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
Robert von Ranke Graves (July 24, 1895 – December 07, 1985) Every choice is always the wrong choice,Every vote cast is always cast away—How can truth hover between alternatives?Then love me more than dearly, love me wholly,Love me with no weighing of circumstance,As I am pledged in honour to love you:With no weakness, with no …
Vanessa Jimenez Gabb There will be workBy late fallRaining inHabana ViejoIt’s so hardTo not think of youPrivacy is complicatedThe famous hotelBy the seaWhere did you come fromWhere did you come fromSometimes the verbsAren't importantThank youFor this organizationThe conspicuous absenceOf logosThese mountains I believeWill absolve meWhen I rememberTo look upMoney doesn't alwaysMean what I thinkIt doesIt …
James Harrison (December 11, 1937 – March 26, 2016) Night and dayseize the day, also the night —a handful of water to grasp.The moon shines off the mountainsnow where grizzlies look for a placefor the winter’s sleep and birth.I just ate the year’s last tomatoin the year’s fatal whirl.This is mid-October, apple time.I picked them …
Michael Waters (November 23, 1949 -) Seth wrestled the Camaro with one fist & poppedHandfuls of pills while the pistol rode on my thigh.I shouted Is it loaded? over Grandmaster Flash.Amateur thug, he slipped the piece into his boot& swaggered like a bounder into the funeral home. Sunglass’d still & jittery, he scanned the room,Swept past …
Naomi Shihab Nye (March 12, 1952 -) Before you know what kindness really isyou must lose things,feel the future dissolve in a momentlike salt in a weakened broth.What you held in your hand,what you counted and carefully saved,all this must go so you knowhow desolate the landscape can bebetween the regions of kindness.How you ride …
Alfred Tennyson (August 06, 1809 – October 06, 1892) For Arthur Hallam Dark house, by which once more I standHere in the long unlovely street,Doors, where my heart was used to beatSo quickly, waiting for a hand, A hand that can be clasp’d no more—Behold me, for I cannot sleep,And like a guilty thing I …
Barbara Quick I learned how to make Nana’s chicken soupby shadowing her steps in the kitchen,taking notes on a white paper napkin.A cauldron of sorts is required, as well as aonce-animate chicken submerged abovethe stove’s blue flame.“You put in the onions,” Nana said,her Russian accent as fresh as the breezemust have felt on her face …
Eleanor Channell If you weren’t here, I’d fear the surgeof surf. I’d watch the moon wax and wane,feel the constant pulling of tides, the urgeto drown myself in pity and booze, to explain my life as “Cape Disappointment” with hard luckspinning and winning souls like mine, a jettyof riprap pointing to my faults, the muckof my …
Tadeusz Dąbrowski Yesterday I sent you a letter. And today on the phoneyou tell me you are pregnant. I pack up and return,you greet me at the airport, you’re even lovelier thanin my letter that’s on its way to you. We builda house, our child grows, our parents shrink,then a few years of sweat and …
Aria Aber Last night it startled me again—I dreamedof the corn maze through which we walked,almost a decade ago, in the presenceof our other lovers. It was all burned down.Purple corn glowed in the fields envelopingthe ruined maze, the woodlands washedby October sun. Instead of you, I found in the salt-white musicof that familiar landscape …
Even the night cooling down is slick with heat.Even the sheet we share like a humming skin.From three stories up the sounds of the street,drinkers at the curb, a wet hiss of dry tires,is a rhythm through our box fan, like panting.When we sleep it is piecemeal until morning. Listen, the years are short. They …
David Romtvedt My Uncle Will wanted to be on Broadway.After family dinners, when everyone sat arounddrinking coffee, he’d do a little tap dance or shuffle.Of course it was embarrassing to have a grown manwho worked at the lumberyard dancing after dinner. On my ninth birthday, I became his reluctant partner.We wore white shirts, red jackets, …
Heidi Seaborn I fall in love todaywith the man fixing my water faucets,how he crouches in his boots, feelshis way deftly to salve the leak.I’m in love with dandelions & ugly bobs& even morning glory as I yanktheir roots free from this dark & luscious soil.O I love, love the rhododendronblushing newborn pink, lovethe neighbor’s …
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Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950) Time does not bring relief; you all have lied Who told me time would ease me of my pain! I miss him in the weeping of the rain; I want him at the shrinking of the tide;The old snows melt from every mountain-side, And last year’s leaves are …
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Daniel Arias Gómez (April 01, 1972 -) Tío, you learn there’s alwaysa border—I imagine a poor family in Jocotepec takes youin. You work as a gardener at the clubacross the lake where rich peoplevacation. The town’s children runshoeless on the dirt roads, stareat the people on the other sidesun-tanning on the decks of theirboats, riding …
Continue reading "Daniel Arias Gómez – Cathedrals: Ode To A Deported Uncle"
Marie Howe The soul has a story that has a shape that almost no onesees. No, no one ever does. All those kisses, The bedroom chair that rocked with me in it, his bodyhis body and his and his and his. More, I said, moreand more and more. . . . What has it come to?Like …
Maxine Kumin (June 6, 1925 – February 6, 2014) If I could only live at the pitchthat is near madness, Eberhart wrotebut there was his wife Betty hanging ontohis coattails for dear life to the end of her life.No one intervened when my mother’s brother’swife ran off with the new young rabbievery woman in the …
