Louis Burke Jenkins (October 28, 1942 – December 21, 2019) The speaker points out that we don't really have much of a grasp of things, not only the big things, the important questions, but the small everyday things. "How many steps up to your front door? What kind of tree grows in your backyard? What …
Paul Kane – Time Was
Paul Kane (March 23, 1950 -) Still, I must not forget that I once managed to put these things into writing. — Blanchot When the high-pitched sounds of the August continuo circulated like breezes through the immovable heat, time was a single leaf drifting upwards, then down. In the emptying out, the vacating of routine, the …
Christina Rossetti – The Rainbow
Christina Georgina Rossetti (December 05, 1830 – December 29, 1894) Boats sail on the rivers, And ships sail on the seas; But clouds that sail across the sky Are prettier far than these. There are bridges on the rivers, As pretty as you please; But the bow that bridges heaven, And overtops the trees, And …
Jorge Luis Borges – The Moon
Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899 – June 14, 1986) — to María Kodama There is so much loneliness in that gold. The moon of every night is not the moon That the first Adam saw. The centuries Of human wakefulness have left it brimming With ancient tears. Look at it. It is your mirror. …
Faith Shearin – Turtle in the Road
Faith Shearin It was the spring before we moved again, a list of what we must do on the refrigerator, when my daughter and I found a turtle in the road. He was not gentle or shy, not properly afraid of the cars that swerved around his mistake. I thought I might encourage him towards …
James Kavanaugh – There Are Men Too Gentle To Live Among Wolves
James Kavanaugh (September 17, 1928 – 29 December 2009) There are men too gentle to live among wolves Who prey upon them with IBM eyes And sell their hearts and guts for martinis at noon. There are men too gentle for a savage world Who dream instead of snow and children and Halloween And wonder …
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Alberto Alvaro Rios – When Giving Is All We Have
Alberto Álvaro Ríos (September 18, 1952 -) One river gives Its journey to the next. We give because someone gave to us. We give because nobody gave to us. We give because giving has changed us. We give because giving could have changed us. We have been better for it, We have been wounded by …
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Tao Writer – Stand Undiminished – The Poem
Tao Writer (April 17, 1948 -) Taken from my motherland in chains to travel waters unknown by me, to toil in soil unfamiliar to my hands. Forced to speak a language which does not sing. Exploited, enslaved, whipped and hanged. Defined in a constitution as three fifths of a man. I stood beside you in …
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Harold Maine – The Hour Of Man
Harold Maine aka Walker Winslow I want to see the radio and television turned off for an hour a week, the paper and magazines laid aside, the car locked safely in the garage, the bridge table folded, the liquor bottle corked, and the sedatives kept tightly in their packages. I want to see production and …
Denise Levertov – Sojourns In The Parallel World
Denise Levertov (October 24, 1923 - December 20, 1997) We live our lives of human passions, cruelties, dreams, concepts, crimes and the exercise of virtue in and beside a world devoid of our preoccupations, free from apprehension—though affected, certainly, by our actions. A world parallel to our own though overlapping. We call it “Nature”; only …
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May Sarton – Rinsing The Eye
May Sarton pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995) Between me and everything I see. The glass is pain. How to slide it away, Unblur my vision? “We must rinse the eye,” My old friend, the poet, Used to say. But that was in Belgium Many years ago. Raymond …
Paul Lawrence Dunbar – Ships That Pass in the Night
Paul Laurence Dunbar (June 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906 Out in the sky the great dark clouds are massing; I look far out into the pregnant night, Where I can hear a solemn booming gun And catch the gleaming of a random light, That tells me that the ship I seek is passing, passing. …
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William Cullen Bryant – To A Cloud
William Cullen Bryant (November 3, 1794 – June 12, 1878) Beautiful cloud! with folds so soft and fair, Swimming in the pure quiet air! Thy fleeces bathed in sunlight, while below Thy shadow o'er the vale moves slow; Where, midst their labour, pause the reaper train As cool it comes along the grain. Beautiful cloud! …
Edna St. Vincent Millay – When You, That At This Moment Are To Me
Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950) When you, that at this moment are to me Dearer than words on paper, shall depart, And be no more the warder of my heart, Whereof again myself shall hold the key; And be no more—what now you seem to be— The sun, from …
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John Freeman – Weight
John Freeman (January 29, 1880 - September 23, 1929) What if each time you caused pain a small round stone was put in your pocket pebbles for inducing self-doubt osmium for death. When you heard someone approach their pockets noisy you’d know, just as dogs do: to keep distance. Some men would pull wagons behind …
James Crews – Telling My Father
James Crews I found him on the porch that morning, sipping cold coffee, watching a crow dip down from the power line, into the pile of black bags stuffed in the dumpster where he pecked and snagged a can tab, then carried it off, clamped in his beak like the key to a room only …
Naomi Shihab Nye – The Traveling Onion
Naomi Shihab Nye (March 12, 1952 -) It is believed that the onion originally came from India. In Egypt it was an object of worship —why I haven’t been able to find out. From Egypt the onion entered Greece and on to Italy, thence into all of Europe. — Better Living Cookbook When I think …
Chana Bloch – Swimming in the Rain
Chana Bloch (March 15, 1940 – May 19, 2017) Swaddled and sleeved in water, I dive to the rocky bottom and rise as the first drops of sky find the ocean. The waters above meet the waters below, the sweet and the salt, and I’m swimming back to the beginning. The forecasts were wrong. Half …
Ruby Archer – In Cloudy Weather
Ruby Archer (January 28, 1873 - January 23, 1961) Where is my halcyon blue? The grudging sky is overcast. Where is my dowering sun? A glory past. Nay, soul, thy daily sky Unfading spirit light must win, Dark days thy sunshine glow Ah bright within!
