When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses… We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. — John F. Kennedy
Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) I like it when you’re silent, for you seem as if you’re gone,and you hear me from afar, and my voice doesn’t touch you.It seems as if your eyes had flown away from you—it seems as if a kiss were sealing shut your mouth.Since each and every thing …
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Rachel Galvin It was interesting to be thinking of something.It was interesting to be thinking. To be thinking. To. It was interesting.It was then she heard the voice the one inside the voice the one she heard.It was then. Was it a poor imitation or was it the real McCoy. Was it.Did she know. Was …
Barbara Ras (1949 -) But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown handsgloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old fingeron your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful lookOf the …
Michele Graaff Cable TV dreams cast outfrom a clickety slide bar channelchanger. One of us, sister or I,standing on thick beige carpetin our tapered teen jeans, scrunchiedhair and socks, to slide fastthe changer, a zipper whipof color flashes on the screen, fastfaces with perfect bangs, moviesmade of satin romance,commercials zing a jingle, sugar cerealwe can’t …
Julia de Burgos (February 17, 1914 – July 6, 1953) Already the people murmur that I am your enemybecause they say that in verse I give the world your me. They lie, Julia de Burgos. They lie, Julia de Burgos.Who rises in my verses is not your voice. It is my voicebecause you are the …
Charles Simic (May 09, 1938 -) Monday comes around with a new tattooIt won't show us and here's TuesdayWalking its latest nightmare on a leashAnd Wednesday blind as the rain tappingOn a windowpane and Thursday sippingBad coffee served by a pretty waitressAnd Friday lost in a confusion of sadAnd happy faces and Saturday flashingLike a …
Catherine Bowman She loves to talk on the phone while washing the dinner dishes, catching up long distance or dealing with issues closer to home, the reconnoitring with the long lost or a recent so-and-so. She finds it therapeutic, washing down the aftermath. And that feeling she gets in her stomach with a loved one’s …
Tracy K Smith (April 16, 1972 -) I’ve been beating my head all day long on the same six lines, Snapped off and whittled to nothing like the nub of a pencil Chewed up and smoothed over, yellow paint flecking my teeth. And this whole time a hot wind’s been swatting down my door, Spat …
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Albert Katz it was around my 70th birthday that I realized I wasn’t 40 anymore that the ballast which had kept me steady for so long had shifted that the people I conjured from my 20s were no longer lithe carnal dynamos reanimated in ageless revisionist trysts on my 70th birthday old friends started to …
Billy Collins (March 22, 1941 -) Not long after we had sat down to dinner at a long table in a restaurant in Chicago and were deeply engrossed in the heavy menus, one of us—a bearded man with a colorful tie— asked if any one of us had ever considered applying the paradoxes of Zeno …
Traci Brimhall I love you like ladybugs love windowsills, love you like sperm whales love squid. There’s no depth I wouldn’t follow you through. I love you like the pawns in chess love aristocratic horses. I’ll throw myself in front of a bishop or a queen for you. Even a sentient castle. My love is …
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dg nanouk okpik For Arthur Sze *(Qin) Dim Sum*equivalent to: *dot, speck heart* Stone piled on stone I finish my meal. In this early sunrise I see shadows where a cairn of rocks used to stack in the direction of eastern light. In late morning, I lit red candles and placed them next to a …
Philip Schultz (January 06, 1945 -) On Turner Classic Movies Philip Marlowe is grimacing at the slinky beauty of the woman who will become the wife of the actor playing him. The man playing me, up at three this morning, worrying about the cost of private school, health insurance, and the slow grinding away of …
Kate Slaughter McKinney (February 6, 1859 - 1939) was an author and poet who used the pen-name of Katydid. There's a cloud on my life’s horizon wonderful shape and hue, Like the feathery down of a snow-drift ’Tis dimpled with changeful blue. I gaze on its shadowy outline And drink in the calm of the …
Julie Cadwallader Staub I am 52 years old, and have spent truly the better part of my life out-of-doors but yesterday I heard a new sound above my head a rustling, ruffling quietness in the spring air and when I turned my face upward I saw a flock of blackbirds rounding a curve I didn't …
Tao Writer (April 17, 1948 -) I like my coffee black, my whiskey on the rocks, my wine chilled in a flat bottom glass— the way they serve it in Italy. I like my woman in ecstasy, moaning my name out loud. My eggs, scrambled, moist but not runny. I like my sheets and towels …
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Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012) I prefer movies. I prefer cats. I prefer the oaks along the Warta. I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky. I prefer myself liking people to myself loving mankind. I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case. I prefer the color green. I prefer …
