bottom catches on table surface
to topple and douse eating companion with cold beverage
saturate my clothes and shoes good
Unless the cup is plastic
Oh, chemically bonded vessel, with your springy forgiveness
to bounce passively on floor, patiently listless
you wait for me to retrieve you in my own time
Oh, plastic cup
with your bright shiny colors
your fun designs
your resilient sides
As scooter squeezes you between wheel and wall
you may bend, but do not crack where you lie
Weight light, large brim
I can sip straight from the rim
Glossy red party cups sold in long plastic bags
last me month-long jags
I stock up, dollar store deals
just what works for my body
call it an accommodation
this need for plastic cups
As disabled person
independence is precarious
daily-life and reason
constructed upon a wobbly set of Crip-hacks
get me from, can't to good enough
Where is my place in zero waste?
|
214,628
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/41275/henry-james-in-cape-may
|
Stephen Dunn
|
Henry James in Cape May
|
SEPTEMBER 2001
STEPHEN DUNN
HENRY JAMES IN CAPE MAY
Though the society he sought did not exist here,
no coteries of fine talk or drawing rooms
where the posturings of the privileged could be skewered,
he nevertheless took pleasure in the Victorian B&B's,
and the old, grand mansions that lined the shore.
Now in a rocker on the balcony of one of them,
the many-dormered Angel by the Sea,
he pondered the ghastliness that all immortals
were unable to die-days like this, years,
in which landscape and one's mind never changed.
Yet he'd always be the central consciousness
of wherever he was, and he trusted, inevitably,
that there'd be some Daisy or Isabel
with whom to dine, then to send out into
the common vagaries of the Cape May night.
The author as pimp, in it to plumb a discrepancy,
to watch, perhaps, one of his ladies
sit down at the wrong table, attempt to speak French
to a bunch of ruffians, say, from Rahway,
or perhaps mistake a mistress for a wife.
He'd be content to have observed for us a small
human tendency, one of the laws of the heart.
Then, for him, a Courvoisier, a good night's rest,
and a sentence that wouldn't stop, modifier
after modifier, turns, hesitations, refinements.
But was he worrying now that someone who thought
and couldn't stop thinking may never have loved?
And were we who watched him there watching us
so unfair, so spoiled, to regret that one who gave us
something had also not given us something else?
|
246,227
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/144839/he-said-she-said
|
Sachiko Murakami
|
He Said She Said
|
I swallowed the sweet thing in a dream. I woke up heavy.
I said, what's the matter with you.
I said, stop seeing what's the matter with me.
I ran to/from only moving one frantic eye.
Something snitched. Then back to the argument.
It is more acceptable to steal from the ether.
When you said, we take matters into our own hands.
I didn't start the day with a ritual. Again. Twenty days and counting!
I said, I was supposed to address my wrongs to you.
The sweetgrass still in its plastic. Keep it there for its poetry?
Then the driftwood resting on my father's ashes.
Well, you said, ecstasy from a fluted throat.
Ha. As if there were presence enough in me to notice, before this.
I said, I'm less angry now that you don't exist.
Then the aha moment announced.
Whistling nothing like wind through fistulae. That happens here.
Left to my own devices, I said.
As if language were a refuge. As though the sound of walls.
|
195,898
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/31883/the-undertaking
|
Louise Glück
|
The Undertaking
|
MAY 1971
LOUISE GLUCK
THE UNDERTAKING
The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.
There you are-cased in clean bark you drift
Through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.
You are free. The river films with lilies,
Shrubs appear, shoots thicken into palm. And now
All fear gives way: the light
Looks after you, you feel the waves' goodwill
As arms widen over the water; Love,
The key is turned. Extend yourself.
It is the Nile, the sun is shining,
Everywhere you turn is luck.
|
214,366
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/41144/two-moon-to-a-journalist-after-rehearsal-1898
|
Geoffrey Brock
|
Two Moon to a Journalist after Rehearsal: 1898
|
I thought then that the Great Spirits
had made the Sioux, put them there,
and white men and the Cheyenne here,
expecting fights. The Great Spirits,
I thought, liked fighting-it was to them
like play. So I joined Crazy Horse,
and at the place called Little Big Horn
we wiped the white men from the earth.
Shooting was quick-pop, pop, pop.
Soldiers dropped, horses fell on them.
One white man I remember rode
a sorrel mare, back and forth,
shouting and waving. He was brave,
I do not know his name. The bugler
kept blowing his commands, brave too.
A white chief, maybe Long Hair, fell.
Then one bunch of white men was left.
Then one man all alone ran far,
down toward the river, up a hill.
I thought he'd live, but a young Sioux
shot him in the back of the head.
We stripped the bodies. Not soldiers then,
not enemies, just men dead. That night
no dance-we were still with sorrow.
It was a great fight, smoke and dust.
But that was twenty years ago,
and old minds change. I do not know
what the Great Spirits want today.
I do know what your people want-
the show business, the Wild West Show.
Tomorrow Long Hair's widow comes,
|
189,948
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/28890/in-the-gorge
|
W. S. Merwin
|
In the Gorge
|
Lord of the bow,
Our jagged hands
Like the ends of a broken bridge
Grope for each other in silence
Over the loose water.
Have you left us nothing but your blindness?
|
162,556
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14095/first-fig
|
Edna St. Vincent Millay
|
Figs from Thistles: First Fig
|
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-
It gives a lovely light!
|
165,820
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/15953/before-words-come
|
Marguerite Edwards Werner
|
Before Words Come
|
These sweet and quiet days before words come,
My baby, are the happiest, I know.
Of our dear mute exchanges, all the sum
Is laughter, love, and music-wordless, low.
To you I bend an ever-smiling face;
Your eyes have never turned from mine in fear.
Serene they see and share my gift of grace-
The peaceful joy God gave with you, most dear.
Still in the distance hangs the mist of speech,
Where fumbling words half clothe the groping thought.
Its shadows will divide us, each from each,
Ending the pure communion silence wrought.
Behind a veil of words the soul sits-dumb!
Our thoughts, unspoken, freely pass. And so
These sweet and quiet days before words come,
My baby, are the happiest, I know.
|
167,894
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17085/georgette-leblanc
|
Mark Turbyfill
|
Georgette Leblanc
|
"Commandeth even the winds and water, and they obey."
Ebony waves stand parted
With braided fangs;
In defeat
Earth's dark ether congeals.
She is roses
And a thin white sword.
She is a quill of light,
Sharp stencil
A goddess cuts through.
Golden words hover about her
(Conversation is in heaven).
Golden words are flowering
(Conversation is in heaven).
Golden words are bursting their calyces.
She is a token, a dove, a harp-
A presence
Cinctured by words of gold.
|
224,718
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/48447/by-dark-
|
W. S. Merwin
|
By Dark
|
When it is time I follow the black dog
into the darkness that is the mind of day
I can see nothing there but the black dog
the dog I know going ahead of me
not looking back oh it is the black dog
I trust now in my turn after the years
when I had all the trust of the black dog
through an age of brightness and through shadow
on into the blindness of the black dog
where the rooms of the dark were already known
and had no fear in them for the black dog
leading me carefully up the blind stairs
|
223,884
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47849/the-goddess-who-created-this-passing-world
|
Alice Notley
|
The Goddess Who Created This Passing World
|
The Goddess who created this passing world
Said Let there be lightbulbs & liquefaction
Life spilled out onto the street, colors whirled
Cars & the variously shod feet were born
And the past & future & I born too
Light as airmail paper away she flew
To Annapurna or Mt. McKinley
Or both but instantly
Clarified, composed, forever was I
Meant by her to recognize a painting
As beautiful or a movie stunning
And to adore the finitude of words
And understand as surfaces my dreams
Know the eye the organ of affection
And depths to be inflections
Of her voice & wrist & smile
|
173,120
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/20013/appeal-in-grey
|
Millen Brand
|
Appeal in Grey
|
THREE POEMS
APPEAL IN GREY
This air is grey the swallows tantalize
with flick of wing and veering lines of joy.
Grey crape is crushed against the hills and skies.
No tones of gold or scarlet here annoy
dun sunset and these wings' delirious turn
under low clouds, against a grey cold sea.
Sustained by ash, how clear the shadows burn-
and in the grey light what dark clarity!
Look upward! Not forever firmament
so holds an opaque cliff against the day;
for once with seeing let the skies be rent
and useless in their depths let shadows play-
your sight a second heaven where these wings'
parabola a tune of silence sings.
|
247,021
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147034/what39s-not-to-liken
|
Evie Shockley
|
what's not to liken?
|
the 14-year-old girl was treated like:
(a) a grown woman.
(b) a grown man.
the bikini-clad girl was handled by the cop like:
(a) a prostitute.
(b) a prostitute by her pimp.
the girl was slung to the ground like:
(a) a sack of garbage into a dumpster.
(b) somebody had something to prove.
the girl's braids flew around her head like:
(a) helicopter blades.
(b) she'd been slapped.
the black girl was pinned to the ground like:
(a) an amateur wrestler in a professional fight.
(b) swimming in a private pool is a threat to national security.
the girl's cries sounded like:
(a) the shrieks of children on a playground.
(b) the shrieks of children being torn from their mothers.
the protesting girl was shackled like:
(a) a criminal.
(b) a runaway slave.
liken it or not
-mckinney, texas, june 2015
|
218,018
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43032/makeup-on-empty-space
|
Anne Waldman
|
Makeup on Empty Space
|
I am putting makeup on empty space
all patinas convening on empty space
rouge blushing on empty space
I am putting makeup on empty space
pasting eyelashes on empty space
painting the eyebrows of empty space
piling creams on empty space
painting the phenomenal world
I am hanging ornaments on empty space
gold clips, lacquer combs, plastic hairpins on empty space
I am sticking wire pins into empty space
I pour words over empty space, enthrall the empty space
packing, stuffing jamming empty space
spinning necklaces around empty space
Fancy this, imagine this: painting the phenomenal world
bangles on wrists
pendants hung on empty space
I am putting my memory into empty space
undressing you
hanging the wrinkled clothes on a nail
hanging the green coat on a nail
dancing in the evening it ended with dancing in the evening
I am still thinking about putting makeup on empty space
I want to scare you: the hanging night, the drifting night,
the moaning night, daughter of troubled sleep I want to scare you
you
I bind as far as cold day goes
I bind the power of 20 husky men
I bind the seductive colorful women, all of them
I bind the massive rock
I bind the hanging night, the drifting night, the
moaning night, daughter of troubled sleep
I am binding my debts, I magnetize the phone bill
bind the root of my pointed tongue
I cup my hands in water, splash water on empty space
water drunk by empty space
Look what thoughts will do Look what words will do
from nothing to the face
from nothing to the root of the tongue
from nothing to speaking of empty space
I bind the ash tree
I bind the yew
I bind the willow
I bind uranium
I bind the uneconomical unrenewable energy of uranium
dash uranium to empty space
I bind the color red I seduce the color red to empty space
I put the sunset in empty space
I take the blue of his eyes and make an offering to empty space
renewable blue
I take the green of everything coming to life, it grows &
climbs into empty space
I put the white of the snow at the foot of empty space
I clasp the yellow of the cat's eyes sitting in the
black space I clasp them to my heart, empty space
I want the brown of this floor to rise up into empty space
Take the floor apart to find the brown,
bind it up again under spell of empty space
I want to take this old wall apart I am rich in my mind thinking
of this, I am thinking of putting makeup on empty space
Everything crumbles around empty space
the thin dry weed crumbles, the milkweed is blown into empty space
I bind the stars reflected in your eye
from nothing to these typing fingers
from nothing to the legs of the elk
from nothing to the neck of the deer
from nothing to porcelain teeth
from nothing to the fine stand of pine in the forest
I kept it going when I put the water on
when I let the water run
sweeping together in empty space
There is a better way to say empty space
Turn yourself inside out and you might disappear
you have a new definition in empty space
What I like about impermanence is the clash
of my big body with empty space
I am putting the floor back together again
I am rebuilding the wall
I am slapping mortar on bricks
I am fastening the machine together with delicate wire
There is no eternal thread, maybe there is thread of pure gold
I am starting to sing inside about the empty space
there is some new detail every time
I am taping the picture I love so well on the wall:
moonless black night beyond country-plaid curtains
everything illuminated out of empty space
I hang the black linen dress on my body
the hanging night, the drifting night, the moaning night
daughter of troubled sleep
This occurs to me
I hang up a mirror to catch stars, everything occurs to me out in the
night in my skull of empty space
I go outside in starry ice
I build up the house again in memory of empty space
This occurs to me about empty space
that it is nevered to be mentioned again
Fancy this
imagine this
painting the phenomenal world
there's talk of dressing the body with strange adornments
to remind you of a vow to empty space
there's talk of the discourse in your mind like a silkworm
I wish to venture into a not-chiseled place
I pour sand on the ground
Objects and vehicles emerge from the fog
the canyon is dangerous tonight
suddenly there are warning lights
The patrol is helpful in the manner of guiding
there is talk of slowing down
there is talk of a feminine deity
I bind her with a briar
I bind with the tooth of a tiger
I bind with my quartz crystal
I magnetize the worlds
I cover myself with jewels
I drink amrita
there is some new detail
there is a spangle on her shoe
there is a stud on her boot
the tires are studded for the difficult climb
I put my hands to my face
I am putting makeup on empty space
I wanted to scare you with the night that scared me
the drifting night, the moaning night
Someone was always intruding to make you forget empty space
you put it all on
you paint your nails
you put on scarves
all the time adorning empty space
Whatever-your-name-is I tell you "empty space"
with your fictions with dancing come around to it
with your funny way of singing come around to it
with your smiling come to it
with your enormous retinue & accumulation come around to it
with your extras come round to it
with your good fortune, with your lazy fortune come round to it
when you look most like a bird, that is the time to come around to it
when you are cheating, come to it
when you are in your anguished head
when you are not sensible
when you are insisting on the
praise from many tongues
It begins with the root of the tongue
it begins with the root of the heart
there is a spinal cord of wind
singing & moaning in empty space
|
246,045
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/144381/mothers-dirge-59bc0225c5a1d
|
Duy Doan
|
Mother’s Dirge
|
Because our family is from the countryside,
Your father liked falling from high places.
