Gaza has become a funeral home,
but there are no seats,
no mourners, no bodies.
In the caskets are nothing but
what remained of the dead’s clothes,
and on the crumbling walls are clocks
that have not moved for fourteen months.
Copyright © 2025 by Mosab Abu Toha. Published by permission of the author.
All right. Try this, Then. Every body I know and care for, And every body Else is going To die in a loneliness I can’t imagine and a pain I don’t know. We had To go on living. We Untangled the net, we slit The body of this fish Open from the hinge of the tail To a place beneath the chin I wish I could sing of. I would just as soon we let The living go on living. An old poet whom we believe in Said the same thing, and so We paused among the dark cattails and prayed For the muskrats, For the ripples below their tails, For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making under water, For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman. We prayed for the game warden’s blindness. We prayed for the road home. We ate the fish. There must be something very beautiful in my body, I am so happy.
From Above the River: The Complete Poems by James Wright. Copyright © 1992 by the literary estate of James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved.
In the pond in the park all things are doubled: Long buildings hang and wriggle gently. Chimneys are bent legs bouncing on clouds below. A flag wags like a fishhook down there in the sky. The arched stone bridge is an eye, with underlid in the water. In its lens dip crinkled heads with hats that don't fall off. Dogs go by, barking on their backs. A baby, taken to feed the ducks, dangles upside-down, a pink balloon for a buoy. Treetops deploy a haze of cherry bloom for roots, where birds coast belly-up in the glass bowl of a hill; from its bottom a bunch of peanut-munching children is suspended by their sneakers, waveringly. A swan, with twin necks forming the figure 3, steers between two dimpled towers doubled. Fondly hissing, she kisses herself, and all the scene is troubled: water-windows splinter, tree-limbs tangle, the bridge folds like a fan.
From Poems Old and New by May Swenson, published by Houghton Mifflin. Copyright © 1994 by the Literary Estate of May Swenson. Used by permission of the Literary Estate of May Swenson. All rights reserved.
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright,
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,--
And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning, glad, I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
This poem is in the public domain.
translated from the German by Samantha Rose Hill and Genese Grill
Dusk sinks,
Abiding, beckoning—
Gray is the flood.
Dusk, silently,
Soundlessly sinking,
Reminding, lamenting,
Soundlessly saying—
Gray is the flood.
Dusk, consoling,
Soothing, healing,
Revealing darkness—
Encountering newness—
Gray is the flood.
Dämmerung
Dämmerung, Sinkende,
Harrende, Winkende,—
Grau ist die Flut.
Dämmerung, Schweigende,
Lautlos Dich Neigende,
Mahnende, Klagende,
Lautloses Sagende—
Grau ist die Flut.
Dämmerung, Tröstende,
Mildernde, Heilende,
Dunkles Weisende,
Neues Umkreisende,—
Grau ist die Flut.
“Reprinted from What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt by Hannah Arendt, translated by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill. Copyright © 2025 by The Hannah Arendt Estate, Samantha Hill, and Genese Grill. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Hannah Arendt, Ich selbst, auch ich tanze. The poems. Piper Verlag GmbH, Munich/Berlin 2015. All rights reserved.”