by E. E. Cummings maggie and milly and molly and may went down to the beach(to play one day) and maggie discovered a shell that sang so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and milly befriended a stranded star whose rays five languid fingers were; and molly was chased by a horrible thing which raced sideways […]
by Denise Levertov You have brought me so far. • I know so much. Names, verbs, images. My mind overflows, a drawer that can’t close. • Unscathed among the tortured. Ignorant parchment uninscribed, light strokes only, where a scribe tried out a pen. • I am so small, a speck of dust moving across the […]
by Denise Levertov Days pass when I forget the mystery. Problems insoluble and problems offering their own ignored solutions jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing their colored clothes; cap and bells. And then once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the throng’s […]
by Joy Harjo The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live. The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on. We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They […]
from the Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot V. What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. And every phrase And sentence that is right (where every word is at home, Taking its place to support the […]
by Denise Levertov Don’t say, don’t say there is no water to solace the dryness at our hearts. I have seen the fountain springing out of the rock wall and you drinking there. And I too before your eyes found footholds and climbed to drink the cool water. The woman of that place, shading her […]
From Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman 3 I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, […]
by Pablo Neruda translated by Ben Belitt I go copying mountains and rivers and clouds: I shake out my fountain pen, remark on a bird flying upward or a spider alive in his workshop of floss, with no thought in my head; I am air, I am limitless air where the wheat tosses, and am […]
by Linda Pastan Dear lost sharer of silences, I would send a letter the way the tree sends messages in leaves, or the sky in exclamations of pure cloud. Therefore I write in this blue ink, color of secret veins and arteries. It is morning here. Already the postman walks the innocent streets, dangerous as […]
by Robert Frost There is a singer everyone has heard, Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird, Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again. He says that leaves are old and that for flowers Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten. He says the early petal-fall is past When pear and cherry bloom […]