Limber feet make expert tree climbers.
The coconut - meat for eating, fiber for the buttonmaker.
Your father liked falling from high places.
Upon landing, he smiles. I carry my share.
The coconut - meat for eating, fiber for the buttonmaker.
Where the bend in the trunk begins matters most.
Upon landing, he smiles. I carry my share.
Husband and wife walk home, avoiding rice paddies.
Where the bend in the trunk begins matters most.
Even if they are full, trees that stand straight: avoid climbing.
Husband and wife walk home, avoiding rice paddies.
Your grandmother warned me many times over.
Even if they are full, trees that stand straight: avoid climbing.
But we were young, the city called to us like a wilderness.
Your grandmother warned me many times over.
Saigon is big, too busy, lacking decency.
But we were young, the city called to us like a wilderness.
The day he died, the sun heated the cement too hot for bare feet.
Saigon is big, too busy, lacking decency.
Afterwards, home brought no comfort.
The day he died, the sun heated the cement too hot for bare feet.
The New World Hotel stands fourteen stories.
Afterwards, home brought no comfort,
Because tragedy cannot save face.
The New World Hotel stands fourteen stories.
Everyone here must remember my new dress last fall,
Because tragedy cannot save face.
Our neighbors recount our tale with great skill and detail.
Everyone here must remember my new dress last fall.
With the white of his palms alone, your father made us a living.
Our neighbors recount our tale with great skill and detail.
The palm trees out front aren't tall enough.
With the white of his palms alone, your father made us a living.
Even when we were promised, I could see he had ability.
The palm trees out front aren't tall enough.
Mind your father, improve yourself, head upwards.
Even when we were promised, I could see he had ability.
He climbed until he got us to the city.
Mind your father, improve yourself, head upwards.
Limber feet make expert tree climbers.
Because our family is from the countryside,
He climbed until he got us to the city.
|
171,712
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/19218/the-wisdom-of-the-hand
|
Helen Cornelius
|
The Wisdom of the Hand
|
Shaped and patterned to a star,
The image of the hand in white
Tapers and presses on the mind
A veined and thin-blown branch of light.
The hand implants the urgent seed
Of music in the flesh. Its flower
Will bear the heart a winy cup
To fire with song its eloquent hour.
The hollow of the hand contains
The cloudy crystal of all time-
This hand that could inscribe a faith
To make leviathan sublime,
Or deify a god without
A face. It craftily engraves
This wisdom in a book whose page
In turning makes a sound of waves.
Now, sinuous tendon builds on bone
The contrapuntal fugue of motion
To thrust cathedrals toward the sky,
Or drive a ship across the ocean.
|
239,166
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57266/the-cherry-trees
|
Edward Thomas
|
The Cherry Trees
|
The cherry trees bend over and are shedding
On the old road where all that passed are dead,
Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding
This early May morn when there is none to wed.
|
164,964
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/15460/first-snow
|
Esther Louise Ruble
|
First Snow
|
The night was hiding a secret
When it stole
Through the red gates of sunset,
Coming so silently.
We heard it whispering
To the bare trees.
And while we wondered,
The white souls of the autumn leaves
Came softly back,
Drifting, drifting.
|
251,967
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/156918/thirds-of-a-ghost
|
Roy White
|
Thirds of a Ghost
|
They've packed a whole umbrage of courtiers
into their rattletrap conveyance, something between
a landau and a saloon. But nobody wants
to tell the young Queen she has to sit on the hump in front
with her dad's sweaty arm draped on the seat behind her.
The ball game on the radio
comes in each time they crest a hill, then fades
like fog in the static-filled valleys. In this country
the water towers are taller than the churches,
and just as dangerous. A man, a distant cousin,
slipped one day on his painting scaffold
while putting the L in Blackduck or Elk River,
slipped and fell like the neighbor's cat, picked up
and dropped by an eagle. He wasn't even drunk;
it's just so hard
being careful all the time. On the long drive
they play Three Thirds of a Ghost, but it bothers her
to take away part of someone who's barely there
to begin with.
Last year in school they did Fiddler on the Roof ,
and she lay in bed in the dream scene being Golde
while phantoms danced in a synthetic fog
on the floor of the school gym, but the fog was wrong,
it was oily and somebody slipped and disappeared
and someone else tripped on them, and soon the phantoms
were all invisible and crying
till someone turned off the machine and opened a window.
|
204,572
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/36229/the-cast
|
Sharon Olds
|
The Cast
|
When the doctor cut off my son's cast the
high scream of the saw filled the room
and Gabey's lap was covered with fluff like the
chaff of a new thing emerging, the
down in the hen-yard. Down the seam that
runs along the outside of the arm and
up the seam along the inside-that
line where the color of a white boy's arm
changes like a fish from belly-white to prismatic,
the saw ranged freely-the saw that does not cut flesh,
the doctor told us, smiling. Then the
horrible shriek ran down in a moment to nothing
and he took a sharp silver wedge like a
can-opener and jimmied at the cracks
until with a creak the glossy white
false arm cracked and there lay Gabey's
sweet dirty forearm, thin as a darkened twig.
He lifted it in astonishment, like a gift,
It's so light! he cried, a lot of light coming out of his eyes,
he fingered it and grinned, he picked up the
halves and put them together and gripped it and
carried it out through the waiting room and
everyone smiled the way you smile at a wedding, so
deep in us the desire to be healed and joined.
|
199,782
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/33827/the-death-of-dido
|
Tom Lowenstein
|
The Death of Dido
|
For Grant Fisher
Felix, heu! nimium felix, si litora tantum
numque Dardaniae tetigissent nostra carinae!
Aeneid ıv
I
Inarticulate till the last moment,
listening, listening to the hero's
diagrams of plot and reminiscence,
finally, her dying curses, brilliant
and futile, are consumed with her own body,
the words becoming enflamed ember,
rolling upward from the palace,
a hieroglyph of disenchantment
one can only turn his back on.
The inner courtyard blackens.
Her knife, blood burnt on the blade,
the jasper handle cracked,
lies in the ash; servants blinded
by the suddenness of everything hold back.
u
Out at sea, all that is visible
is the gaunt outline of the walls
rising above cliffs and foliage.
Then a glint from the interior
(her secret courtyard),
as though seen through honeycomb's
concealed intensity,
until, the worst part over, the flame
grows tall, and rising with her blood,
the apex of the fire injects
the hero's vision. He turns, goes forward,
heart pounding for a secondary reason
from this simulacrum, hand-made, of his Ilium.
m
Aeneas
She was the softest indelicacy of my project,
and I can not have that straining against my purpose,
my perusal of fate.
The flesh-her hand, her eye-is only an enticement
to reproduction in the wrong country.
I was never meant for Africa, that gross cradle of
misrule:
my fertile continent lies on the further shore.
The cold sea beckons me, albeit to an unknown
vicinity of the familiar.
IV
Dido
If it was his strength I loved,
then I must continue to make trial of it.
And yet... he will only acknowledge
my previous existence in terms
of some personal aberration.
He sees everything that way: his self-
projection swallowing the geography.
He is Troy. I am not Helen.
Why should he tear his heart to pieces
over one for whom there is no contest?
v
His nights are finished also.
Carthage queenless.
The palace courtyard
has a hole burnt in it.
vI
Aeneas
If she must take her life,
then she would in some way
in the end have also taken mine.
There was the danger.
Now I live again. May her
memory be as her ashes:
ghostless. Let them not be
scattered.
vu
Dido
Let him go then into dangers in which I have no part.
I shall not belabor him with my howling.
When he tastes a bitter moment, let his heart
be alone with its responsibility. A hard fate.
But he has chosen to be chosen.
vill
Aeneas
My prosperity is a national, rational preoccupation,
and is therefore stronger than her pining,
individuated ghost. Besides, I refuse to be
haunted by a mortal. That I have been permitted
to get away with my mistake is an omen:
Iam a hero and a prince again.
Love in strange countries must be
something other than than the heart's indulgence.
Would she have tied my people
to serving women, to a godforsaken insecurity?
In the wrong land, I became an island.
When it comes to marriage settlement,
I must insulate the proper kingdom in me.
Ix
Dido
So, he is gone, and in my final breath
I reproduced his going.
All that's left of me is incompleteness,
a void spirit, hanging in a landscape
of the afterlife, void in void. He races
onward, joining waves with his impeturbable direction.
As he moves, alone, under the eye of the Love Goddess,
his mother, only Dido will weep
that this indefatigable tautness
will forge history out of its renunciation.
This I understand. I do not bless it.
x
Aeneas
Shores . . . life . . . the light waves race towards their
boundaries.
In flame or darkness I have lost a life's tide of
possession.
My fine ships, my companions, let us not admit we are
exhausted.
We carry in our bodies all that is reclaimed of Ilium.
Hold this in your minds, lest the sea drag purpose in
its back-wash with it.
And I will hold you in my purpose too, at the expense
of everything in me.
|
235,646
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55318/the-wound-56d236c8c5ded
|
Adonis
|
The Wound
|
1. The leaves asleep under the wind are the wounds' ship, and the ages collapsed on top of each other are the wound's glory, and the trees rising out of our eyelashes are the wound's lake. The wound is to be found on bridges where the grave lengthens and patience goes on to no end between the shores of our love and death. The wound is a sign, and the wound is a crossing too. 2. To the language choked by tolling bells I offer the voice of the wound. To the stone coming from afar to the dried-up world crumbling to dust to the time ferried on creaky sleighs I light up the fire of the wound. And when history burns inside my clothes and when blue nails grow inside my books, I cry out to the day, "Who are you, who tosses you into my virgin land?" And inside my book and on my virgin land I stare into a pair of eyes made of dust. I hear someone saying, "I am the wound that is born and grows as your history grows." 3. I named you cloud, wound of the parting dove. I named you book and quill and here I begin the dialogue between me and the ancient tongue in the island of tomes in the archipelago of the ancient fall. And here I teach these words to the wind and the palms, O wound of the parting dove. 4. If I had a harbor in the land of dreams and mirrors, if I had a ship, if I had the remains of a city, if I had a city in the land of children and weeping, I would have written all this down for the wound's sake, a song like a spear that penetrates trees, stone, and sky, soft like water unbridled, startling like conquest. 5. Rain down on our desert O world adorned with dream and longing. Pour down, and shake us, we, the palms of the wound, tear out branches from trees that love the silence of the wound, that lie awake staring at its pointed eyelashes and soft hands. World adorned with dream and longing world that falls on my brow like the lash of a wound, don't come close-the wound is closer- don't tempt me-the wound is more beautiful. That magic that your eyes had flung on the last kingdoms- the wound has passed over it, passed and did not leave a single sail to tempt toward salvation, did not leave a single island behind.
|
235,998
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55530/may-56d2373a7826d
|
Karen Volkman
|
May
|
In May's gaud gown and ruby reckoning
the old saw wind repeats a colder thing.
Says, you are the bluest body I ever seen.
Says, dance that skeletal startle the way I might.
Radius, ulna, a catalogue of flex.
What do you think you're grabbing
with those gray hands? What do you think
you're hunting, cat-mouth creeling
in the mouseless dawn? Pink as meat
in the butcher's tender grip, white as
the opal of a thigh you smut the lie on.
In May's red ruse and smattered ravishings
you one, you two, you three your cruder schemes,
you blanch black lurk and blood the pallid bone
and hum scald need where the body says I am
and the rose sighs Touch me, I am dying
in the pleatpetal purring of mouthweathered May.
|
208,840
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/38369/bringing-in-the-cows
|
Laurel Trivelpiece
|
Bringing in the Cows
|
Easy enough to begin:
the sun behind, yes, and
daddy longleg shadows bounding
before us down the path
we and the stock have made
deep in prairie sod.
