Leonard Norman Cohen (September 21, 1934 – November 7, 2016) She stands before you naked You can see it, you can taste it And she comes to you light as the breeze Now you can drink it or you can nurse it It don't matter how you worship As long as you're Down on your …
Jane Kenyon – At A Motel Near O’Hare Airport
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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Jane Ebihara – Last Kiss
Jane Ebihara First, in your seventies and alone, you read that those who count such things say an average person kisses for a total of two weeks in a lifetime. And you realize your two weeks was up some time ago. Suddenly there is kissing everywhere you look. And you learn that cows kiss and …
Raymond Carver – Loafing
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 …
Ron Padgett – Hug
Ron Padgett (June 17, 1942 -) The older I get, the more I like hugging. When I was little, the people hugging me were much larger. In their grasp I was a rag doll. In adolescence, my body was too tense to relax for a hug. Later, after the loss of virginity—which was anything but …
AE Stallings – Another Lullaby for Insomniacs
Alicia Elsbeth Stallings (July 02, 1968 -) Sleep, she will not linger: She turns her moon-cold shoulder. With no ring on her finger, You cannot hope to hold her. She turns her moon-cold shoulder And tosses off the cover. You cannot hope to hold her: She has another lover. She tosses off the cover And …
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Maggie Smith – Bride
Maggie Smith How long have I been wed to myself? Calling myself darling, dressing for my own pleasure, each morning choosing perfume to turn me on. How long have I been alone in this house but not alone? Married less to the man than to the woman silvering with the mirror. I know the kind …
Danez Smith – Poem Where I Be & You Just Might
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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Sadiqullah Khan – Dark Clouds
Sadiqullah Khan From freedom To security Checked searched Interviewed Many times Paranoia Who stopped me This time “White or red” Or just soldiers In drawn lines Colors And appearances Matter Language and religion Race and ethnicity Dark clouds hovering On my horizon
Frank Bidart – Visions At 74
Frank Bidart (May 27, 1939 -) The planet turns there without you, beautiful. Exiled by death you cannot touch it. Weird joy to watch postulates lived out and discarded, something crowded inside us always craving to become something glistening outside us, the relentless planet showing itself the logic of what is buried inside it. To …
Lucille Clifton – Lorena
Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936 – February 13, 2010) —News Report *Woman cuts off husband’s penis,* *later throws it from car window.* it lay in my palm soft and trembled as a new bird and i thought about authority and how it always insisted on itself, how it was master of the man, how it …
Mary Oliver – When I Am Among The Trees
Mary Jane Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily. I am so distant from the hope …
Allen Ginsberg – Five A.M.
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, …
Julia de Burgos – Poema Para Mi Muerte (Poem For My Death)
Julia de Burgos (February 17, 1914 – July 6, 1953) Ante un anhelo Morir conmigo misma, abandonada y sola, en la más densa roca de una isla desierta. En el instante un ansia suprema de claveles, y en el paisaje un trágico horizonte de piedra. Mis ojos todos llenos de sepulcros de astro, y mi …
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David Budbill – The First Green of Spring
David Budbill (June 13, 1940 – September 25, 2016) Out walking in the swamp picking cowslip, marsh marigold, this sweet first green of spring. Now sautéed in a pan melting to a deeper green than ever they were alive, this green, this life, harbinger of things to come. Now we sit at the table munching …
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Joanna Klink – The Processional
Joanna Klink If there is a world, let me be in it. Let fires arise and pass. The sky fill with evening air then sink across the woodlots and porches, the streams thinning to creeks. In winter there will be creatures half-locked in ice, storms blown through iron grates, a drug of whitest ardor. Let …
Annie Kim – Eros the Contagion
Annie Kim Soft as a Claude painting, the yellow sky tonight— trees in the parking lot still thick, though the air, yes, has an edge, the honey was solid in the jar when I opened it this morning, found a single ant frozen in the dunes, stunned by sweetness. Can you really die of sweetness? …
Edna St. Vincent Millay – I Shall Forget You Presently My Dear (Sonnet IV)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950) I shall forget you presently, my dear, So make the most of this, your little day, Your little month, your little half a year Ere I forget, or die, or move away, And we are done forever; by and by I shall forget you, …
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Priscilla Denise Levertov – Clouds
Priscilla Denise Levertov (October 24, 1923 – December 20, 1997) The clouds as I see them, rising urgently, roseate in the mounting of somber power surging in evening haste over roofs and hermetic grim walls— Last night As if death had lit a pale light in your flesh, your flesh was cold to my touch, …
Kurt Vonnegut – Joe Heller
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 …
Reginald Dwayne Betts – At The End Of Life, A Secret
Reginald Dwayne Betts (November 05, 1980 -) Everything measured. A man twists a tuft of your hair out for no reason other than you are naked before him and he is bored with nakedness. Moments before he was weighing your gallbladder, and then he was staring at the empty space where your lungs were. Even …
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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 …
Wendell Berry – A Marriage Song
Wendell Berry August 05, 1934 -) In January cold, the year's short light, We make new marriage here; The day is clear, the ground is bridal white, Songless the brittled air As we come through the snow to praise Our Mary in her day of days. In time's short light, and less than light, we …
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, …
Jackleen Holton – A Hard Lump
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 …
Maya Angelou – A Brave And Startling Truth
Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928–May 28, 2014) We, this people, on a small and lonely planet Traveling through casual space Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns To a destination where all signs tell us It is possible and imperative that we learn A brave and startling truth And when we come to …
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Dante Alighieri — Excerpt From Inferno, Canto I
Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri commonly known by his pen name Dante Alighieri or simply Dante (1265 – 1321) Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost. Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say What was this forest savage, …
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Ross Gay – Poem To My Child
Ross Gay — after Steve Scafidi The way the universe sat waiting to become, quietly, in the nether of space and time, you too remain some cellular snuggle dangling between my legs, curled in the warm swim of my mostly quietest self. If you come to be — And who knows? — I wonder, little …
Wisława Szymborska – The Moment
Wisława Szymborska (July 02, 1923- February 01, 2012) I walk on the slope of a hill gone green. Grass, little flowers in the grass, as in a children’s illustration. The misty sky’s already turning blue. A view of other hills unfolds in silence. As if there’d never been any Cambrians, Silurians, rocks snarling at crags, …
WS Merwin – The Unwritten
William Stanley Merwin (September 30, 1927 – March 15, 2019) Inside this pencil crouch words that have never been written never been spoken never been taught they’re hiding they’re awake in there dark in the dark hearing us but they won’t come out not for love for time not for fire even when the dark …
