I try a new way of imagining people
as dogs
as dogs it makes sense
why anyone would be drawn to do anything
just as dogs rub themselves
in patches of grass
or suddenly lick a face
as dogs you can surely forgive
your mother
because she makes a funny dog
with frilly fur and worried eyes
and as a dog, is it so bad
you spend so much time
recalling a certain smell
or staring too long and too intently
at a torn leaf in a hot tub
a dog falls ill and says nothing
over time, they destroy the things they love
picture whoever is giving you trouble
or whatever part of you desires more than it has
then see a dog
pulling against the chain gripping his neck
or barely moving under a bench
watch the dog run away from everything it knows
do you blame them?
Copyright © 2021 by Rachel B. Glaser. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 25, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Wild Nights – Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile – the winds –
To a heart in port –
Done with the compass –
Done with the chart!
Rowing in Eden –
Ah, the sea!
Might I moor – Tonight –
In thee!
This poem is in the public domain.
What was done was done
in our names; we ourselves
would never have done
what was done to anyone.
We wanted to be good,
polite, obedient, fun,
wanted only not to ever
ask What have we done?
And yet, in our names,
what was done was done.
Copyright © 2018 Richard Hoffman. This poem originally appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Summer 2018. Used with permission of the author.
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.
I.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
II.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.
III.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
Written June 12, 1814. This poem is in the public domain.
is like being burned up
in a twelfth-floor elevator.
Or drowned in a flipped SUV.
It’s like waking with scalpels
arrayed on my chest.
Like being banished to 1983.
Having a fight with you
is never, ever less horrid: that whisper
that says you never loved me—
my heart a stalled engine
out the little square window.
Your eyes a white-capped black sea.
Copyright © 2022 by Patrick Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 11, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:
I see the island
Still ahead somehow.
I see the island
And its sands are fair:
Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.
From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (Vintage Books, 1995) by Langston Hughes. Used by permission Harold Ober Associates.
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.
Say not of Beauty she is good,
Or aught but beautiful,
Or sleek to doves’ wings of the wood
Her wild wings of a gull.
Call her not wicked; that word’s touch
Consumes her like a curse;
But love her not too much, too much,
For that is even worse.
O, she is neither good nor bad,
But innocent and wild!
Enshrine her and she dies, who had
The hard heart of a child.
This poem is in the public domain.