Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes published by Alfred A. Knopf/Vintage. Copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated. All rights reserved.
Life! Ay, what is it? E’en a moment spun
From cycles of eternity. And yet,
What wrestling ’mid the fever and the fret
Of tangled purposes and hopes undone!
What affluence of love! What vict’ries won
In agonies of silence, ere trust met
A manifold fulfillment, and the wet,
Beseeching eyes saw splendors past the sun!
What struggle in the web of circumstance,
And yearning in the wingèd music! All,
One restless strife from fetters to be free;
Till, gathered to eternity’s expanse,
Is that brief moment at the Father’s call.
Life! Ay, at best, ’tis but a mystery!
This poem is in the public domain.
In studying the anomaly it was determined that holiday decorations look sad out of season, that there's no excuse for the mistakes of my people. Red paper hearts on the front door into April, a cauldron that doubles as a planter in summer. Always the starscape to help keep me honest, to remind me that distance is easy to cross. The analytic belt I'm equipped with reminds me of an indescribable autumn from one hundred generations ago though even last year I was someone else. I was faced with a choice. Proceed with the same core or blow it up to restart & maybe go further. Most of my programming has survived into this new battle. I can smell faint ocean salt on the breeze & I have different reactions for its presence or absence. Now is the time to overcome problems. I debate the finer points of being desperate, of wanting things to remain as they are, though they can't. I'd rather not go into details since specifics make me queasy, like in pictures when people put their heads too close together. How can they stand such forced intimacy? I take off in search of my home planet. My resolve is stronger than ever.
Copyright © 2010 by Nate Pritts. Used with permission of the author.
I’m trying to forgive my friend
who arrives like a bleeder
in an ambulance.
I should minimize
my exposure, as to a bad
virus or too much sun.
I’m always the shadow,
the “local talent,” sweeping
the floor, feting her
even when my new baby
had just come home.
I was gulping
cranberry ginger ales
in dazed thirst to restore
myself as she uncorked
another dark-green bottle,
put her thumb
in the deep punt
of the heavy bell-shaped
bottom, and poured herself
more red.
Copyright © 2018 Leslie Williams. This poem originally appeared in Kenyon Review, November/December 2018. Used with permission of the author.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
This poem is in the public domain.
A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.
But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.
I will give you no hiding place down here.
You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.
Your mouths spilling words
Armed for slaughter.
The Rock cries out to us today, you may stand upon me,
But do not hide your face.
Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song. It says,
Come, rest here by my side.
Each of you, a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,
Clad in peace, and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the rock were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.
The River sang and sings on.
There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African, the Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheik,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.
They hear the first and last of every Tree
Speak to humankind today. Come to me, here beside the River.
Plant yourself beside the River.
Each of you, descendant of some passed
On traveller, has been paid for.
You, who gave me my first name, you,
Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then
Forced on bloody feet,
Left me to the employment of
Other seekers—desperate for gain,
Starving for gold.
You, the Turk, the Arab, the Swede, the German, the Eskimo, the Scot,
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought,
Sold, stolen, arriving on the nightmare
Praying for a dream.
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am that Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.
I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours—your passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes upon
This day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands,
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out and upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.
Here, on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes, and into
Your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope—
Good morning.
"On the Pulse of Morning" from ON THE PULSE OF MORNING by Maya Angelou, copyright © 1993 by Maya Angelou. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
From The Poetry of Robert Frost by Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1916, 1923, 1928, 1930, 1934, 1939, 1947, 1949, © 1969 by Holt Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright 1936, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1951, 1953, 1954, © 1956, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1962, 1967, 1970 by Leslie Frost Ballantine.
I tried to put a bird in a cage.
O fool that I am!
For the bird was Truth.
Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put
Truth in a cage!
And when I had the bird in the cage,
O fool that I am!
Why, it broke my pretty cage.
Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put
Truth in a cage!
And when the bird was flown from the cage,
O fool that I am!
Why, I had nor bird nor cage.
Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put
Truth in a cage!
Heigh-ho! Truth in a cage.
This poem is in the public domain.
I am arguing with an idiot online. He says anybody can write a poem. I say some people are afraid to speak. I say some people are ashamed to speak. If they said the pronoun "I" they would find themselves floating in the black Atlantic and a woman would swim by, completely dry, in a rose chiffon shirt, until the ashamed person says her name and the woman becomes wet and drowns and her face turns to flayed ragged pulp, white in the black water. He says that he'd still write even if someone cut off both his hands. As if it were the hands that make a poem, I say. I say what if someone cut out whatever brain or gut or loin or heart that lets you say hey, over here, listen, I have something to tell you all, I'm different. As an example I mention my mother who loved that I write poems and am such a wonderful genius. And then I delete the comment because my mother wanted no part of this or any argument, because "Who am I to say whatever?" Once on a grade school form I entered her job as hairwasher. She saw the form and was embarrassed and mad. "You should have put receptionist." But she didn't change it. The last word she ever said was No. And now here she is in my poem, so proud of her idiot son, who presumes to speak for a woman who wants to tell him to shut up, but can't.
From The Animals Are All Gathering by Bradley Paul. Copyright © 2010 by Bradley Paul. Used by permission of The Association of Writers and Writing Programs.
What happened. This terrible breaking, this blow. Then slow
the dogwood strewn like tissue along the black road.
No the busy pollinators the breeze in the pine shadows
in the aftermath where I drove back there. And two bones
of smoke lifting ahead along the shoulder in the high new
green weed-bank running beside the asphalt. No
I had come from my father. Nothing more common nothing more
than such. I could not breathe for the longest time
over and again. There was something deadly, she said, in it.
Of the genus buteo, as b. harlani, as Harlan’s red-tail.
Blocky in shape, goes the book, blood or brick-red but white
I am sure underneath, white along its wing, which was not smoke
but rising now one bird. I was coming back and couldn’t breathe
and him bruised torn bedridden tubed taken to the brink
by his body and carried aloft. There he had fallen.
This is what happened said the medical team. Fallen:
and ripped aortal stenosis in the process of their repair.
No the white bird strained, as trying to lift, to a slight
dihedral, the deepest deliberate wing beats, and barely
above the snow-white-lipped grasses and the shoulder
until I thought I would hit it. It happened or
it did not, in the way of my thinking. And now why
I saw. Two lengths of snake helical and alive in the talons
heavy there, writhing, so the big bird strained for the length
of time that it takes. Like the oiled inner organs
of a live thing heaving in shreds, the dogwoods
the doctors, and did I say the horrible winds all before.
Now the air after storm. The old road empty. Swept white,
by blossoms by headlights, my father hovering still:
why it flew so close, why it was so terribly slow.
I think I hoped it would tear me to pieces. Lift me,
of my genus helpless, as wretched. And drop me away.
I turned back to the animal. No it turned its back to me.
Copyright © 2017 by David Baker. Used with permission of the author. “Why Not Say” originally appeared in American Poetry Review.