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
Kathleen A Dale i. Nine thousand years seems long but for the imagination: see a Siberian girl smile as she reaches out to touch the saggital crest (shaped like an arrow, indicating strong jaw muscles) on the head of a Husky, once-removed from wolf, panting by the fire after pulling home a sled of reindeer meat. Now, see them …
Mi-Mi Monahan Her mother makes her dinner every night.We sit at the table and say grace with hands pressedlike clenched thighs and I pray they can’t tell my motherdoesn’t believe in god and doesn’t cook. So I eatall the peas off my plate while she complains over the two bites she’s forced to takefor a …
Billy Collins (March 22, 1941 -) You are the bread and the knife,The crystal goblet and the wine… —Jacques Crickillon You are the bread and the knife,the crystal goblet and the wine.You are the dew on the morning grassand the burning wheel of the sun.You are the white apron of the baker,and the marsh birds …
Deborah Landau So whatever’s the opposite of a Buddhist that’s what I am.Kindhearted, yes, but knee deep in existential gloom,except when the fog smokes the bridges like this—like, instead of being afraid we might juice ourselves up,eh, like, might get kissed again? Dwelling in bones I go straightthrough life, a sublime abundance—cherries, dog’s breath, the …
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 …
Maria Mazziotti Gillan (March 12, 1940 -) A friend sends me a picture of herselffrom the 70s—bell bottoms, platform shoesa patterned button down shirt,hair puffed up from a perm. I can see the outline of the person she is nowand she reminds me of myself in the 70s—married for eight years to a manI knew …
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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 …
William Wordsworth (April 07, 1770 – April 23, 1850) My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky:So was it when my life began;So is it now I am a man;So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die!The Child is father of the man;And I could wish my days to …
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 …
Joan Kwon Glass If rust can grow on the moon’s surface,240,000 miles away from oxygen,if solar wind can traverse that vacuum,confounding scientists, turning red the crustof such a scarred and lonesome celestial body,maybe I am capable of more than I think.Maybe everything I need for alchemyis already here, in my core and cells,in this room …
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 …
Kenneth Ronkowitz A star chart tells methat the star I am seeing tonightis 500 light years away.It may have died 499 years ago,and I am still seeing its last light.Stars are born, they live, and they die.What is the light that remains when we leave?If I die after writing this poem, is this my light,and …
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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 …
James Cushing I know a man who carries a corpse on his shoulders.Yesterday, at sunset, I thought I sawa lump of what had been a foot, or a smear of whatmaybe was a face, just to the side of my friend’s pant legdown by the unshined toes of his brown saddle shoes.It was the dead, …
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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 …
Kamilah Aisha Moon I. Their noises make you thinkthey are crying or suffering.They have learned to bow.Even the fawns bow, centuriesof bowingin their blood. They are not considered wild.Precious pests litter parkswith dung, take over the roads.Sweet nuisance worthsaving, thinning these herdsis a last resort — oncea capital offense to spilltheir endangered blood. They are …
Joyce Sutphen (August 10, 1949 -) Everything remembers something. The rock, its fiery bed,cooling and fissuring into cracked pieces, the rubof watery fingers along its edge.The cloud remembers being elephant, camel, giraffe,remembers being a veil over the face of the sun,gathering itself together for the fall.The turtle remembers the sea, sliding over and underits belly, …
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Jiordan Castle The Lovers II, 1928 by Rene Magritte Magritte is saidto have said thateverything we seehides another thing, thatwe always want to seewhat is hiddenby what we see,& in his second paintingof the lovers,with their mouthsseeminglypressed againsteach other’s throughthick white veils,I don’t know what ismeant to be hiddenfrom me,except perhapsMagritte’s dead mother, who diedby …
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 …
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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 …
Hayden Saunier A dog and I stare at each otherfrom our separate cars, waiting for our people to return.He’s a shepherd mix, big head, big ears,like me, he’s riding shotgun.Heat blares inside my car,exhaust plumes from the pickup truck he’s in,so I know he isn’t freezing but I don’t knowif he’s a he or a …
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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 …
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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 …
Jane Kenyon (May 23, 1947 – April 22, 1995) Let the light of late afternoonshine through chinks in the barn, moving up the bales as the sun moves down. Let the cricket take up chafing as a woman takes up her needles and her yarn. Let evening come. Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned in long grass. Let …
Belén Atienza Give me back the hours you swore mine foreverand take away this grief hidden in my wardrobeand when you remember me, do not whisper my namenor think of me as yours, though yours you know I was. I shall be asleep and forget the scent of youI shall awaken alone, as then, before, …
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Eavan Aisling Boland (September 24 1944 – April 27, 2020) Back from Dublin, my grandmotherfinds an eviction notice on her door.Now she is in court for rent arrears.The lawyers are amused.These are the Petty Sessions,this is Drogheda, this is the Bank Holiday.Their comments fill a column in the newspaper.Was the notice well served?Was it served …
Richard Cecil Beyond the waves that lap the sandy beachesmy balcony looks down on, there must beno distant shoreline, only open seathat stretches toward the west until it reachesthe sky to make an infinite horizon,which the sun sinks into with a hissof surf as afternoon and evening kissgood night and sky turns on its constellations. …
Czesław Miłosz (June 30, 1911 – August 14, 2004) Of those at the table in the caféwhere on winter noons a garden of frost glittered on windowpanesI alone survived.I could go in there if I wanted toand drumming my fingers in a chilly voidconvoke shadows. With disbelief I touch the cold marble,with disbelief I touch …
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 …
Billy Collins (March 22, 1941 -) The way the dog trots out the front doorevery morningwithout a hat or an umbrella,without any moneyor the keys to her doghousenever fails to fill the saucer of my heartwith milky admiration.Who provides a finer exampleof a life without encumbrance—Thoreau in his curtainless hutwith a single plate, a single …
Jane Hirshfield (February 24, 1953 -) I stop the car along the pasture edge,gather up bags of corncobs from the back,and get out.Two whistles, one for each,and familiar sounds draw close in darkness—cadence of hoof on hardened bottomland,twinned blowing of air through nostrils curious, flared.They come deepened and muscular movementsconjured out of sleep: each small …
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
