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.
Before you came, things were as they should be: the sky was the dead-end of sight, the road was just a road, wine merely wine. Now everything is like my heart, a color at the edge of blood: the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns, the gold when we meet, the season ablaze, the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames, and the black when you cover the earth with the coal of dead fires. And the sky, the road, the glass of wine? The sky is a shirt wet with tears, the road a vein about to break, and the glass of wine a mirror in which the sky, the road, the world keep changing. Don't leave now that you're here— Stay. So the world may become like itself again: so the sky may be the sky, the road a road, and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.
From The Rebel's Silhouette by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, translated by Agha Shahid Ali. Copyright © 1991 by Agha Shahid Ali. Used by permission of University of Massachusetts Press.
They’re both convinced
that a sudden passion joined them.
Such certainty is beautiful,
but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
Since they’d never met before, they’re sure
that there’d been nothing between them.
But what’s the word from the streets, staircases, hallways—
perhaps they’ve passed by each other a million times?
I want to ask them
if they don’t remember—
a moment face to face
in some revolving door?
perhaps a “sorry” muttered in a crowd?
a curt “wrong number” caught in the receiver?—
but I know the answer.
No, they don’t remember.
They’d be amazed to hear
that Chance has been toying with them
now for years.
Not quite ready yet
to become their Destiny,
it pushed them close, drove them apart,
it barred their path,
stifling a laugh,
and then leaped aside.
There were signs and signals,
even if they couldn’t read them yet.
Perhaps three years ago
or just last Tuesday
a certain leaf fluttered
from one shoulder to another?
Something was dropped and then picked up.
Who knows, maybe the ball that vanished
into childhood’s thicket?
There were doorknobs and doorbells
where one touch had covered another
beforehand.
Suitcases checked and standing side by side.
One night, perhaps, the same dream,
grown hazy by morning.
Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.
"Love at First Sight" from MAP: Collected and Last Poems by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak. Copyright © 2015 by The Wislawa Szymborska Foundation. English copyright © 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
You hurt my feelings
I say to the trees. You never
ask me how I am I whisper
to the breakfast taco, before
an indelicate but determined bite.
I miss you, I confront
the chair in the stranger’s yard.
Your strong + silly arms. Your sin-sturdy legs.
Why don’t you me I embroider
in green thread onto a yellow t-shirt
on sale (jk I don’t do that. I pur-
chase bananas and toothpaste). Oh,
is this where you go? I murmur
to my car, who has a secret name.
Can you hear me? I gesture
mutely to the parking lot. The trees
do not answer; they’re trees,
and know better.
Copyright © 2023 by Tarfia Faizullah. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 1, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
Deployment Day 150
Halfway through October and I have lost
hope of autumn, everything still the green
green green it was when you left.
I wonder if this will be another year
of wind and banshee flame as I wait
for rain in the endless blue. I want to say
I can bear this, but I wear your absence
in my face, in the way my skin crawls off
in the night when you’re asleep in a cold
country, dreaming no doubt of something
warm. Here our cat stopped eating
six days ago, her haunches peaked
and sharp on my lap, where she circles
herself to sleep. Each time I wonder
if she’ll wake. But she is as warm
as this month, and soon she thrums
against my thigh. We are saying a sort
of goodbye each day, when she looks
at me and I am all the heartbreak
a body can hold. We say skin and bones
but nothing of how big the eyes become,
how wonder and starvation are twin.
I try to call you to say this. There is nothing
but the trilling ring that calls out
like a bird that forgot its season.
Copyright © 2022 by Erin Elizabeth Smith. This poem appeared in South Carolina Review Vol. 55, No. 1, 101–103 (Fall, 2022). Used with permission of the author.
The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.
From The Wild Iris, published by Ecco Press, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Louise Glück. All rights reserved. Used with permission. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on October 10, 2020.