Stanley Kunitz – The Layers
Stanley Jasspon Kunitz (July 29, 1905 – May 14, 2006) I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather …
Reginald Dwayne Betts – If Absence Was the Source of Silence
Reginald Dwayne Betts (November 05, 1980 -) if absence was the source of silence some things my sons would never hear not from my reluctance to speak or the thief that is silenced his mother's tongue his grandmother's tongue turned the stare of the woman who when it's far too early for the Sun to …
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Dorianne Laux – Mother’s Day
Dorianne Laux (January 10, 1952 -) I passed through the narrow hills of my mother’s hips one cold morning and never looked back, until now, clipping her tough toenails, sitting on the bed's edge combing out the tuft of hair at the crown where it ratted up while she slept, her thumbs locked into her …
Joy Harjo – Remember
Joy Harjo (May 09, 1951 -) Remember the sky that you were born under, know each of the star's stories. Remember the moon, know who she is. Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the strongest point of time. Remember sundown and the giving away to night. Remember your birth, how your mother struggled …
Pablo Neruda – The Citizen
Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973), better known by his pen name and, later, legal name Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973) I went into the tool shops in all innocence to buy a simple hammer or some vague scissors. I should never have done it. …
Marie Howe – Singularity
Marie Howe (1950 -) *— after Stephen Hawking* Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were? so compact nobody needed a bed, or food or money — nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept. For every atom belonging to …
Barbara Crooker – Poem With An Embedded Line By Susan Cohen
Barbara Crooker When the evening newscast leads to despair, when my Facebook feed raises my blood pressure, when I can't listen to NPR anymore, I turn to the sky, blooming like chicory, its dearth of clouds, its vast blue endlessness. The trees are turning copper, gold, bronze, fired by the October sun, and the bees …
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Ella Wheeler Wilcox – Protest
Ella Wheeler Wilcox (November 5, 1850–October 30, 1919) To sin by silence, when we should protest, Makes cowards out of men. The human race Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised Against injustice, ignorance, and lust, The inquisition yet would serve the law, And guillotines decide our least disputes. The few who dare, …
Robert Bly – Poem
I If we are truly free and live in a free country, When shall I be without this heaviness of mind? When shall I have peace? Peace this way and peace that way? I have already looked beneath the street And there I saw the bitter waters going down, The ancient worms eating up the …
Pattiann Rogers – Opus from Space
Pattiann Rogers Almost everything I know is glad to be born—not only the desert orangetip, on the twist flower or tansy, shaking birth moisture from its wings, but also the naked warbler nesting, head wavering toward sky, and the honey possum, the pygmy possum, blind, hairless thimbles of forward, press and part. Almost everything I’ve …
William Wordsworth – I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud
William Wordsworth (April 1770 07, – April 23, 1850) I wandered lonely as a Cloud That floats on high o'er Vales and Hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden Daffodils; Beside the Lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And …
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Deborah Digges – The Transmigration of Souls
Deborah Digges (February 6, 1950 – April 10, 2009) Inside the starboard window of his room in a boat at sea, the piece of earth he's scraped from a dead gull’s leg sprouts eighty different species, green under bell glass. By the sunlight of the oil lamp he makes rain as the wind picks up …
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