Thistles red with sunset
dust blow with us,
across the canyon soapweeds
shine like harps;
before the first string's struck
more pieces glide in place.
It's always summer when the cows
need bringing home.
Each with her necklace of flies
they linger in the late light,
blown-up acceptances of grazing.
Slobber loops
from their grave jaws;
they lower horns once more
to their lifework.
Rooted probably forever
in pasture which is theirs, and ours,
we children understand
this enrapture by grass,
we know the plantless sky gone red
at the rim encloses us all;
we shout-they ignore the dog
at their exquisite ankles.
I move us all intact toward home.
The cattle sway steadily forward,
creak through the twilight -
but the gate no longer closes.
I get this far-
and always hoof by hoof
they drop over the edge,
taking with them their heavy dreams,
the softness of a gathering wind,
those children fading in the dusk.
|
211,114
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/39513/change-56d21d160917e
|
Philip Schultz
|
Change
|
You wake up earlier than usual,
everything feels new, irrevocable,
like the light hovering near the ceiling
in silken scarves- you can taste it
on your tongue, fizzing like dry ice,
on the tips of your fingers, salty
like ocean foam. Your shadow
is sitting on the edge of your bed,
stretching. It has already brushed its teeth
& shaven but usually you rise together
with the light (which is now hovering near the
window)
- wasn't it once amber or outsized, like a splinter?
Surely you've never tasted it before: lavender, like
lilacs
on the first fine day of May, the happiest of seasons!
Now your heart is thumping like a tail-perhaps
you've grown
something inside yourself, a shinbone or new
webbing
between your toes? Whatever, it doesn't hurt
or especially please you, nothing feels late
or newly arrived, nothing is absent,
like a cramp or favorite flavor, nothing feels
suddenly grievous or especially appealing,
burdensome or flagrant, nothing seems atrocious
or disquieting, loud or subdued, you don't feel
greedy or lusty, certainly no more than usual,
your fingers & toes wiggle & the hair in both ears
remains calm, there's absolutely no warning signal
anywhere along the arterial railway of your arms &
legs
& the hair on your chest is drifting peacefully
with the tide of your breath. But something is
definitely
different, refined or edged like an eyebrow dormer,
enhanced like an encouraging wink at just the right
moment,
a slap on the back, say, just before rising
to accept one's fate, a lavish smile
thirty years late & therefore all the sweeter. . .
Yes, something is rising in your body like a tide
of forgiveness or a breath at long last released,
a kind of slow waltzing in the mind's fiery sky
where every cloud suddenly stands & leaves the table,
when only a moment ago the din of conversation
& clinking glasses was deafening & now you are
alone
with the music of your most somber breathing- yes
something has changed that has changed everything
else,
has overtaken you like a memory of the future
that appears at your side winking as if to suggest
a new arrangement, as in a novel of manners
where everyone suddenly changes partners
& is dancing with someone they love so profoundly
the clocks all over town begin chiming so loudly
you cannot hear what you are whispering over &
over again
like a chant you cannot remember knowing but
which echoes
like a heartbeat on your tongue- Monica Monica
Monica...
|
251,761
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/156569/crusa-the-hour-before-dawn
|
Kate Rushin
|
Crusa: The Hour before Dawn
|
In the hour before dawn, I rise up
to give myself a little bit
before it all starts again.
"Rise up" is not really what I do;
I lie there, awake, on my pallet,
and very still, barely breathing.
I listen, make sure no one else is stirring,
make sure nobody hears me.
I take a few moments to listen to
my blood beating in my ear,
hear my own breath
easing out my lips.
I let myself sink, ease down
again, for just a few minutes
in the cool gray
before it all starts
all over again and
goes and goes
until the middle of the night
and I collapse on rough cloth,
too tired to ease into sleep,
too frayed to dream
good dreams, knots in my back
like cobblestones.
I want to work for myself
not for somebody else.
I want to earn my own keep.
|
166,934
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/16555/against-the-wall
|
Aline Kilmer
|
Against the Wall
|
THREE POEMS
AGAINST THE WALL
If I live till my fighting days are done
I must fasten my armor on my eldest son.
I would give him better, but this is my best;
I can get along without it-I'll be glad to have a rest.
And Tl sit mending armor with my back against the wall,
Because I have a second son if this one should fall.
So I'll make it very shiny, and I'll whistle very loud,
And I'll clap him on the shoulder and I'll say, very proud:
"This is the lance J used to bear!"
(But I mustn't tell what happened when I bore it.)
"This is the helmet J used to wear!"
(But I won't say what befell me when I wore it.)
For you couldn't tell a youngster-it wouldn't be right-
That you wish you had died in your very first fight.
And I mustn't say that victory is never worth the cost,
That defeat may be bitter but it's better to have lost.
And I mustn't say that glory is as barren as a stone-
I'd better not say anything, but leave the lad alone.
So he'll fight very bravely and probably he'll fall.
And T'll sit mending armor with my back against the wall.
|
173,298
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/20115/she-nameless
|
Henry W. Rago
|
She, Nameless
|
These winds pass, and breathe a soft song for her,
And press their loving mouths upon the grass
Where yesterday she danced.
The twilight, grey-robed, comes from the glowing mist
To pin a blue star in her rippling hair-
But she is gone. . . .
She left a song to tremble on these lips,
To beat its tired wings upon the narrow cage.
There is no more. The night swoops to the earth
Like a great bird,
And the river undulates into the purple dusk,
Not questioning, not knowing.
|
199,376
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/33624/a-small-boy-once-lost-and-found
|
Gary Smith
|
A Small Boy, Once Lost and Found
|
He, trembling on the edge of whimsy,
I rescued a small boy hidden amid roses;
the bleeding paint of life colored his design
red, and red their petals crushed underfoot
his thornstruck hand ravished in pursuit.
Perhaps his frenzy was informed by innocence,
as an insatiable host devouring her guest;
or even one rose distinct from all others
by its ripe fragrance or pitched voice.
And he, even then unleasing himself to lust,
stares with rebuffed wonder at the roses.
|
231,764
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/53041/address
|
James Schuyler
|
Address
|
Right hand graced with writing,
my left arm my secondhand new
suit bestrode, from the auto I
say, "Antinous, perched like a
parakeet cracking sunflower seeds
in a hot ice cave or cage,
you're an apogee. Acid pennies
will fill your mouth, your head
bowl at a soldiers' revel. Fly
the safety you despise and seek,
a butcher with a butcher's knife
peers. The lice are fast. Ta ta."
|
199,390
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/33631/opposing
|
D. R. Fosso
|
Opposing
|
D. R. FOSSO
OPPOSING
Binary, to curve coordinated
As moonlight dredges ur
Burgeoning continuum,
A line making light
Connections, lashing point
For pointing across stars
Whose grid in place
Quadrants out, to hang
Like stretching reluctance
Drawn, racked, fixed toward
Being equal to what hurt is
Quartering reciprocally:
Because heart is concerned
Moonlight draws farness
Between the glare of
Distance needfully.
|
221,576
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46253/november-night
|
Adelaide Crapsey
|
November Night
|
Listen. .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.
|
208,314
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/38106/a-fifties-4th
|
Daniel Hall
|
A Fifties 4th
|
Word came down: the show
would go on, in spite of fog
thick as water. Then the initial
stumpf, and a rocket rose
to a dead-center, rib-
rattling concussion, like a fist
of the sea balked in granite
underfoot. But where skies past
had given way to meadows
of mullein and boneset, dandelions
gone to seed, asters distinct
vacancy, erasure, something
on the order of mood or inkling
washing over the cranium
like Adams's ur-memory
of sunlight warming to scarlet
fever and cooling to an original
apple. . . . And another neuron
fired deep in gray matter. Strange,
that neither one of us
paid it any mind: misled,
let down, we writhed and jigged
our rank impatience, tugging
at sleeves that might as well
have been empty, so far gone
was every grown-up heart, so high
on violence stripped of imagery,
resounding to the sternum struck
like a tuning fork-Yes
this is what it was or
must have been or will be like-
until the grand finale's
numbing redundancy woke
them out of it-the new TV
already on the fritz, its glow
clicked off. And then the slow
dispersal, car and home. By morning
things might be clearer, resolved
to a high-strung world repeated
in each screen's compound eye,
a myriad blind eye's simplifying,
simplifying. . . . In the meantime,
we slipped under a nightlong spell
of lulling, gut-thrumming tones
too deep to trace the source,
and my mother and father, my brother
and I-we all slept like children.
|
253,127
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/159125/piers-plowman-passus-6
|
William Langland
|
Piers Plowman: Passus 6
|
'þis were a wikkede wey but whoso hadde a gyde
þat [myȝte] folwen us ech foot': þus þis folk hem mened.
Quod Perkyn þe Plowman, 'By Seint Peter of Rome!
I haue an half acre to erie by þe heiȝe weye;
Hadde I eryed þis half acre and sowen it after
I wolde wende wiþ yow and þe wey teche.'
'þis were a long lettyng,' quod a lady in a Scleyre.
'What sholde we wommen werche þe while?'
'Somme shul sowe þe sak for shedyng of þe Whete.
And ye louely ladies wiþ youre longe fyngres,
þat ye haue silk and Sandel to sowe whan tyme is
Chesibles for Chapeleyns chirches to honoure.
Wyues and widewes wolle and flex spynneþ;
Makeþ cloþ, I counseille yow, and kenneþ so youre douȝtres.
þe nedy and þe naked nymeþ hede how þei liggeþ;
Casteþ hem cloþes [for cold] for so [wol] truþe.
For I shal lenen hem liflode but if þe lond faille
As longe as I lyue, for þe Lordes loue of heuene.
And alle manere of men þat [by þe] mete libbeþ,
Helpeþ hym werche wiȝtliche þat wynneþ youre foode.'|
'By Crist!' quod a knyȝt þoo, '[þow] kenne[st] us þe beste,
Ac on þe teme, trewely tauȝt was I neuere.
[Ac] kenne me,' quod þe knyȝt, 'and [I wole konne erie].'
'By Seint Poul!' quod Perkyn, '[for þow profrest þee so lowe]
I shal swynke and swete and sowe for us boþe,
And [ek] labour[e] for þi loue al my lif tyme,
In couenaunt þat þow kepe holy kirke and myselue
Fro wasto u rs and wikked men þat [wolde me destruye],
And go hunte hardiliche to hares and foxes,
To bores and to [bukkes] þat breken myne hegges,
And [fette þee hoom] faucons foweles to kille
For [þise] comeþ to my croft and croppeþ my whete.'
Curteisly þe knyȝt [conseyued] þise wordes:
'By my power, Piers, I pliȝt þee my trouþe
To fulfille þis forward þouȝ I fiȝte sholde.
Als longe as I lyue I shal þee maynetene.'
'Ye, and yet a point', quod Piers, 'I preye [þee] of moore:
Loke [þow] tene no tenaunt but truþe wole assente,
And þouȝ [þow] mowe am e rcy hem lat m e rcy be taxour
And mekenesse þi maister maugree Medes chekes;
And þouȝ pou e re men pr o fre [þee] p r esentes and ȝiftes
Nyme it niȝt an auenture [þow] mowe it niȝt deserue.
For þow shalt yelde it ayein at a one yeres [ende]
In a [wel] perilous place [þat] Purgatorie hatte.
And mysbede noȝt þi bondem[a]n, þe better [shalt] þow spede;
þouȝ he be þyn underlying here wel may happe in heuene
þat he worþ worþier set and wiþ moore blisse:
Amice, ascende superius.
For in Charnel at chirche cherles ben yuel to knowe,
Or a knyȝt from a knaue; knowe þis in þyn herte. |
And þat þow be trewe of þi tonge and tales þow hatie,
But if [it be] of wisdom or of wit þi werkmen to chaste;
Hold wiþ none harlotes ne here noȝt hir tales,
And namely at þe mete swiche men eschuwe,
For it ben þe deueles disours, I do þe to understonde.'
'I assente, by Seint Jame', seide þe knyȝt þanne,
'For to werche by þi wor[d] while my lif dureþ.'
'And I shal apparaille me', quod Perkyn, 'in pilgrymes wise
And wende wiþ yow [þe wey] til we fynde truþe.'
[He] caste on [hise] cloþes, yclouted and hole,
[Hise] cokeres and [hise] coffes for coId of [hise] nailes,
And [heng his] hoper at [his] hals in stede of a Scryppe:
'A busshel of bredcorn brynge me þ er Inne,
For I wol sowe it myself, and siþenes wol I wende
To pilgrymage as palm er es doon pardon for to haue.
And whoso helpeþ me to erie [or any þyng swynke]
Shal haue leue, by oure lord, to lese here in heruest
And make h[y]m murie þ er myd, maugree whoso bigruccheþ it.