Hayden Carruth (August 3, 1921 – September 29, 2008) What does it mean? Lord knows; least of all I. Faced with it, schoolboys are shy,And grown-ups speak it at moments of excess Which later seem more or lessUnfeasible. It is equivocal, sentimental, Debatable, really a sort of lentil—Neither pea nor bean. Sometimes it’s a muscle, Sometimes courage or at …
Continue reading "Hayden Carruth – An Apology for Using the Word ‘Heart’ in Too Many Poems"
Sean Hill She, being the midwifeand your mother’slongtime friend, saidI see a heart; can yousee it?And on the greydisplay of the ultrasoundthere you were as you were,our nugget, in that momentbecoming a shrimpor a comma punctuatingthe whole of my life, separatingits parts—before and after—,a shrimp in the seaof your mother, and I couldn’thelp but see …
Elinor Morton Wylie (September 7, 1885 – December 16, 1928) 1 When the world turns completely upside downYou say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern ShoreAboard a river-boat from Baltimore;We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town,You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gownHomespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color.Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor,We’ll swim …
Alison Hazle No one calls me that anymore. But that long Y,it licks the space. I longfor that Y in my name. Am I still young? These other dykesare young, wetfrom their clamshellwombs. I am dry having smoked and smokedand not slept and been notwell for quite a while. But I am a dyke, I …
Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950) What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,I have forgotten, and what arms have lainUnder my head till morning; but the rainIs full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sighUpon the glass and listen for reply,And in my heart there stirs a …
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Diane di Prima (August 6, 1934 – October 25, 2020) Sweetheartwhen you break thruyou’ll finda poet herenot quite what one would choose. I won’t promiseyou’ll never go hungryor that you won’t be sadon this guttedbreakingglobe but I can show youbabyenough to loveto break your heartforever
James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901[1] – May 22, 1967) Way Down South in Dixie(Break the heart of me)They hung my black young loverTo a cross roads tree. Way Down South in Dixie(Bruised body high in air)I asked the white Lord JesusWhat was the use of prayer. Way Down South in Dixie(Break the heart …
Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) Now that you’ve gone away for five days,I’ll smoke all the cigarettes I want,where I want. Make biscuits and eat themwith jam and fat bacon. Loaf. Indulgemyself. Walk on the beach if I feellike it. And I feel like it, alone andthinking about when …
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Ellen Bass (June 16, 1947 -) to love life, to love it evenwhen you have no stomach for itand everything you've held dearcrumbles like burnt paper in your hands,your throat filled with the silt of it.When grief sits with you, its tropical heatthickening the air, heavy as watermore fit for gills than lungs;when grief weights …
Aracelis Girmay (December 10, 1977 -) You, selling roses out of a silver grocery cartYou, in the park, feeding the pigeonsYou cheering for the beesYou with cats in your voice in the morning, feeding catsYou protecting the river You are who I lovedelivering babies, nursing the sickYou with henna on your feet and a gold …
Linda France (May 21, 1958 -) 1 Because we love watching the flock’s precision glide upstroke for height, tilt of wing spun mid-flightjust for a moment we’re in the frenzied swirling rush home for the winged owls hoot their love through the dark chiffchaff creeps up stalks fennel and flowdipper and wagtail Arctic terns like dartsgeese honking each note weigheda duck sits on …
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquility. The emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears. William Wordsworth (April 07, 1770 - April 23, 1850) Surprised by joy—impatient as the WindI turned to share the transport—Oh! with whomBut Thee, long …
Walter Everette Hawkins Ask me why I love you, dear,And I will ask the roseWhy it loves the dews of SpringAt the Winter’s close;Why the blossoms’ nectared sweetsLoved by questing bee,—I will gladly answer you,If they answer me. Ask me why I love you, dear,And I will ask the flowerWhy it loves the Summer sun,Or …
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Ross Gay (August 01, 1974 -) Friends I am here to modestly reportseeing in an orchardin my towna goldfinch kissinga sunfloweragain and againdangling upside downby its tiny clawssteadying itself by snapping openlike an old-timey fanits wingsagain and again,until, swooning, it tumbled offand swooped back to the very same perch,where the sunflower curled its giantswirling of …
Galway Mills Kinnell (February 1, 1927 – October 28, 2014) I open my eyes to see how the nightis progressing. The clock glows green,the light of the last-quarter moonshines up off the snow into our bedroom.Her portion of our oceanic duvetlies completely flat. The wordsof the shepherd in Tristan, "Wasteand empty, the sea," come back …
Bartholomew Griffin Fair is my love that feeds among the lilies,The lilies growing in the pleasant garden,Where Cupid’s mount, that well-beloved hill is,And where that little god himself is warden.See where my love sits in the beds of spices,Beset all round with camphor, myrrh and roses,And interlac’d with curious devices,Which her from all the world …
If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation. —Jiddu Krishnamurti
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
