translated from the Japanese by William George Aston
The cry of the cicada
Gives us no sign
That presently it will die.
From A History of Japanese Literature (William Heinemann, 1899) by W. G. Aston. This poem is in the public domain.
(War Time)
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
From The Language of Spring, edited by Robert Atwan, published by Beacon Press, 2003.
I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden Daffodils;
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:—
A Poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.
This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on October 1, 2017. This poem is in the public domain.
Mine are the night and morning,
The pits of air, the gulf of space,
The sportive sun, the gibbous moon,
The innumerable days.
I hid in the solar glory,
I am dumb in the pealing song,
I rest on the pitch of the torrent,
In slumber I am strong.
No numbers have counted my tallies,
No tribes my house can fill,
I sit by the shining Fount of Life,
And pour the deluge still;
And ever by delicate powers
Gathering along the centuries
From race on race the rarest flowers,
My wreath shall nothing miss.
And many a thousand summers
My apples ripened well,
And light from meliorating stars
With firmer glory fell.
I wrote the past in characters
Of rock and fire the scroll,
The building in the coral sea,
The planting of the coal.
And thefts from satellites and rings
And broken stars I drew,
And out of spent and aged things
I formed the world anew;
What time the gods kept carnival,
Tricked out in star and flower,
And in cramp elf and saurian forms
They swathed their too much power.
Time and Thought were my surveyors,
They laid their courses well,
They boiled the sea, and baked the layers
Or granite, marl, and shell.
But he, the man-child glorious,—
Where tarries he the while?
The rainbow shines his harbinger,
The sunset gleams his smile.
My boreal lights leap upward,
Forthright my planets roll,
And still the man-child is not born,
The summit of the whole.
Must time and tide forever run?
Will never my winds go sleep in the west?
Will never my wheels which whirl the sun
And satellites have rest?
Too much of donning and doffing,
Too slow the rainbow fades,
I weary of my robe of snow,
My leaves and my cascades;
I tire of globes and races,
Too long the game is played;
What without him is summer's pomp,
Or winter’s frozen shade?
I travail in pain for him,
My creatures travail and wait;
His couriers come by squadrons,
He comes not to the gate.
Twice I have moulded an image,
And thrice outstretched my hand,
Made one of day, and one of night,
And one of the salt sea-sand.
One in a Judaean manger,
And one by Avon stream,
One over against the mouths of Nile,
And one in the Academe.
I moulded kings and saviours,
And bards o’er kings to rule;—
But fell the starry influence short,
The cup was never full.
Yet whirl the glowing wheels once more,
And mix the bowl again;
Seethe, fate! the ancient elements,
Heat, cold, wet, dry, and peace, and pain.
Let war and trade and creeds and song
Blend, ripen race on race,
The sunburnt world a man shall breed
Of all the zones, and countless days.
No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,
My oldest force is good as new,
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
Gives back the bending heavens in dew.
From American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume I, published by Library of America.
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
Poetry used by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Ralph W. Franklin ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Green spring grass on
the hills had cured
by June and by July
gone wooly and
brown, it crackled
underfoot, desiccated while
within the clamor of live
oaks, an infestation of
tiny larvae clung
to the underleaves,
feeding between
veins. Their frass, that
fine dandruff of excrement
and boring dust, tinkled
as it dropped onto dead leaves
below the limbs. You
could hear it twenty
feet away, tinkling.
Across the valley, on
Sugarloaf Ridge, the full
moon showed up
like a girl doing cartwheels.
No one goes on living
the life that isn’t there.
Below a vast column of
smoke, heat, flame, and
wind, I rose, swaying
and tottering on my
erratic vortex, extemporizing
my own extreme weather, sucking up
acres of scorched
topsoil and spinning it
outward in a burning sleet
of filth and embers that
catapulted me forward
with my mouth open
in every direction at once. So
I came for you, churning, turning
the present into purgatory
because I need to turn
everything to tragedy before
I can see it, because
it must be
leavened with remorse
for the feeling to rise.
Copyright © Forrest Gander. Used with permission of the author.
Lark hit us in the face with his rising sound.
We were unstruck by wind before and raced
Train, and saw all signs with one eye only,
And were shelled against sky
And all that we went by.
Now lark said something in the field and we heard it,
And it mounted and rode upon our ears as we sped.
And we heard windshield rattle and canvas creak thereafter,
And pondered every line
Of hill and sign.
