by George Sefferis To Nani Panayíotopoulo And yet we should consider how we go forward. To feel is not enough, nor to think, nor to move nor to put your body in danger in front of an old loophole when scalding oil and molten lead furrow the walls. And yet we should consider towards what […]
by David Biespiel After it came in like a dark bird Out of the snow, barely whistling The notes father, mother, child, It was hard to say what made us happiest. Seeing the branches where it had learned To stir the air? The air that opened Without fear? Just the branches And us in a room of wild […]
by Joseph Brodsky When it’s Christmas we’re all of us magi. At the grocers’ all slipping and pushing. Where a tin of halva, coffee-flavored, is the cause of a human assault-wave by a crowd heavy-laden with parcels: each one his own king, his own camel. Nylon bags, carrier bags, cones of paper, caps and neckties […]
by Walt Whitman On the beach at night, Stands a child with her father, Watching the east, the autumn sky. Up through the darkness, While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading, Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky, Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the […]
by Stephen Edgar Impossible to wield The acreage of the fabric that unfolded, Slung from his shoulders like a crumpled field: The distance from one Christmas to the next When he was only seven Was aching there; a foreign city flexed Among the ripples; a face, the star-shocked heaven About his flailing arms were shrugged […]
by Naomi Shihab Nye is not turning the way you thought it would turn, gently, in a little spiral loop, the way a child draws the tail of a pig. What came out of your mouth, a riff of common talk. As a sudden weather shift on a beach, sky looming mountains of cloud in […]
by Denise Levertov I know this happiness is provisional: the looming presences— great suffering, great fear— withdraw only into peripheral vision: but ineluctable this shimmering of wind in the blue leaves: this flood of stillness widening the lake of sky: this need to dance, this need to kneel: this mystery: -Read at St. Lydia’s on […]
by D. Nurkse Brothers and sisters, who live after us, don’t be afraid of our loneliness, our dented wiffle ball, the little kerf the dog chewed in the orange Frisbee. Don’t grieve for our kite; not the frayed string that clings to your ankle, not the collapsed wing. We lived on earth, we married, we […]
BY ROBERT DUNCAN [De Vulgari Eloquentia, I,I] “We will endeavor, the word aiding us from Heaven, to be of service to the vernacular speech” —from “Heaven” these “draughts of the sweetest honey-milk”, si dolcemente from the language we first heard endearments whisperings infant song and revery a world we wanted […]
by Thomas Lux His job is honest and simple: keeping the forest tidy. He replaces, after repairing, the nests on their branches, he points every pine north, polishes the owl’s stained perch, feather-dusts the entrance to the weasel’s burrow, soft-brushes each chipmunk (the chinchilla of the forest banal), buffs antlers, gives sympathy to ragweed, tries […]