Jenny Joseph (May 07, 1932 -) When I am an old woman I shall wear purple With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me. And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter. I shall sit down on the pavement …
Tao Writer – Always Another Mountain
Tao Writer (April 17, 1948 -) Life is amazing from the time we breathour first breath until the time we exhale our last.But life is not easy. It was never meant to be.Life is meant to be appreciated and enjoyed. Watching hummingbirds hover around the feederWalking barefoot in the desert sand or on an empty …
Barbara Ras – You Can’t Have It All
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 …
Matthew Dickman – King
Matthew Dickman I’m always the king of something. Ruined or celebrated,newly crowned, or just beheaded. King of the shady grassand king of the dirty sheets. I sit in the middleof the room in Decemberwith the windows open, five pills, and a razor. My life longsecret. My killing power and my stayingpower. When the erection fails, …
Langston Hughes – The Weary Blues
Langston Hughes (February 01, 1902 – May 22, 1967) Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,I heard a Negro play.Down on Lenox Avenue the other nightBy the pale dull pallor of an old gas lightHe did a lazy sway . . .He did a lazy sway . . .To the …
Tao Writer – I Want
Tao Writer (April 17, 1948 -) I want to write more than words that say I love you. I want to write poetry that fills your heart with ecstasy, your mind with wonder, your body with burning desire. I want to write words which move your eyes to tears, fill your ears with the sweetness of …
Anna Belle Kaufman – Cold Solace
Anna Belle Kaufman When my mother died, one of her honey cakes remained in the freezer. I couldn’t bear to see it vanish, so it waited, pardoned, in its ice cave behind the metal trays for two more years. On my forty-first birthday I chipped it out, a rectangular resurrection, hefted the dead weight in …
Joyce Sutphen – The Poem of Your Life
Joyce Sutphen (August 10, 1949 -) Is waiting for you to come along— some spring (or maybe it's winter) in New York or Paris on your way to meet someone who will change everything if you take the right train, if you look up from the book you are reading, if you say hello. The …
Traci Brimhall – Love Poem Without A Drop Of Hyperbole In It
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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Mark Doty – Pescadero
Mark Doty (August 10, 1953 -) The little goats like my mouth and fingers, and one stands up against the wire fence, and taps on the fence board a hoof made blacker by the dirt of the field, pushes her mouth forward to my mouth, so that I can see the smallish squared seeds of …
Pablo Neruda – Poetry
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 …
Anne Sexton – Welcome Morning
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 …
Richard Blanco – My Father In English
Richard Blanco (February 15, 1968 -) First half of his life lived in Spanish: the long syntax of *las montañas* that lined his village, the rhyme of *sol* with his soul—a Cuban *alma*—that swayed with *las palmas*, the sharp rhythm of his *machete* cutting through *caña*, the syllables of his *canarios* that sung into *la …
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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Naomi Shihab Nye – So Much Happiness
Naomi Shihab Nye (March 12, 1952 -) It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. With sadness there is something to rub against, a wound to tend with lotion and cloth. When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up, something to hold in your hands, like …
Danusha Laméris – Small Kindnesses
Danusha Laméris I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, …
Gabrielle Calvocoressi – Jubilee
Gabrielle Calvocoressi Come down to the water. Bring your snare drum, your hubcaps, the trash can lid. Bring every joyful noise you’ve held at bay so long. The fish have risen to the surface this early morning: flounder, shrimp, and every blue crab this side of Mobile. Bottom feeders? Please. They shine like your Grandpa …