And alle kynne crafty men þat konne lyuen in truþe,
I shal fynden hem fode þat feiþfulliche libbeþ,
Saue Ia[kk]e þe Iogelour and Ionette of þe Stuwes
And danyel þe dees pleyere and Denote þe baude
And frere faitour and folk of hi[s] ordre,
And Robin þe Ribaudour for hise rusty wordes.
Truþe tolde me ones and bad me telle it [forþ]:
Deleantur de libro uiuencium ; I sholde noȝt dele wiþ hem,
For holy chirche is [holde] of hem no tiþe to [aske],
Quia cum iustis non scribantur.
þey ben ascaped good auenture, [now] god hem amende.'
Dame werch-whan-tyme-is Piers wif hiȝte; |
His douȝter hiȝte do-riȝt-so-or-þi-dame-shal-þee-bete;
His sone hiȝte Suffre-þi-Souereyns-to-hauen-hir-wille-
Deme-hem-noȝt-for-if-þow-doost-þow-shalt-it-deere-abugge-
Lat-god-yworþe-wiþ-al-for-so-his-word-techeþ.
'For now I am old and hoor and haue of myn owene
To penaunce and to pilg ri mage I wol passe wiþ oþere;
Forþi I wole er I wende do write my biqueste.
In dei nomine, amen . I make it myselue .
'He shal haue my soule þat best haþ deserued,
And [defende it fro þe fend], for so I bileue,
Til I come to hise acountes as my [crede] me [techeþ]--
To haue a relees and a remission, on þat rental I leue.
'þe kirke shal haue my caroyne and kepe my bones
For of my corn and [my] catel [h]e craued þe tiþe;
I paide [hym] prestly for peril of my soule;
[He is] holden, I hope, to haue me in [mynde]
And mengen [me] in his memorie amonges alle c ri stene.
My wif shal haue of þat I wan wiþ truþe and na moore,
And dele among my [frendes] and my deere children.
For þouȝ I deye today, my dettes are quyte;
I bar hom þat I borwed er I to bedde yede.
And wiþþe residue and þe remenaunt, by þe Rode of Lukes!
I wol worshipe þerwiþ truþe by my lyue,
And ben his pilgrym atte plow for pouere mennes sake.
My plow[pote] shal be my pi[k] and [putte at] þe rotes,
And helpe my cultour to kerue and [close] þe furwes.'
Now is Perkyn and [þe] pilg ri mes to þe plow faren.
To erie þis half-acre holpen hym manye;
Dikeres and Delueres digged up þe balkes; |
þerwiþ was Perkyn apayed and preised hem [yerne].
Oþere werkmen þer were þat wroȝten ful [faste],
Ech man in his manere made hymself to doone,
And so m me to plese Perkyn piked up þe wedes.
At heiȝ prime Piers leet þe plowȝ stonde
To ou ers en hem hymself; whoso best wroȝte
Sholde be hired þ er after whan heruest tyme come.
[þ]anne seten so m me and songen atte Nale
And holpen ere þe[e] half acre wiþ 'how trol1y lolly'.
'Now by þe peril of my soule!' quod Piers al in pure tene,
'But ye arise þe raþer and rape yow to werche
Shal no greyn þat [here] groweþ glade yow at nede,
And þouȝ ye deye for doel þe deuel haue þat recch[e]!'
þo were faito ur s afered and feyned hem blynde;
So m me leide hir le[g] aliry as swiche lo[r]els konneþ
And made hir mone to Piers [how þei myȝte niȝt werche]:
'We haue no lymes to laboure w i þ; lord, ygraced be [y]e!
Ac we preie for yow, Piers, and for youre plowȝ boþe,
þat god of his grace your e greyn multiplie
And yelde yow [of] youre Almesse þat ye ȝyue us here;
For we may [neiþer] swynke ne swete, swich siknesse us eyleþ.'
'If it be sooþ', quod Piers, 'þat ye seyn, I shal it soone aspie.
Ye ben wastours, I woot wel, and truþe woot þe soe;
And I am his [h]olde hyne and [auȝte] hym to warne
Whiche þei were in þis world hise werkmen apeired.
Ye wasten þat men wynnen wiþ t ra uaille and wiþ tene.
Ac truþe shal teche yow his teme to dryue,
Or ye shul eten barly breed and of þe broke drynke; |
But if he be blynd or brokelegged or bolted wiþ Irens,
[þei] shal ete [as good as I, so me god helpe],
Til god of his [grace gare hem to arise].
Ac ye myȝte t ra uaille as truþe wolde and take mete and hyre
To kepe kyen in þe feld, þe corn fro þe beestes,
Diken or deluen or dyngen upon sheues
Or helpe make morter or bere Muk afeld.
In lecherie and losengerie ye lyuen, and in Sleuþe,
And al is þoruȝ suffraunce þ a t uengeaunce yow ne takeþ.
Ac Ancres and heremites þat eten but at Nones
And na moore er morwe, myn almesse shul þei haue,
And catel to [cope] hem wiþþat han Cloistres and chirches.
Ac Rob er t Renaboute shal [riȝt] noȝt haue of myne,
Ne Postles, but þei p re che konne and haue power of þe bisshop:
þei shul haue payn and potage and [a pitaunce biside],
For it is an unresonable Religion þat haþ riȝt noȝt of c er tein.'
[þ]anne gan wastour to wraþen hym and wolde haue yfouȝte,
To Piers þe Plowman he p ro frede his gloue.
A Bretoner, a bragger e , [he b]osted Piers als
And bad hym go pissen wiþ his plowȝ: '[pyupsshe] sherewe!
Wiltow, or neltow, we wol haue oure wille
Of þi flour and þi flesshe, fecche whanne us likeþ
And maken us murye þ er [miþ] maugree þi chekes.'
þanne Piers þe Plowman pleyned hym to þe knyȝte
To kepen hym as couenaunt was fro cursede sherewes,
'And fro þise wastours wolueskynnes þat makeþ þe world deere,
For [þei] wasten and wynnen noȝt and [þo] worþ neu er e
Plentee among þe people þe while my plowȝ liggeþ'.
Curteisly þe knyȝt þanne, as his kynde wolde,
Warnede wastour and wissed hym bettre:
'Or þow shalt abigge by þe lawe, by þe ordre þat I bere!'
'I was noȝt wont to werche', quod Wasto ur , 'now wol I noȝt bigynne!'
And leet liȝt of þe lawe and lasse of þe knyȝte,
And sette Piers at a pese and his plowȝ boþe,
And manaced [hym] and his men if þei mette eftsoone.
'Now by þe peril of my soule!' quod Piers, 'I shal apeire yow alle',
And houped after hunger þat herde hym at þe firste.
'Awreke me of wastours', quod he, 'þat þis world shendeþ!'
Hunger in haste þoo hente wastour by þe [mawe]
And wrong hym so by þe wo m be þat [al watrede his eiȝen].
He buffetted þe Bretoner aboute þe chekes
þat he loked lik a lant er ne al his lif after.
He bette hem so boþe he brast ner hire [mawes].
Ne hadde Piers wiþ a pese loof preyed [hym bileue]
þey hadde be [dede and] toluene, ne deme þow noon ooþer.
'[Lat] hem lyue', he seide, 'and lat hem ete wiþ hogges,
Or ellis benes [and] bren ybaken togideres.'
Faito ur s for fere flowen into Bernes
And flapten on wiþ flailes fro morwe til euen
þat hunger was noȝt hardy on hem for to loke.
For a pot[el] of peses þat Piers hadde ymaked
An heep of herernytes henten hem spades
And kitten hir copes and courtepies hem maked |
And wente as werkmen [to wedynge] and [mowynge]
And doluen [drit] and [dung] to [ditte out] hunger.
Blynde and bedreden were bootned a þousand;
þat seten to begge siluer soone were þei heeled,
For þat was bake for bayard was boote for many hungry;
And many a beggere for benes buxum was to swynke,
And ech a pouere man wel apaied to haue pesen for his hyre,
And what Piers preide hem to do as prest as a Sperhauk.
And [Piers was proud þerof ] and putte hem [in office]
And yaf hem mete [and money as þei] myȝte [asserue].
þanne hadde Piers pite and preide hunger to wende
Hoom [in]to his owene [e]rd and holden hym þ e re [euere].
'I am wel awroke of wastours þoruȝ þy myȝte.
Ac I preie þee, er þow passe', quod Piers to hunger,
'Of beggeris and bidderis what best be to doone.
For I woot wel, be þow went þei wol werche ille;
Meschief it makeþ þei be so meke nouþe,
And for defaute of foode þis folk is at my wille.
[And it] are my blody breþeren for god bouȝte us alle;
Truþe tauȝte me ones to louen hem ech one,
And helpen hem of alle þyng [after þat] hem nedeþ.
Now wolde I wite, [if þow wistest], what were þe beste,
And how I myȝte amaistren hem and make hem to werche.'
'Here now', quod hunger, 'and hoold it for a wisdom:
Bolde beggeris and bigge þat mowe hir breed biswynke,
Wiþ houndes breed and horse breed hoold up hir hertes,
[And] aba[u]e hem wiþ benes for bollynge of hir womb[e];
And if þe gomes grucche bidde hem go [and] swynke
And he shal soupe swetter whan he it haþ deserued. |
A[c] if þow fynde any freke þat Fortune haþ apeired
[Wip fire or wiþ] false men, fonde swiche to knowe.
Conforte h[e]m wiþ þi catel for cristes loue of heuene;
Loue hem and lene hem [and] so [þe] Iawe of [kynde wolde]:
Alter alterius onlera portate.
And alle manere of men þat þow myȝt aspie
þat nedy ben [or naked, and nouȝt han to spende,
Wiþ mete or wiþ mone lat make hem fare þe bettre].
Loue hem and lakke hem noȝt; lat god take þe uengeaunce;
þeiȝ þei doon yuele lat [þow] god yworþe:
Michi uindictam et ego retribuam.
And if þow wilt be gracious to god do as þe gospel techeþ
And biloue þee amonges [lowe] men: so shaltow lacche grace.'
Facite uo[bis] amicos de mammona iniquitatis.
'I wolde noȝt greue god', quod Piers, 'for al þe good on grounde!
Miȝte I synnelees do as þow seist?' seide Piers þanne.
'Ye I [h]ote þee', quod hunger, 'or ellis þe bible lieþ.
Go to Genesis þe geaunt, þe engendrour of us alle:
In sudore and swynk þow shalt þi mete tilie
And laboure for þi liflode, and so oure lord hiȝte.
And Sapience seiþ þe same-I seiȝ it in þe bible:
Piger [ propter frigus ] no feeld [w]olde tilie;
He shal [go] begge and bidde and no man bete his hunger.
Maþew wiþ mannes face mouþeþ þise wordes:
Seruus nequam hadde a Mnam and for he [n]olde [it use]
He hadde maugree of his maister eueremoore after,
And bynam hym his Mnam for he [n]wolde werche
And yaf [it hym in haste þat hadde ten bifore];
And [siþen] he seide--[hise seruauntz] it herde--
"He þat haþ shal haue and helpe þere [nede is] |
And he þat noȝt haþ shal noȝt haue and no man hym helpe,
And þat he weneþ weI to haue I wole it hym bireue".
Kynde wit wolde þat ech a wiȝt wroȝte,
Or [wiþ tech]ynge or [tell]ynge or t ra uaillynge [of hondes],
Contemplatif lif or Actif li; crist wolde [it als].
þe Sauter seiþ, in þe psalme of Beati omnes ,
þe freke þat fedeþ hymself wiþ his feiþful labour
He is blessed by þe book in body and in soule:
Labores manuum tuarum &c .'
'Yet I preie [þee]', quod piers, 'p [ u ] r charite , and [þpw] konne
Any leef of lechecraft lere it me, my deere;
For some of my seruaunts and myself boþe
Of al a wike werche noȝt, so oure wombe akeþ.'
'I woot wel,' quod hunger, 'what siknesse yow eyleþ.
Ye han manged ouer muche; þat makeþ yow grone.
Ac I hote þee', quod hunger, 'as þow þyn hele wilnest,
þat þow drynke no day er þow dyne somwhat.
Ete noȝt, I hote þee, er hunger þee take
And sende þee of his Sauce to sauore þi lippes,
And keep som til soper tyme and sitte noȝt to longe;
[A]rys up er Appetit haue eten his fille.
Lat noȝt sire Surfet sitten at þi borde;
L[o]ue hym noȝt for he is [a] lech[our] and likerous of tunge,
And after many maner metes his mawe is [alonged].
And if þow diete þee þus I dar legge myne [armes]
þat Phisik shal hi[s] furred ho[od] for his fode selle,
And his cloke of Calabre [and] þe knappes of golde,
And be fayn, by my feiþ, his Phisik to lete,
And lerne to laboure wiþ lond [lest] liflode [hym faille].