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Charles Simic (May 09, 1938 -) This peaceful world of ours is ready for destruction— And still the sun shines, the sparrows come Each morning to the bakery for crumbs. Next door, two men deliver a bed for a pair of newlyweds And stop to admire a bicycle chained to a parking meter. Its owner …
Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (July 12, 1904 – September 23 1973), better known by his pen name and, later, legal name Pablo Neruda And it was at that age . . . poetry arrived in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don’t …
John L. Stanizzi I had seen them in the tree, and heard they mate for life, so I hung a bird feeder and waited. By the third day, sparrows and purple finches hovered and jockeyed like a swarm of bees fighting over one flower. So I hung another feeder, but the squabbling continued and the …
William Stanley Merwin (September 30, 1927 – March 15, 2019) In the morning as the storm begins to blow away the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe simpler than I could have begun to find words for not patient …
Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928 – October 4, 1974) There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning, in the chapel of eggs I cook each morning, in the outcry from the kettle that heats my coffee each …
Billy Collins (March 22, 1941 -) This morning as I walked along the lakeshore, I fell in love with a wren and later in the day with a mouse the cat had dropped under the dining room table. In the shadows of an autumn evening, I fell for a seamstress still at her machine in …
Barbara Ras (1949 -) This peaceful world of ours is ready for destruction— And still the sun shines, the sparrows come Each morning to the bakery for crumbs. Next door, two men deliver a bed for a pair of newlyweds And stop to admire a bicycle chained to a parking meter. Its owner is making …
Barbara Crooker there will be sun, scalloped by clouds, ushered in by a waterfall of birdsong. It will be a temperate seventy-five, low humidity. For twenty-four hours, all politicians will be silent. Reality programs will vanish from TV, replaced by the “snow” that used to decorate our screens when reception wasn’t working. Soldiers will toss …
This peaceful world of ours is ready for destruction— And still the sun shines, the sparrows come Each morning to the bakery for crumbs. Next door, two men deliver a bed for a pair of newlyweds And stop to admire a bicycle chained to a parking meter. Its owner is making lunch for his ailing …
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!
Jane Kenyon (May 23, 1947 – April 22, 1995) I sit by the window all morning watching the planes make final approaches. Each of them gathers and steadies itself like a horse clearing a jump. I look up to see them pass, so close I can see the rivets on their bellies, and under their …
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Raymond Carver (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) I looked into the room a moment ago, and this is what I saw — my chair in its place by the window, the book turned facedown on the table. And on the sill, the cigarette left burning in its ashtray. Malingerer! my uncle yelled at …
Danez Smith I am sitting next to you & you are not there you're a frameless heat, mass of ruptured air. to be clear, you are the spit & liver it takes to be human & I want it & I think you want me to have it all, but I know what it's like …
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Irwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) Elan that lifts me above the clouds into pure space, timeless, yea eternal Breath transmuted into words Transmuted back to breath in one hundred two hundred years nearly Immortal, Sappho's 26 centuries of cadenced breathing -- beyond time, clocks, empires, bodies, cars, chariots, rocket ships skyscrapers, …
Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) True story, Word of Honor: Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made …
Jackleen Holton sprung up on the right side of my neck so I went to the doctor, who patted around the mass, told me it was probably nothing, a cluster of pissed-off cells, a mini-revolt. I started to say the word I feared. No, he said, probably not that, but we’ll run some tests. Just …
Transformation literally means going beyond your form. — Wayne Dyer
The truest philosophy, is not to long for anything in particular, but to accept everything as it comes, and find out the reason of it coming. — Marie Corelli
...If one looks long enough at almost anything, looks with absolute attention at a flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, grass, snow, a cloud, something like revelation takes place. — May Sarton
The most we can do is to write — intelligently, creatively, evocatively — about what it is like living in the world at this time. — Oliver Sacks
When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses... We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. — John F. Kennedy