From Collected Poems, 1930–83. Copyright © 1983 by Josephine Miles. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.
Earth put a roaring halt
to our empty rabid existence
ceasing marathon plastic productions
disintegrating worldwide stock markets
shuttering ubiquitous greed
Earth put a roaring halt
to our multimillion-dollar-games
sunk crude oil markets to asunder
stopped our titillating trophy hunts
our eating bloody meat in hoards
our cruel trampling of the land
put an end to our soiling of the skies
our tarnishing the homes where water-beasts are born
In one thunderous clap the Planet hurled
an instant standstill to our haywire
to our decapitation of mountain tops
our butchering of tree-communities
to our murdering sprees of elephant
and whale, tiger infants
and elders, mothers and girls
Throughout passing days of sirens
our existence is halted
a new plague set into motion
our mass die-off
launched.
Copyright © 2024 by Nancy Mercado. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 23, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
It will be Summer eventually —
Ladies with parasols,
Sauntering gentlemen with canes,
And little girls with dolls
Will tint the pallid landscape
As’t were a bright bouquet,
Though drifted deep in Parian
The village lies to-day.
The lilacs, bending many a year,
Will sway with purple load ;
The bees will not despise the tune
Their forefathers have hummed ;
The wild rose redden in the bog,
The aster on the hill
Her everlasting fashion set,
And covenant gentians frill,
Till Summer folds her miracle
As women do their gown,
Or priests adjust the symbols
When Sacrament is done.
I’m sorry for the Dead to-day,
It’s such congenial times
Old neighbors have at fences
At time o’ year for hay —
When broad sun-burned acquaintances
Discourse between the toil
And laugh, a homely species,
That makes the meadows smile.
It seems so straight to lie away
From all the noise of fields,
The busy carts, the fragrant cocks,
The mower’s meter steals
A trouble, lest they’re homesick, —
Those farmers and their wives,
Set separate from the farming
And all the neighbors’ lives.
I wonder if the sepulchre
Is not a lonesome way,
When and boys, and larks and June
Go down the fields to hay !
To disappear enhances ;
The man who runs away
Is tinctured for an instant
With Immortality.
But yesterday a vagrant,
Today in memory lain
With superstitious merit
We tamper with again.
But never far as Honour
Removes the paltry One,
And impotent to cherish
We hasten to adorn.
Of Death the sharpest function,
That, just as a we discern,
The Excellence defies us ;
Securest gathered then
The fruit perverse to plucking,
But leaning to the sight
With the ecstatic limit
Of unobtained Delight.
From The Further Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little, Brown, and Company, 1929), edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson. This poem is in the public domain.
Siwashing It Out Once in Suislaw Forest I slept under rhododendron All night blossoms fell Shivering on a sheet of cardboard Feet stuck in my pack Hands deep in my pockets Barely able to sleep. I remembered when we were in school Sleeping together in a big warm bed We were the youngest lovers When we broke up we were still nineteen Now our friends are married You teach school back east I don’t mind living this way Green hills the long blue beach But sometimes sleeping in the open I think back when I had you. A Spring Night in Shokoku-ji Eight years ago this May We walked under cherry blossoms At night in an orchard in Oregon. All that I wanted then Is forgotten now, but you. Here in the night In a garden of the old capital I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao I remember your cool body Naked under a summer cotton dress. An Autumn Morning in Shokoku-ji Last night watching the Pleiades, Breath smoking in the moonlight, Bitter memory like vomit Choked my throat. I unrolled a sleeping bag On mats on the porch Under thick autumn stars. In dream you appeared (Three times in nine years) Wild, cold, and accusing. I woke shamed and angry: The pointless wars of the heart. Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter. The first time I have Ever seen them close. December at Yase You said, that October, In the tall dry grass by the orchard When you chose to be free, “Again someday, maybe ten years.” After college I saw you One time. You were strange. And I was obsessed with a plan. Now ten years and more have Gone by: I’ve always known where you were— I might have gone to you Hoping to win your love back. You still are single. I didn’t. I thought I must make it alone. I Have done that. Only in dream, like this dawn, Does the grave, awed intensity Of our young love Return to my mind, to my flesh. We had what the others All crave and seek for; We left it behind at nineteen. I feel ancient, as though I had Lived many lives. And may never now know If I am a fool Or have done what my karma demands.
From The Back Country, by Gary Snyder. Published by New Directions, copyright © 1968. Reprinted with permission.