The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don’t mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don’t sing
all the time
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn’t half so bad
if it isn’t you
Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey to
with its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen
and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to
Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs of having
inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
‘living it up’
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician
From A Coney Island of the Mind, copyright © 1955 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
God sends his tasks and one does them or not, but the sky delivers its gifts at the appointed times: With spit and sigh, with that improbable burst of flame, the balloon comes over the cornfield, bringing another country with it, bringing from a long way off those colors that are at first the low sound of a horn, but soon are many horns, and clocks, and bells, and clappers and your heart rising to the silence in all of them, a silence so complete that the heads of the corn bow back before it and the dog flees in terror down the road and you alone are left gazing up at three solemn visitors swinging in a golden cage beneath that unbelievable chorus of red and white, swinging so close you cannot move or speak, so close the road grows wet with light, as when the sun flares, after an evening storm and you become weightless, falling back in the air before the giant oak that with a fiery burst the balloon just clears.
From To the Place of Trumpets, published by Yale University Press, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Reproduced by permission of Yale University Press.
Three moves in sixth months and I remain the same. Two homes made two friends. The third leaves me with myself again. (We hardly speak.) Here I am with tame ducks and my neighbors' boats, only this electric heat against the April damp. I have a friend named Frank— the only one who ever dares to call and ask me, "How's your soul?" I hadn't thought about it for a while, and was ashamed to say I didn't know. I have no priest for now. Who will forgive me then. Will you Tame birds and my neighbors' boats. The ducks honk about the floats . . . They walk dead drunk onto the land and grounds, iridescent blue and black and green and brown. They live on swill our aged houseboats spill. But still they are beautiful. Look! The duck with its unlikely beak has stopped to pick and pull at the potted daffodil. Then again they sway home to dream bright gardens of fish in the early night. Oh these ducks are all right. They will survive. But I am sorry I do not often see them climb. Poor sons-a-bitching ducks. You're all fucked up. What do you do that for? Why don't you hover near the sun anymore? Afraid you'll melt? These foolish ducks lack a sense of guilt, and so all their multi-thousand-mile range is too short for the hope of change.
Copyright © 1989 by the John Logan Literary Estate, Inc. Reprinted from John Logan: The Collected Poems, by John Logan, with permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.
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.