by Jane Kenyon Let the light of late afternoon shine 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 the […]
by Anne Stevenson Spring comes little, a little. All April it rains. The new leaves stick in their fists; new ferns still fiddleheads. But one day the swifts are back. Face to the sun like a child You shout, ‘The swifts are back!’ Sure enough, bolt nocks bow to carry one sky-scyther Two hundred […]
by James Lasdun It isn’t me, he’d say, stepping out of a landscape that offered, he’d thought, the backdrop to a plausible existence until he entered it; it’s just not me, he’d murmur, walking away. It’s not quite me, he’d explain, apologetic but firm, leaving some job they’d found him. They found him others: he’d […]
by Brenda Shaughnessy I am dreaming of a house just like this one but larger and opener to the trees, nighter than day and higher than noon, and you, visiting, knocking to get in, hoping for icy milk or hot tea or whatever it is you like. For each night […]
by Hannah Gamble It had a secret name which in later years came to mean I will continue to stand here. It had a food mouth and a shrieking mouth. Popular wisdom indicated that Its hands could heat stones and that a man could cook meat on those stones. That being said, It had […]
by Robinson Jeffers Mountains, a moment’s earth-waves rising and hollowing; the earth too’s an ephemerid; the stars— Short-lived as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry in their summer, they spiral Blind up space, scattered black seeds of a future; nothing lives long, the whole sky’s Recurrences tick the seconds of the hours […]
by Michael Palmer The voice, because of its austerity, will often cause dust to rise. The voice, because of its austerity, will sometimes attempt the representation of dust. Someone will say, I can’t breathe—as if choking on dust. The voice ages with the body. It will say, I was shaped by […]
by Adrienne Rich i. Burnt by lightning nevertheless she’ll walk this terra infinita lashes singed on her third eye searching definite shadows for an indefinite future Old shed-boards beaten silvery hang askew as sheltering some delicate indefensible existence Long grasses shiver in a vanished doorway’s draft a place of origins as yet unclosured and unclaimed […]
by Wendy Videlock Change is the new, improved, word for god, lovely enough to raise a song or implicate a sea of wrongs, mighty enough, like other gods, to shelter, bring together, and estrange us. Please, god, we seem to say, change us. –Read at St. Lydia’s on January 27, 2013
by W. H. Auden Perhaps I always knew what they were saying: Even the early messengers who walked Into my life from books where they were staying. Those beautiful mahines that never talked But let the small boy worship and learn All their long names whose hardness make him proud, Love was the word they […]