[þer are mo lieres pan] leches; lord hem amende!
þey do men deye þoruȝ hir drynkes er destynee it wolde.' |
'By Seint [Pernele]', quod Piers, 'þise arn p ro fitable wordes!
[þ]is is a louely lesson; lord it þee foryelde.
Wend now whan [þi wil is], þat wel be þow euere.'
'[I] bihote god,' quod hunger, 'hennes [nil] I wende
[Er] I haue dyned bi þis day and ydronke boþe.'
'I haue no peny,' quod Piers, 'pulettes to bugge,
Neiþer gees ne grys, but two grene cheses,
A fewe cruddes and creme and [a cake of otes],
[A lof] of benes and bran ybake for my fauntes.
And yet I seye, by my soule! I haue no salt bacon
Ne no cokeney, by crist! coloppes to maken.
Ac I haue p er cile and pore[t] and manye [plaunte coles],
And ek a cow and a calf, and a cart mare
To drawe afeld my donge þe while þe droȝte lasteþ.
By þis liflode [I moot] lyue til lammesse tyme,
By þat I hope to haue heruest in my crofte;
[þ]anne may I diȝte þi dyner as [þee] deere likeþ.'
Al þe pouere peple pescoddes fetten;
Benes and baken apples þei broȝte in hir lappes,
Chibolles and Cheruelles and ripe chiries manye;
And p ro frede Piers þis p re sent to plese wiþ hunger.
[Hunger eet þis] in haste and axed after moore.
þanne pou er e folk for fere fedden hunger yerne
Grene poret and pesen; to [peisen] hym þei þoȝte.
By þat it neȝed neer heruest and newe corn cam to chepyng.
þanne was folk fayn and fedde hunger wiþ þe beste;
Wiþ good Ale as Gloton taȝte [þei] garte [hym to] slepe.
And þo [n]olde Wastour noȝt werche, but wandre[d] aboute, |
Ne no beggere ete breed þat benes Inne [come],
But Coket [or] clermatyn or of clene whete,
Ne noon halfpeny ale in none wise drynke,
But of þe beste and of þe brunneste þat [brewesteres] selle.
Laborers þat haue no land to lyue on but hire handes
Deyne[þ] nouȝt to dyne a day nyȝt olde wortes.
May no peny ale hem paie, ne no pece of bacou n ,
But if it be fressh flessh ouþer fissh [y]fryed,
And þat chaud and plus chaud for chillynge of hir mawe.
And he be heiȝliche hyred ellis wole he chide;
[þat] he was werkman wroȝt [warie] þe tyme.
Ayeins Catons counseil comseþ he to Iangle:
Paupertatis onus pacienter ferre memento;
He greueþ hym ageyn god and gruccheþ ageyn Reson,
And þanne corseþ þe kyng and al [pe] counseil after
Swiche lawes to loke laborers to [chaste].
Ac whiles hunger was hir maister þ er wolde noon chide
Ne stryuen ayeins [þe] statut, so sterneliche he loked.
Ac I warne yow werkmen, wynneþ whil ye mowe
For hunger hiderward hasteþ hym faste.
He shal awake [þoruȝ] water wastours to chaste;
Er fyue yer be fulfilled swich famyn shal aryse.
þoruȝ flo[od] and foule wedres, fruytes shul faille,
And so sei[þ] Saturne and sente yow to warne.
Whan ye se þe [mone] amys and two monkes heddes,
And a mayde haue þe maistrie, and multiplie by eiȝte,
þanne shal deeþ wiþdrawe and derþe be Iustice,
And Dawe þe dyker e deye for hunger
But [if] god of his goodnesse graunte us a trewe.
|
167,402
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/16814/withdrawal-tr-by-muna-lee
|
Jos Manuel Poveda
|
Withdrawal
|
Enchanting is this suburb wide and cold,
With gray streets running into dingy alleys,
And the friendly room where your calm came to fold
Its essences with mine as in one chalice.
I would prolong this life secure and lonely,
Would make this pleasant quietude endure:
Cuba
Most wholly yours-you who are Nature only;
Most wholly mine-I who am Vision pure.
To live here in communion of flesh and spirit,
And the sensual wine, flowing freely for us,
Calmly to quaff from the goblet we inherit;
So far from men, that if any of them should go
Asking who we may be, then in a chorus
All men will answer him: "We do not know."
Jose Manuel Poveda
|
210,950
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/39431/birth-certificate-amsterdam-22-june-1988
|
Michael O'Loughlin
|
Birth Certificate: Amsterdam, 22 June 1988
|
1944: I hate those barbed-wire numbers,
evil crystals breaking the light,
death's rusted formula.
Two broken crosses.
The clawprints of a monstrous bird
gouged in a century come to grief.
There is no road. Our bodies
are flimsy bridges
across the unspeakable river,
and out in to
these bloodswept streets
we will carry you, alone.
Yet this year of your birth
has a pleasing shape:
two annealing eights
like the brief eclipse
of bodies when
your flesh was made flesh.
Though I know it solves nothing
though I know
it salves nothing
you have been born:
Saar, I carve your name
on the dawn
and the diamond ratchet
of your small song
|
230,454
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52277/the-kings-question
|
Brian Culhane
|
The King’s Question
|
Before he put his important question to an oracle,
Croesus planned to test all the famous soothsayers,
Sending runners half around the world, to Delphi,
Dodona, Amphiarius, Branchidae, and Ammon,
So as to determine the accuracy of their words;
His challenge: not to say anything of his future
But rather what he was doing in his capital, Sardis
(Eating an unlikely meal of lamb and tortoise,
Exactly one hundred days after messengers had set out).
This posed a challenge, then, of far space not of time:
Of seeing past dunes and rock fortresses; of flying,
Freighted, above caravans and seas; of sightedness,
As it were, in the present construed as a darkened room.
Croesus of Lydia sought by this means to gauge
The unplumbed limits of what each oracle knew,
Hesitant to entrust his fate to any unable to divine
Lamb and tortoise stewing in a bronze pot.
When only the Pythia of Apollo at Delphi correctly
Answered from her cleft, her tripod just the lens
For seeing into the royal ego, she put his mind to rest,
But not before speaking in her smoke-stung voice:
I count the grains of sand on the beach and the sea's depth;
I know the speech of the dumb and I hear those without voice.
We know this because those present wrote it down.
Of the King's crucial questions, however, there is nothing.
We have no word. The histories are silent.
My analyst,
Whose office on Madison was narrow as an anchorite's cave,
Would sit behind me as I stared up at her impassive ceiling,
As the uptown buses slushed all the way to Harlem,
And I would recount, with many hesitations and asides,
The play I was starring in, whose Acts were as yet
Fluid, though the whole loomed tragically enough.
She would listen, bent over knitting, or occasionally note
Some fact made less random by my tremulous soliloquy.
When much later I heard of her death after long cancer,
I walked across town and stood, in front of her building,
Trying to resurrect those afternoons that became the years
We labored together toward a time without neurosis,
When I might work and raise a family and find peace.
Find, if not happiness exactly, some surcease from pain.
What question had I failed to ask, when the chance was mine?
When she, who knew me so well, could have answered?
Let just one of those quicksilver hours be returned to me,
With my knowledge now of the world, and not a boy's,
With all that I have become a lighted room. One hour
To ask the question that burned, once, in a King's throat:
The question of all questions, the true source and center,
Without which a soul must make do, clap hands and sing.
|
225,880
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49214/valentine-56d22b153e7d1
|
Tom Pickard
|
Valentine
|
simplicity
say sleep
or
shall we
shower
have an apple
you are
as I need
water
shall I move?
do you dream?
shallow snow
flesh
melt this
|
229,802
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51917/the-violet
|
Jane Taylor
|
The Violet
|
Down in a green and shady bed,
A modest violet grew,
Its stalk was bent, it hung its head,
As if to hide from view.
And yet it was a lovely flower,
Its colours bright and fair;
It might have graced a rosy bower,
Instead of hiding there,
Yet there it was content to bloom,
In modest tints arrayed;
And there diffused its sweet perfume,
Within the silent shade.
Then let me to the valley go,
This pretty flower to see;
That I may also learn to grow
In sweet humility.
|
166,788
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/16480/sonnet-lovers-stir-not
|
Dorothy Keeley Aldis
|
Sonnet ("Lovers, stir not...")
|
BRIDES
I like to look at soft young brides,
And know that they are warmed and fed,
And, if grieving, comforted.
I like to think of their delight
In day and night,
And all the sweet surprises of
Their waking love.
SONNET
Lovers, stir not the bright pool of your love,
Nor throw a stone to watch the ripples play,
Nor cast small twigs afloat, nor from above
Shake down loose leaves to make the surface gay;
Nor yet from pique or curiosity
Make acorn boats and send them sailing out,
Boats full of hungry questionings to see
If they will bump each other. Do not shout
To hear if there are echoes; but be still,
And let your pool wait quietly in the sun
Reflecting patient things-the sky, the hill,
And growing trees for your delightful one.
And it will lie as brimming and as deep
As summer oceans, and as kind as sleep.
Dorothy Aldis
|
248,887
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/150757/iraq-vag-panic
|
Tracy Fuad
|
Iraq Vag Panic
|
You could say it wrong, like my wracked
brain, or with the wrong g
like gag or Garamond.
Some words are nearly in ruins.
Yesterday the gynecologist told me
I spell my name wrong-should have an o between the f and u .
Am I trying to get pregnant?
In my country, he begins.
And then, between my parted legs, tells me that over there
they do everything that we do,
just behind closed doors.
Am I anxious?
Well, someone is tweeting at me from a burner account,
or my step-grandma's trying to troll me again.
But I've already gone quick-violet.
On the plane, beside me
is a healer who tells me about her interest
in belly dancing.
Belly good is what my grandpa says instead of very.
Not his accent, just a joke.
We approach the fertile crescent:
Hewlêr , Kirkuk , Baghdad -three neon shocks.
Across the aisle a woman opens up
a document that just says ART.
Then selects the text in baby blue
and makes it shrink.
Timing, says the healer. Such a powerful force in life.
|
161,984
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13765/petals
|
Lila Rich
|
Petals
|
THE SNOWSTORM
Something is going to happen:
The moon is blue,
The sky is black,
The stars are yellow.
Suddenly the snow comes . . .
Next -morning
The children make snow-men
All over the town,
With tall silk hats,
And berries for eyes,
And little brown mittens,
FROZEN HEART
The ground is covered deep with snow,
And over the hill a treasure lies-
The reddest heart in the world.
It is my heart lies so red
In the white snow . . .
Frozen.
And I have forgotten all
But one old friend.
WAR
Over the battlefield
Dead men lay,
Bloody and cold
Under the stars. *
Over the battlefield
Cannon are booming
More death to come.
And women
Sit with their children
In their ruined homes.
Over the battlefield
Fadls the deep snow.
PRAISE
O birds,
Sing of the beautiful heaven.
Sing, birds,
Of the angels,
The harps,
And the sweet bells,
We should love this heaven of God's
For ever and ever!
|
216,114
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/42020/things-as-they-are-when-they-take-you
|
Renée Ashley
|
THINGS AS THEY ARE WHEN THEY TAKE YOU
|
It is the now that is reordered. All the markers gone. Thunder
on the window ledge. Your heart a rattle of rocks and
the world ends every day. You would like to get closer to
what-it-is. The what-you-just-by-moments-missed when
you were otherwise, abstractly, occupied. The what-bodies-
rolled-by-you, the what-fell-from-the-goddamned-sky. You
would like the dogs to understand-but they're otherwise, not
so abstractly, occupied. They want bones and beef: They want
to go outside, pee, take a big dump near the marigolds. They
want that now. And the black one would like his muzzle
stroked. You'd like some god to let the ladder down, you'd
like to understand a few things as they are when they take you.
|
252,529
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/157936/bodhisattvas-at-the-beach-in-november
|
Monica Sok
|
Bodhisattvas at the Beach in November
|
You can bring half that Gouda in your fridge if you want.
I'll bring a persimmon, my cutting board, and knife.
But first golden chrysanthemums at the farmers market, cut at the stem
and wrapped in butcher paper.
What about this olive bread- Oh yes, get this olive bread. Cash only.
Do you have cash? All right, fine. I have cash.
On 580 toward San Francisco, we talk about the imbecile men
who have rejected us lately.
Sister, sex is nothing to be embarrassed about.
Sister, the more you tell me about him the less I like him.
Hold my hand as we descend this hill of sand and hidden rocks.
Bodhisattvas at the beach are each other's bitches but not everybody's,
though we vow to return many lifetimes
until not one being is suffering, not even one blade of grass.
Let's lay the mat somewhere-you pick a spot-and drink margaritas.
You change from hiking boots into sandals and bare feet.
I still have on my socks. Bitches don't get cold .
