Spring . . . . . . .
Too long . . . . . .
Gongula . . . . . .
This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on June 1, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive. This poem is in the public domain.
My son took a picture of me jumping the cemetery wall. Do it again, he said, as if I'd got out too fast. Pretend you're really climbing. In the retake my lazy eye is half shut, and the other is smiling or crying.
From The Game of Boxes by Catherine Barnett. Copyright © 2012 by Catherine Barnett. Published by Graywolf Press. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
iv.
I know agape means both dumbly
open and love not the kind of love
that climbed the stairs to you.
From The Game of Boxes by Catherine Barnett. Copyright © 2012 by Catherine Barnett. Published by Graywolf Press. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
Could have been otherwise and birdsong make us nauseous. And gigantic roiling sunsets give us vertigo. The world of flowers is for insects, not us. But tonic is durance among.
Copyright © 2012 by Forrest Gander. Used with permission of the author.
RAG SMELL. FIRE smell. Bed blacked. Bowl.
The quiet come from living done.
Shadow built the walls, holed and cribbed with light.
Vine felt cracks and fingered in.
Were sky inside
and what the wind-holes left, a wind.
Ay walk the last. What were floor
heaves rock and root.
Flame-eaten walls, rubs of wood,
scraps the burn left licked
now licked with dirt.
Copyright © 2012 by Joan Houlihan. Used with permission of the author.
Done with mortise and tenon, linseed oil and wax, she stands back from the highboy to snap a photograph with her phone, all the while, defending a shim to absent interlocutors who have, admittedly, never seen her work and died three hundred years ago.
Copyright © 2012 by Devin Johnston. Used with permission of the author.
Awakened too early on Saturday morning by the song of a mockingbird imitating my clock radio alarm. * Walking along the green path with buds in my ears, too engrossed in the morning news to listen to the stillness of the garden.
Copyright © 2012 by Harryette Mullen. Used with permission of the author.
How about an oak leaf if you had to be a leaf? Suppose you had your life to live over knowing what you know? Suppose you had plenty money "Get away from me you little fool." Evening of a day in early March, you are like the smell of drains in a restaurant where paté maison is a slab of cold meat loaf damp and wooly. You lack charm.
From Collected Poems by James Schuyler. Copyright © 1993 by James Schuyler. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux . All rights reserved.
DISABLE SPELLCHECK
Copyright © 2012 by Joyelle McSweeney.
St. Augustine Light shafts down on the assembled congregation of sails billows my shirt sends me to where thin countries stretch like needles to a low and distant shore from which suddenly canoes appear
Copyright © 2012 by Lola Haskins. Used with permission of the author.
Thirty days hath September, April, June and November. All the rest have thirty-one, Excepting February alone, And that has twenty-eight days clear And twenty-nine in each leap year.
This poem is in the public domain.
What syllable are you seeking,
Vocalissimus,
In the distances of sleep?
Speak it.
This poem is in the public domain.
When I was four years old my mother led me to the park. The spring sunshine was not too warm. The street was almost empty. The witch in my fairy-book came walking along. She stooped to fish some mouldy grapes out of the gutter.
This poem is in the public domain.
The water understands Civilization well; It wets my foot, but prettily, It chills my life, but wittily, It is not disconcerted, It is not broken-hearted: Well used, it decketh joy, Adorneth, doubleth joy: Ill used, it will destroy, In perfect time and measure With a face of golden pleasure Elegantly destroy.
Everyone is asleep There is nothing to come between The moon and me.
From Women Poets of Japan, copyright © 1977 by Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
the round spoon
with the curvature
of a concave mirror
scoops out my eye
and swallows it
From The Forest of Eyes by Tada Chimako, translated by Jeffrey Angles. Copyright © 2010 by Tada Chimako and Jeffrey Angles. Used by permission of University of California Press. All rights reserved.
one narcissus
draws close to another
like the only
two adolescent boys
in the universe
From The Forest of Eyes by Tada Chimako, translated by Jeffrey Angles. Copyright © 2010 by Tada Chimako and Jeffrey Angles. Used by permission of University of California Press. All rights reserved.
Fisherman's arm Up and down Like a pump handle The old-fashioned way Flashing a large silver Spangle off the bottom Where lakers lurk in August. Barefoot Thelonious and Bruno Run in the grass of memory.
Copyright © 2011 by Willam Corbett. Reprinted from The Whalen Poem with the permission of Hanging Loose Press.
Venom erupted from the trees when the vital system of the brook reset its serum stem. Can suspended snakes compose a more careless music? Do two detached wings count as an exoskeletal gesture? A hiss is the sound the sky would make if these leaves revived their flight.
Copyright © 2011 by Eric Baus. Used with permission of the author.
A two-legged bag stops me on the street and asks me what I'm carrying in bags under my arm carrying carrying carrying Nothing Nothing Nothing Dead Nightingale Dead Hen
From Dark Things. Copyright © 2009 by Charles Simic. Used with permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.
Out of the dusk a shadow, Then, a spark; Out of the cloud a silence, Then, a lark; Out of the heart a rapture, Then, a pain; Out of the dead, cold ashes, Life again.
This poem is in the public domain.
Last week the caption on page twelve stated the person photographed was Jersy Lem when in fact it was Adolf Hitler.
Copyright © 2010 by Carl Adamshick. From Curses and Wishes (Louisiana State University Press, 2011). Used by permission of the author.