My life’s blossom might have bloomed on all sides
Save for a bitter wind which stunted my petals
On the side of me which you in the village could see.
From the dust I lift a voice of protest:
My flowering side you never saw!
Ye living ones, ye are fools indeed
Who do not know the ways of the wind
And the unseen forces
That govern the processes of life.
This poem is in the public domain.
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs. At home once more, They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. She is black and white, Her mane falls wild on her forehead, And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist. Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom.
Copyright © 2005 James Wright. From Selected Poems. Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
(Miles Davis, 1926–1991)
This is what heroin must feel like—
Miles Davis exacting
his way through “Autumn Leaves”—
pretty and cold, a slowly spreading frost
along synapses and veins,
mapping interstellar darkness
one blue note at a time. Sometimes you could hear
him thinking through the changes
like he was hunting himself, relentless
and without mercy, then a burst of blue
flame, squeezing the Harmon mute like a man screaming
from the bottom of a mine shaft—
but however brightly the darkness glows,
it is still darkness, and Miles was a blackbird
on a field of snow, beautiful, distant, quiet—
and however many steps you take to meet him he flies
ten more feet away.
Copyright © 2015 by Anthony Walton. This poem was first printed in Black Renaissance Noire, Vol. 15, Issue 1 (Spring–Summer 2015). Used with the permission of the author.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
This poem is in the public domain.