1 sliced apple, 4 dates, 2 mandarins, a few square coconut crackers-
the kind that comes stale,
the kind my mom buys and leaves in my cupboard.
I feel really bad for your mom. I mean ... I feel really bad for my mom too!
A white dog walks up to us. A black dog sits next to our shoes.
They go when their owners call them back.
Next time I want a basket to bring to the beach. What kind of basket?
A wicker basket with a lid.
Oh and a separate basket for the wine bottle and wine glasses.
I want a basket for fruit . I want that too.
You and I with separate lighters burn incense sticks,
our bodies huddling over the flames
to keep them going against November wind.
I'm done praying before you're done praying.
Bitch, I'm envious that you're still praying.
As you chant to yourself quietly, as the scent of sandalwood snakes toward us,
I lie down watching two tiny crustaceans from wet sand
skip onto the mat.
What is your purpose? Do you mean my purpose in life ? I'm a bodhisattva.
I am too. I know.
I'm not here to change anybody. Or tell anybody what's best for them.
I know why the sun is out today. Because yesterday it rained.
Are you sure you want to wear boots? Instead of your sandals?
I'm rolling up my pants to walk to the water.
Whatever we try to prevent from happening, will happen.
The tide rushes toward us. It knows we are here.
Now my pants are wet up to my calves
and your boots are completely soaked,
but the chrysanthemums are floating in the ocean.
Our small offering.
I love you. I love you too.
Let me put on my socks and sneakers to climb the steep hill with you,
huffing and puffing, and not without laughter.
I'm getting better at accepting myself and others and the way things are.
Look at the sunset beyond the pink ice plants. Yes, I see.
Look at this spray-painted bench high off the ground. It has character.
If you say so. Character.
The air smells like basil. Or mint. I told you this in the beginning
when we first got here. It's eucalyptus.
I can't remember the last time I held someone's hand. Bitch, it was me.
In January. Before lockdown.
It seemed like a lifetime ago. It was many lifetimes ago.
|
164,114
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14987/children-at-play
|
Jack Merten
|
Children at Play
|
"The wind is whistling in the lane," said Sybil.
"Fairies whispering," said Jane.
"The leaves are sighing overhead."
"Songs of dying birds," Jane said.
"The vines are dripping with the rain," said Sybil.
"Diamond necklaces," said Jane.
"The toadstools perk their ugly heads."
"Cricket umbrellas," Jane said.
"The water beats against the pane," said Sybil.
"Clouds are tapping drums," said Jane.
"Let's go ask for sugar-bread."
"Let's do," Jane said.
|
230,402
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/52251/game-night
|
Conor O'Callaghan
|
Game Night
|
Love not
being in the loop.
Grant the spruces' wish,
the golf compound
graying out of use,
suvs in the it lot,
power outage,
a chorus from the quad.
Bless the elsewhere
where others are
not here or you.
And rain
after midnight . . .
Ask yourself,
is that rain or bells?
|
175,310
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/21300/kin-56d20c90dccdf
|
Edward Weismiller
|
Kin
|
THE LATCHED GATE
KIN
These I see with a dog's eyes:
'The hunched cloud on a sunset rise
Like a tawny cat with sickle claws;
The eyes, nose, mouth a rabbit draws
In the windy snow with its thimble track;
And the long moon burning, white on black.
'These I know as a dog knows:
Disquiet of the effluent rose;
The tingling leaf, compulsive musk
Of shadowed deer on a track at dusk;
And the mad command to break and go
Inherent in the unscarred snow.
These I feel as a dog feels:
The fang keen at my nimble heels;
And a low, sullen, secret hate
For the leash and the whip and the latched gate.
|
217,806
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42911/poor-old-lady
|
Anonymous
|
Poor Old Lady
|
Poor old lady, she swallowed a fly.
I don't know why she swallowed a fly.
Poor old lady, I think she'll die.
Poor old lady, she swallowed a spider.
It squirmed and wriggled and turned inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
I don't know why she swallowed a fly.
Poor old lady, I think she'll die.
Poor old lady, she swallowed a bird.
How absurd! She swallowed a bird.
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don't know why she swallowed a fly.
Poor old lady, I think she'll die.
Poor old lady, she swallowed a cat.
Thank of that! She swallowed a cat.
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird.
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don't know why she swallowed a fly.
Poor old lady, I think she'll die.
Poor old lady, she swallowed a dog.
She went the whole hog when she swallowed the dog.
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat,
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don't know why she swallowed a fly.
Poor old lady, I think she'll die.
Poor old lady, she swallowed a cow.
I don't know how she swallowed a cow.
She swallowed the cow to catch the dog,
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat,
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don't know why she swallowed a fly.
Poor old lady, I think she'll die.
Poor old lady, she swallowed a horse.
She died, of course.
|
211,896
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/39907/my-friend-someone
|
Charles Simic
|
My Friend Someone
|
By the sudden draft of cool air,
It could be, a door has opened
Somewhere in the evening quiet.
Someone hesitates on the threshold
With a faint smile
Of a happy premonition.
On this day without a date,
On a back street, dusky
But for the light of a TV set
Here and there,
And one lone tree in flower
Trailing a long train
Of white petals and shadows.
|
244,445
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/92048/twang-they-and-i-incline-this-ear-to-tin
|
Fanny Howe
|
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin.
|
If my fingers could twang
the guitar as before they
would not be what they are and
neither would I. I
would be back in young-time. Incline
towards me, Gwendolyn, this
Monday, and lend me your ear
while I loll on my pillows to
turn your songs from strings into tin.
|
193,130
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/30497/poem-flowering-balls
|
Alan Dugan
|
Poem ("Flowering balls!...")
|
FOUNDED IN I9I2 BY HARRIET MONROE
VOLUME CVIX NUMBER 4
JANUARY 1967
ALAN DUGAN
FLOWER GROWER IN AQUARIUS
I fell away toward death
for lack of company and goods:
no business but to flinch.
A woman caught me with the hook
her smile wore at its edge
and wound me up with a winch.
Love's bucket, I was refilled!
So I came back and kissed
and cursed her. She fixed lunch.
She gave me solid grounds,
the company of laughter,
and the water-works. 1
recant! 1 should invest
in fly-by-night concerns
while I have flesh to risk
and currency to burn,
so 1 will hang around
her well-head and decant
death's water to my drawer.
|
200,512
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/34192/mar-45
|
Mark Halperin
|
April 1945
|
How even the light is on this afternoon
of my fifth year. Mother must hear
the radio, she pushes the vacuum
through such graceful arabesques.
I am not paying attention to my cards
but to Mother, beautiful in her short skirt
and cream blouse, light shining
in the edges of her upswept hair.
We are home alone, sharing the room
. while we do our work. Mother has made a turn
toward the kitchen. She switches
the machine off, sinking to the rug.
On the radio a man is repeating the hour
the president died. Mother sobs
but she has remembered to open her arms
and I have climbed in them, my cheek
on her breast. I tell her not to
but she cries. There is music,
very slow and not to dance to, and Mother
rocking me in that bright room.
|
195,056
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/31462/the-unifying-principle
|
A. R. Ammons
|
The Unifying Principle
|
Ramshackles, archipelagoes, loose constellations
are less fierce, subsidiary centers, with the
attenuations of interstices, roughing the salience,
jarring the outbreak of too insistent commonalty:
a board, for example, not surrendering the rectitude
of its corners, the island of the oaks an
admonishment to pines, underfigurings (as of the Bear)
that take identity on: this motion is against
the grinding oneness of seas, hallows distinction
into the specific: but less lovely, too, for how
is the mass to be amassed, by what sanction
neighbor touch neighbor, island bear resemblance,
how are distinction's hard lines to be dissolved
(and preserved): what may all the people turn to,
the old letters, the shaped, characteristic peak
generations of minds have deflected and kept:
a particular tread that sometimes unweaves, taking
more shape on, into dance: much must be
tolerated as out of timbre, out of step, as being not
in its time or mood (the hiatus of the unconcerned)
and much room provided for the wretched to find caves
to ponder way off in: what then can lift the people
and only when they choose to rise or what can make
them want to rise, though business prevents: the
unifying principle will be a
phrase shared, an old cedar long known, general
wind-shapes in a usual sand: those objects single,
single enough to be uninterfering, multiple by
the piling on of shared sight, touch, saying:
when it's found the people live the small wraths of ease.
|
192,248
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/30055/the-grandfather-father-poem
|
Charles Olson
|
The Grandfather-Father Poem
|
rolled in the grass
like an overrun horse
or a poor dog
to cool himself
from his employment
in the South Works
of U S Steel
as an Irish shoveler
to make their fires hot
to make ingots above
by puddlers of
melted metal
and my grandfather
down below
at the bottom of the
rung
stoking
their furnaces
with black
soft
coal soft coal
makes fire
heat higher
sooner,
beloved
Jack Hines (whose picture
in a devil's
cap-black jack
Hines
and would come home
to the little white house
sitting by itself
on Mitchell Street
or was then
Middle River Road
and take off
all his clothes, down to
his full red underwear
the way the story was told
and go out there
on the grass
and roll
and roll
my
grandfather
my Jack Hines
whose picture
I have lost
I have also lost
the tin-type
of-was it?-my mother's
mother? a severe face
tight actually
her cheeks
colored false pink
nothing like the
limber
of that harsh
grand father's
face in the picture
loving man
who hated
my father, would
understand
anyone
and go stupid
when attacked by like
Irish blockheads to
what also conceivably my
grandfather may
have been gave allegiances to
-like the Church I don't know
was a whiskey
drinker
but no drunk
stored barrels
of apples
in his cellar
etc
there was nothing
that I can honestly recall
wasn't
'strict? about him-that is he wasn't
soft, I don't believe. He would my impression is give up
anything to
anyone or any
thing: (impossible to be
accurate about
'memories' in
that generation
unless
like one's own parents
they live long enough
for you yourself
to be able to
judge: on my father
I'm afraid I am
right, that he did fight
rigidly the next generation of
'Irish' in the
U S Post Office to
mon grand
Pére: Paddy Hehir
"Blocky" Sheehan
and the Postmaster,
Healy, ran a travel agency
Pleasant Street
Worcester
killed himself
'fighting'
such men (when my grandfather
rolled right over on the rug
when he was leaning over the window seat
getting some magazine say out of the inside
(with the cushions off) when I
came up from behind
and kicked him
and I went out in the kitchen
and sd to my mother Grandpa
is lying on the floor
he looked out of the tintype
like a different type
than my pa
black walnut
the bed was made of
he put the ridges in
where he missed
when he was giving
my uncle a beating
my mother used to beg
to be beaten
instead
who knows?
but I make Jack Hines
too mean
a man and a woman either is only a thing when each
is full of blood
This is my poem to my grandfather,
John Hines his name was
he migrated to the United States
from Ireland sometime
(my mother was born
on this side 1872)
before
1872
and was employed
so far as I know only
in his lifetime
on this side by
the U S Steel (retired
as such a night watchman
after (I suppose) having
shoveled coal most
of his life
He had been born "in Cork,
brought up
in Galway," and recently
I figured out he must have been
sent 'home' to
Galway during
the potato famine
(the Hines,
as an Irish clan
were reasonably small
and had their center
around Gort
1964
|
190,194
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/29013/mirror-in-february
|
Thomas Kinsella
|
Mirror in February
|
The day dawns, with scent of must and rain,
Of opened soil, dark trees, dry bedroom air.
Under the fading lamp, half dressed-my brain
Idling on some compulsive fantasy-
I towel my shaven jaw and stop, and stare,
Riveted by a dark exhausted eye,
A dry downturning mouth.
It seems again that it is time to learn,
In this contented, crumbling place of growth
To which, for the time being, I return.
Now plainly in the mirror of my soul
I read that I have looked my last on youth
And little more: for they are not made whole
That reach the age of Christ.
Below my window the awakening trees,
Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defaced
Suffering their brute necessities;
And how should the flesh not quail, that span for span
Is mutilated more? In slow distaste
I fold my towel with what grace I can,
Not young, and not renewable, but man.
|
243,713
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/90970/from-feeld
|
Jos Charles
|
from feeld
|
i
thees wite skirtes / & orang
sweters / i wont / inn the feedynge marte /
wile mye vegetable partes bloome /
inn the commen waye / a grackel
inn the guarden rooste / the tall
wymon wasching handes /
or eyeing turnups
/ the sadened powres wee rub / so economicalie / inn 1 virsion off thynges /
alarum is mye nayme
/ unkempt & handeld
i am hors /
i am sadeld / i am a brokn hors
ii
the bit provydes
its hors / the rocke
provyded a boye
blessynge gode / i wantd 1
secrete but fore the rod
inn this / mye longish throte / i kno
no new waye / 2 speech
this / the powre off lyons
iii
tonite i wuld luv to rite the mothe inn the guarden / 2 greev it / & as a mater off forme / did u kno not a monthe goes bye / a tran i kno doesnt dye / just shye off 27 / its such a plesure to b alive / inn this trembled soot / u lent / shock is a struktured responce / a whord lost inn the mouthe off keepers / & u thum at the mothe / a dozen bes / i tetherred thees nites / i gathred so manie treees
|
209,526
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/38713/pas-de-deux-56d21c27c61c7
|
Michael McFee
|
Pas de Deux
|
MICHAEL MC FEE
PAS DE DEUX
Sleep is our long dark dance.
