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.”