All night we turn
with a grace impossible by day,
feeling for each other
like parts of a single body:
under the blank sheet
hands know where to find hands,
feet stretch for feet,
we fill the bed's familiar stage
and disappear
deep into our mirrored breath,
delivered from the fear
of a mattress left half-empty,
of having to learn
that difficult long dark dance
without a partner.
|
183,526
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/25594/the-death-of-kropotkin
|
Herbert Read
|
The Death of Kropotkin
|
Emma said there had been snow
and a keen wind sighing in the withered branches
And I imagined little details
sheepswool caught in the thorns
red berries
and a prophet's dead face on the pillow.
She said he had died in peace
and the eternal intelligence on his brow
had seemed like a light
in the dark unlit hut
And I imagined
steel-rimmed glasses on a side-table
and eyes forever hidden.
She said there had been a great concourse of people
walking out from Moscow
or the nearest station
poor humble people - Lenin had let them come
to sidle lovingly past
his silent form.
Several hundred people, simple people
fur caps down to their ears
their padded trousers crisscrossed with string
standing there on the obliterated road
waiting for the cortége.
a
Dmitrov was the name of the place.
They took his body to Moscow
and there formed a procession
perhaps a mile long
old revolutionaries, young students
and children carrying wreaths
of holly and laurel.
They marched five miles
carrying the black and scarlet banners
and I imagine the feathery snow falling
gently on his bier
gently on the bowed heads
and the patient streets.
But when they reached the burial place
the snow had ceased
and the winter sun
sinkingred
distained the level glittering plain.
A river of glowing light
poured into the open grave
all the light in the world
sank with his coffin
into the Russian earth,
It was seven versts outside Moscow.
On the steps of their museum
the Tolstoyans had gathered
to play mournful music
as the cortége passed.
Dark then it was, and silent.
I remembered, said Emma, the cairn on the mountain ridge
a heap of stones and broken branches
with tokens attached of horsehair or rag
and the cry: "The waters before us
flow now to the Amir.
No mountains more to cross."
No mountains more to cross for you
dear comrade and pioneer.
You have crossed the Great Khinghän
travelling eastward into rich lands
where many will follow you.
Hersert READ
|
217,572
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42782/in-the-deep-channel
|
William E. Stafford
|
In the Deep Channel
|
Setting a trotline after sundown
if we went far enough away in the night
sometimes up out of deep water
would come a secret-headed channel cat,
Eyes that were still eyes in the rush of darkness,
flowing feelers noncommittal and black,
and hidden in the fins those rasping bone daggers,
with one spiking upward on its back.
We would come at daylight and find the line sag,
the fishbelly gleam and the rush on the tether:
to feel the swerve and the deep current
which tugged at the tree roots below the river.
|
222,256
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46683/on-the-gift-of-a-book-to-a-child
|
Hilaire Belloc
|
On the Gift of a Book to a Child
|
Child! do not throw this book about!
Refrain from the unholy pleasure
Of cutting all the pictures out!
Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.
Child, have you never heard it said
That you are heir to all the ages?
Why, then, your hands were never made
To tear these beautiful thick pages!
Your little hands were made to take
The better things and leave the worse ones:
They also may be used to shake
The Massive Paws of Elder Persons.
And when your prayers complete the day,
Darling, your little tiny hands
Were also made, I think, to pray
For men that lose their fairylands.
|
198,646
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/33259/october-56d216c039635
|
Gary Soto
|
October
|
GARY SOTO
OCTOBER
A cold day, though only October,
And the grass has greyed
Like the frost that hardened it
This morning.
And this morning
After the wind left
With its pile of clouds
The broken fence steamed, sunlight spread
Like seed from one field .
To another, out of a bare sycamore
Sparrows lifted above the ridge.
In the ditch an owl shuffled into a nest
Of old leaves and cotton
A black tassel of lizard flapping
From its beak. Mice
And ants gathered under the flat ground
And slipped downward like water,
A coyote squatted behind granite,
His ears tilting
Toward a rustle, eyes dark
With the winter to come.
|
244,843
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/92679/what-to-read-this-summer
|
Ange Mlinko
|
What to Read This Summer
|
Terrible are the rose names ...
Stakeholders in a tradition of
"Grande Amore" and "True Love"
(one carmine, the other blush ... ), their aims
are, for the most part, scattershot.
"Mothersday" and "Playboy,"
"Senior Prom" and "Let's Enjoy"
vie with a lyrical "Lady of Shalott,"
while a flyweight "Pink Knockout"
comes "Outta the Blue" to mock
"Honey Perfume," "Pillow Talk"
- jock Cupid wielding clout.
Then maybe a puckish curator
pairs "Las Vegas" with "Nearly Wild,"
"Buttercream" with "Julia Child,"
"Aloha" with "Hello, Neighbor ... "
•
Misenus, son of Aeolus, god of the wind,
don't you think it's bad form
to practice trumpet on this platform,
what with the dentistry squeal
at construction site decibel levels
of braking blade shaving molar steel,
dropped-in blare of delays and arrivals
squelched against granite, at close intervals,
while you riff on "Over the Rainbow" - ?
You received some negative attention
from Triton, after blowing his conch so loud
you inadvertently entered yourself
in an unwinnable contest; now,
stuck in a twenty-first-century translation
of hell, you press the stops, and for an obol
prepare our burial in an infinite axial scroll
with a tinier and tinier turning radius,
as if we were those hordes, the unsanctified,
who shoved one another along the Cocytus,
none led on to the golden bough
by Venus's semaphore, the unloved rock doves,
whom Virgil treats so gently in the Aeneid .
|
177,760
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/22617/sir-isaac-newton
|
Robert Liddell Lowe
|
Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
|
THREE POEMS
SIR ISAAC NEWTON
(1642-1727)
An apple fell in England
And Revelation spread
Its haughty, secret sunlight
Within a bachelor's head.
The Abstract humbly rested
In symbol round and red.
Strong Force exerted pull
On him who clearly saw.
Unloosened from the stem
Of Nature-the heedless Awe-
The fruit and farmer's son
Were subjects of one Law.
|
170,894
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/18760/shadow-56d20af819a5c
|
Marion Ethel Hamilton
|
Shadow
|
A sudden coolness comes, the dusk drops down,
The quail run to the chaparral with a cry;
And so these orange poppies fall away-
The golden petals of a golden day.
SHADOW
When I remember what a swift sharp hour
Youth lit upon me, like a butterfly
Upon some glowing and unknowing flower,
And with what insolence Youth flew on by;
When I consider with what gallant grace
The grasses dry to dust and disappear,
And how all life is dying to make place,
And how my heart is crying at each year-
I am disconsolate that I should grieve,
That I alone am desolate at decay.
But how can consciousness of doom achieve
A careless rapture in each hour and day?
Why should Death's shadow move across the sun,
Eclipsing day before my day is done?
|
1,547,258
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/146441/teenage-riot
|
Matthew Dickman
|
Teenage Riot
|
All of us were boys only some were taller or already in high school, and almost
nothing else
mattered but to learn some new trick,
to pull off something we saw in a skate video, wind cutting
around our bodies when we flew
off the lip of a ramp, grabbed the board and twisted
into a 180, kicking
a leg out and landing it, the only way to run
through the neighborhood
was to run through it
together, flipping off cops and skinheads, I almost
don't even remember girls but a vague sense of the taste of bubble gum
and how they smelled so different
from us, sitting in some kid's basement drinking
his parents' vodka, we grew out our bangs, moved in a pack,
jumped in when some one of us
got jumped,
so when a man we had never seen before
came up and started beating on Simon, one of us dropped his skateboard, walked
over to the man
like someone walking into a bank
and stabbed him.
The man, startled, sat down, right there on the asphalt,
right in the middle of his new consciousness,
kind of looking around.
|
235,290
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55071/brutal
|
Andrea Cohen
|
Brutal
|
Brutal to give
the prisoner a window-
a blue sky glimpse-
as if an afterlife
existed. Brutal
for you to parade
in a body
in the same
room where I dream you.
|
220,708
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45320/claribel
|
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
|
Claribel
|
Where Claribel low-lieth
The breezes pause and die,
Letting the rose-leaves fall:
But the solemn oak-tree sigheth,
Thick-leaved, ambrosial,
With an ancient melody
Of an inward agony,
Where Claribel low-lieth.
At eve the beetle boometh
Athwart the thicket lone:
At noon the wild bee hummeth
About the moss'd headstone:
At midnight the moon cometh,
And looketh down alone.
Her song the lintwhite swelleth,
The clear-voiced mavis dwelleth,
The callow throstle lispeth,
The slumbrous wave outwelleth,
The babbling runnel crispeth,
The hollow grot replieth
Where Claribel low-lieth.
|
160,172
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12761/quest
|
Winifred Webb
|
Quest
|
Ho all you eager travelers!
Have you some place to go
Where you forget the many things
You wish you did not know?
Forget your own insistent past
And feel just fit and free?
Tf you have found it, won't you tell
Its happy name to me?
|
187,034
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/27401/davids-boyhood
|
Adrienne Rich
|
David's Boyhood
|
Lying against the throne-room wall,
Let David play the harp for Saul.
So shall the melancholic brain
Forget the crown and its migraine,
The kingdom's mischief, and the way
The self disperses, day by day.
Though someday on Gilboa that tongue
Shall spell a prince's funeral song,
: And that enravished voice shall drive
Uriah from honey in the hive,
Though Absalom shall strangle in
The harpstrings eloquent and thin,
And the ex-psalmer turn in pain
A head that lies where Saul's has lain,
Let him compose, the gifted boy,
What manhood's hand cannot destroy,
What later folly or design
Shall never censor by a line.
Let David play for Saul, and sing
To ease the soul of David, King.
|
227,836
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50582/a-prospect-of-heaven-makes-death-easy
|
Isaac Watts
|
A Prospect of Heaven Makes Death Easy
|
There is a land of pure delight
Where saints immortal reign;
Infinite day excludes the night,
And pleasures banish pain.
There everlasting spring abides,
And never-withering flowers;
Death like a narrow sea divides
This heavenly land from ours.
Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood
Stand dressed in living green:
So to the Jews old Canaan stood,
While Jordan rolled between.
But timorous mortals start and shrink
To cross this narrow sea,
And linger shivering on the brink,
And fear to launch away.
Oh could we make our doubts remove,
These gloomy doubts that rise,
And see the Canaan that we love,
With unbeclouded eyes;
Could we but climb where Moses stood
And view the landscape o'er,
Not Jordan's stream, nor death's cold flood,
Should fright us from the shore.
|
215,592
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/41758/voyage-to-cythera
|
Charles Simic
|
Voyage to Cythera
|
I'll go to the island of Cythera
On foot, of course,
I'll set out some May evening,
Light as a feather,
There where the goddess is fabled to have risen
Naked from the sea-
And instead, jump over the park fence
Where the lilacs are blooming
And the trees are feverish with new leaves.
The famous swing,
I saw in a painting once,
Is surely around here,
And the one in a long white dress,
With eyes blindfolded
As she gropes my way down a winding path
Among masked companions
Wearing black capes and carrying knives.
It's just the story of unrequited love,
Pll say to them
After they empty my pockets.
Oh love, running off with my wallet
And a Chinese lantern
In the evening darkness.
|
219,292
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44095/a-burnt-ship
|
John Donne
|
A Burnt Ship
|
Out of a fired ship, which by no way
But drowning could be rescued from the flame,
Some men leap'd forth, and ever as they came
Near the foes' ships, did by their shot decay;
So all were lost, which in the ship were found,
They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship drown'd.
|
207,240
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/37567/beloved-lover
|
Annalisa Cima
|
("Beloved lover...")
|
ANNALISA CIMA
da IPOTESI D'AMORE
1. ACHERUBINO
Forse analogie naturali
danzano la gioia
forse scolorita la noia
dell'inganno
vanno
le ipotesi d'amore.
Forse bastava
una lama
per trinciare pensieri
futilita, e darci
in un fusorio incontro
compattezza
temperatura
brama.
Le sorti della guerra
sono incerte.
Vincerö: perché Venere
da a me i regni
che Marte dona agli altri.
2. A CHERUBINO
1.
Amante amato amandoti
ho gocce negli occhi
e sale nel palato
ANNALISA CIMA
From HYPOTHESES ON LOVE
1. TO CHERUBINO
Maybe natural analogies
dance for joy
maybe once the boredom of deceit
has dimmed
they go:
hypotheses on love.
Maybe all it took
was a blade
to cut through thoughts
futilities, and give us
in one fusing meeting
closeness
fire
desire.
The fortunes of war
are unsure.
But I shall win: for Venus
grants me realms
that Mars bestows on others.
2. TO CHERUBINO
1.
Beloved lover loving you
I have tears in my eyes
and salt on my tongue
non vi € iato tra noi
siamo
calore calato nel vivere obliando
e quando guardo
vedo che sei sole
colore che muta e invita a perdersi
nel solco che dall'ansia dirama.
2.
Gettati gli ultimi fiori
lo troviamo bianco
questo campo di seminagioni.
Vi sono stagioni di pianto
e stagioni dove il canto dei giorni
muta il passato congelato.
E allora percorrere cammini di muschi
uniti nei vapori-sudari
saper cogliere il ritorno
di un giorno smarrito.
4. A CHERUBINO
Cominciö per gioco
poi poco a poco
improvviso il richiamo
degli occhi che mi fanno
impallidire.
Chiaro é il nesso tra noi
trame eran gia sottese
correvano magie di venti.
All'alato chiedo
che non fermi il gioco
conosco i segni dell'antico fuoco:
dolce & deporre la saggezza
a tempo e luogo.
ANNALISA CIMA
there's no distance between us
we are
heat fallen into life forgetting
and when I look
I see you're the sun
color that changes and wants to be lost
in the furrow that forks out of yearning.
2.
After the last flowers are tossed
we find this field
of sowings white.
There are times for tears
and times when the song of days
transforms the frozen past.
And then to go down mossy paths
together in the shrouds of haze
able to reap the return
of a lost day.
4. TO CHERUBINO
It began as a game
then little by little
suddenly the claim
of your eyes that turn me
pale.
The link between us is clear
the web was already taut
charms of winds were whispering.
I asked the winged one
not to end the game
I know the signs of the ancient flame:
it's sweet to set wisdom aside
in the right time and place.
5. A CHERUBINO
E quando
ripercorri il cammino
elsa, stelo, regno
del fiorire,
non vi é arroganza
nel tuo ardire:
aquila che torni nella roccia
goccia di mille spirali
risali i viali dell'impallidire
quasi terra d'esilio
che t'accolse guerriero
e ti ritrova figlio.
9, A CHERUBINO
Dimmi senti anche tu
il correre del tempo.
Sembra lontano il giorno
dell'incantamento.
Muovo i passi
a sottili ritrovi,
tesi fili di archi
verso acque furtive
dove arcadi insieme andiamo.
11. A CHERUBINO
Anche tu invecchierai
e morirai del male del finire.
Resta il tempo per cantare
una mattina ritrovata.
ANNALISA CIMA
5. TO CHERUBINO
And when you
take the way again
hilt, shaft and reign
of flowering,
there's no arrogance
in your burning:
eagle that returns to the rock
drop of a thousand spirals
you climb the paths of paling again
like a land of exile
that received you as a warrior
and rediscovers you a son.
9. TO CHERUBINO
Tell me do you too feel
time flowing on.
The day of enchantment seems
long gone.
I take steps
toward subtle meeting places
stretched lines of arcs
toward furtive waters
where, Arcadians, we go together.
11. TO CHERUBINO
You too will age
and die of the sickness of ending.
There's time enough to sing
one recovered morning.
Translated by Jonathan Galassi
|
232,828
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/53614/beginning-with-an-acute-stab-of-nostalgia-it-gets-worse-and-worse
|
Arthur Vogelsang
|
Beginning With an Acute Stab of Nostalgia, It Gets Worse and Worse
|
I called Hart on my longer distance line
And in case you didn't know he is in heavine.
Hart, I implored, I searched your book
(Yes, you have a Collected ) and could fine
Nothing about the 36 cast iron bridges in
Central Park, why didn't you write about one
At least. He said he wrote about the narrow Bow Bridge
For peds built in 1878 which is sad and fine
And always photographed through branches in the foregrine
Which was sufficiently sad to make him weep all the tine
He was trying to write the poem so he threw it away.
He tried again and he uncontrollably wept agine.
Did you try a third tine,
I asked. No, he said, and here's why:
Life is uncontrollably sad all the time
Unless we divert ourselves with art objects,
Sex, or tequila or beer, and if we tell the truth
About this, for instance when we feel it
While looking at a photograph of the cast ine
Bow Bridge or see in life not photos but the real bridge at a short destine
Away with the actual park and branches around us,
We feel like killing ourselves to stop the pain
Or as you, Arthur, call it, the pine,
So I didn't try a third time
To write the poem. Get off this line,
He said. Wait! Don't hang up, he said, I take it back, stay on the phine!
Well, I considered calling on my second longer distance line
Kenneth who in heavine has changed his name to Kenneth Kine
And Barbara who I did call on my second longer distance line
With Hart on hold and affirmed her name change to Barbara Gine
But I didn't ask those younger two about uncontrollable totally dominant sadness
Or whether they had discarded their own poems about the 36 cast ine
Bridges for people to walk on in Central Park
Because they were weeping on the paper and pine
Ing for Hart's Big Deep Salty Lake to ease the pine.
I didn't call Frank because I never knew hine I mean him.
I figured the next step was mine.
So if you can believe it I hung up on Hart Crine.
|
170,196
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/18375/spring-song-56d20ac526d76
|
Thomas Hill McNeal
|
Spring Song
|
There goes the way to the moon-
A path as gay and white
As ever sent a giddy streak
Across a purple night.
And every bat and beetle
That wears a ready wing
Is up and lumbering about
In quest of spring!
|
228,866
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/51241/marble-sized-song
|
Albert Goldbarth
|
Marble-Sized Song
|
Does she love you? She says yes, but really
how do you know unless you undress that easy assertion,
undoing its petals and laminae, and going in
below all trace of consciousness, into the neuroelectrical
coffer where self-understanding is storaged away,
and then lifting its uttermost molecule out, to study
in its nakedness as it spins
in a clinical light?-the way
we all, in our various individual versions
of this common human urge, go in,
and in, and in, the physicist down
to the string-vibration underlying matter, and
the Appalachia fiddler getting so
(as she puts it) "into my music," sound becomes
a flesh for her to intimately ("in"-timately)
enter, "its thick and its sweetbreads."
Is he cheating on you? He says no, and feigns
that he's insulted, but for certainty
you'll need to delicately strip the bark away
and drill, and tweeze, until you can smear a microscope slide
of the pith and can augur the chitterlings
-the way the philosopher can't accept a surface
assumption of truth, but needs to peel back
the fatty sheen of the dermis, soak the cambium layer
into a blow-away foam, and then with pick
and lightbeam helmet, inch by inch begin
spelunking through those splayed-out caverns
under the crust, where gems of cogitation are buried
-the way the diver descends for the pearl,
the miner: in, the archaeologist: in, the therapist: down
the snakier roots of us and in, and in, the way
the lone, leg-pretzeled yogi makes
a glowing bathysphere of worldliness and sends it in,
and further in, tinier and heavier and ever in,
the way the man in the opium den is floating forever,
toward a horizon positioned in the center of the center
of his head. . . . If we could stand beyond the border
of our species and consider us objectively, it might seem
that our purpose in existing is to be a living agency
that balances, or maybe even slows, the universe's
irreversible expansion out, and out . . . and each
of us, a contribution to that task.
My friend John's wife received the news: a "growth,"
a "mass," on her pituitary, marble-sized, mysterious.
And the primary-care physician said: Yes,
we must go in and in. That couldn ' t be the final word!
And the second-opinion physician said: Yes,
my sweet-and-shivering-one,
my fingerprint-and-irisprint-uniqueness,
someone's-dearest, you
who said the prayers at Juliette's grave, who drove
all night from Switzerland with your daughter, you
on this irreplaceable day in your irreplaceable skin
in the scumbled light as it crosses the bay in Corpus Christi,
yes in the shadows, yes in the radiance,
yes we must go in and in.
|
164,856
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/15399/encounter-56d208c687c34
|
Emanuel Carnevali
|
Encounter
|
Little grey lady sitting by the roadside in the cold,
My fire is to warm you, not to burn you up.
Little grey lady in your little grey house in the warmth,
Your warmth is to loosen my frozen arms and tongue,
Not to drowse me.
|
223,656
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47729/stone-gullets
|
May Swenson
|
Stone Gullets
|
Stone gullets among Inrush Feed Backsuck and
The borders swallow Outburst Huge engorgements Swallow
In gulps the sea Tide crams jagged Smacks snorts chuckups Follow
In urgent thirst Jaws the hollow Insurge Hollow
Gushing evacuations follow Jetty it must Outpush Greed
|
234,380
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54573/symphony-no3-in-d-minor
|
Jonathan Williams
|
Symphony No.3, in D Minor
|
I. Pan Awakes: Summer Marches In
Pan's
spring rain
"drives his victims
out to the animals
with whom they become
as one"-
pain and paeans,
hung in the mouth,
to be sung
II. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me
June 6, 1857, Thoreau in his Journal:
A year is made up of a certain series
and number of sensations and thoughts
which have their language in nature...
Now I am ice, now
I am sorrel.
Or, Clare, 1840, Epping Forest:
I found the poems in the fields
And only wrote them down
and
The book I love is everywhere
And not in idle words
John, claritas tell us the words are not idle,
the syllables are able
to turn plantains into quatrains,
tune raceme to cyme, panicle and umbel to
form corollas in light clusters of tones...
Sam Palmer hit it:
"Milton, by one epithet
draws an oak of the largest girth I ever saw,
'Pine and monumental oak':
I have just been trying to draw a large one in
Lullingstone; but the poet's tree is huger than
any in the park."
Muse in a meadow, compose in
a mind!
III. What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me
Harris's Sparrow-
103 species seen
by the Georgia Ornithological Society
in Rabun Gap,
including Harris's Sparrow, with its
black crown, face, and bib encircling
a pink bill
It was, I think, the third sighting
in Georgia, and I should have been there
instead of reading Clare, listening to
catbirds and worrying about
Turdus migratorious that flew
directly into the Volkswagen and
bounced into a ditch
Friend Robin, I cannot figure it, if I'd
been going 40 you might be
whistling in some grass.
10 tepid people got 10 stale letters
one day earlier,
I cannot be happy
about that.
IV. What the Night Tells Me
the dark drones on
in the southern wheat fields
and the hop flowers
open before the sun's
beckoning
the end
is ripeness, the wind
rises,
and the dawn says
yes
YES! it says
"yes"
V. What the Morning Bells Tell Me
Sounds, and sweet aires
that give delight
and hurt not-
that, let
Shakespeare's
delectation
bear us
VI. What Love Tells Me
Anton Bruckner counts the 877th leaf
on a linden tree in the countryside near Wien
and prays:
Dear God, Sweet Jesus,
Save Us, Save Us...
the Light in the Grass,
the Wind on the Hill,
are in my head,
the world cannot be heard
Leaves obliterate
my heart,
we touch each other
far apart...
Let us count
into
the Darkness
|
196,196
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/32032/the-poem-arriving-at-last
|
Daniel G. Hoffman
|
The Poem ("Arriving at last...")
|
DANIEL HOFFMAN
DANIEL HOFFMAN
COMANCHES
I read this once: how the Comanche,
Weak after long fasting, felt a slow
Trembling shake the earth-the buffalo!-
And raced his pony barebacked toward the herd.
That morning not a brave in camp could gird
Himself with strength to bend the stout bowstem,
Yet with bursting arms he twangs his arrow
Deep in the bison's heart. Comanches know
The Great Spirit, when it possesses them.
And now the poet, half a savage bound
By the hungers of his tribe, paces his swift
Foray across a desolate hunting-ground
In hopes to run to earth a fleeting creature
And, with the unpremeditated gift
Of spirit, seize imagination's meat.
STONE
Ever since the first fires
Cooled and colors went out of the air
And on my flanks water sizzled and seethed
And collected in warm pools in my pockets
I have not changed. Cold came,
Prying its levers of ice in my veins,
|
194,414
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/31139/chateau
|
Andrew Hoyem
|
Chateau
|
The house I would build for us has twelve rooms. One dozen
presently exist. I have built them with my own hands at various
times and places over the thirty years since you were conceived.
They are constructed inside-out, out of doors, in nature, out of
doorways, out in the open.
Twelve times I have found places for a room. Upon a hill would
stand a tree. Around its trunk a room would be made with my
own hands. Each radiates 360 degrees from a different species of
tree, uncontained by walls, containing nothing. The rooms are
half full.
Now that we have found each other I would build a house for us
with my own hands. Oh rooms, expand at my command! See
how twelve invisible domes grow contiguous. See how visibly
we are contingent upon one another.
Tam carrying you in my arms into the world. In your arms I am
held still and could stay so forever. The home you would build
has been built by your own hands. Our house is a mobile home
made of one living room and of our love.
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.