The heat rises in distorted gold
waves around fire
but without fire,
shimmering, twisting
anything seen through it.
The heat rises, rasping
the air it rises through,
scuffing the surface,
if the air has a surface.
The tall summer
field is the keeper
of secrets. Lie down
and forget your body, forgive
your body its bad cradle,
its brokenness.
Lie down and listen
to the rasp, to heat sweep
the pale, dry grass as if
it were your own
breathing, as if the field
you’ve pressed your shape into
is a broom in reverse,
a broom being
swept by the wind.
Copyright © 2017 by Maggie Smith. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 13, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
Tonight the wind is in your voice.
And the gods are nervous
about the drinking water.
Someone hijacks the background
with three simple dance moves.
Or maybe the clouds
paused on the television
set during a ball game.
The silence inside
the photograph
of you eating alone
in an old yearbook.
This is going to be over
before you know it.
But not before your hands
become small birds
in celebration
of the present snow.
An expressed panic
attack of harmonics.
It’s like listening to your heartbeat
in a club, all the lights off,
all by yourself.
Copyright © 2017 by Noah Falck. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 11, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
Dear comrades, my comrades,
My heart is always true;
An’ ever an’ ever
I shall remember you.
We all joined together,
Together joined we four;
An’ I have been first to
Pass t’rough the open door.
We four drilled together,
Together drilled we all;
An’ I’ve been the first to
Flee from the life o’ gall.
We parted, dear comrades,
We parted all in tears,
An’ each went his own way
To shoulder life’s sad cares.
O comrades, my comrades,
What is de lasting gain,
But all t’rough de tempest
A heart of unmixed pain?
My comrades, loved comrades,
I hear your bitter cry;
But life’s pain will end, boys,
Will end yet—by an’ by.
This poem is in the public domain.
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”
This poem is in the public domain.
If you remember cosmology
there is nothing to stop time
running all the way to zero
Lying up or even lying down
I will just wiggle my hand to
remind you I was timorous
Copyright © 2017 by Wayne Miller. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 7, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
When did hordes of sentences start beginning with So?
As if everything were always pending,
leaning on what came before.
What can you expect?
Loneliness everywhere, entertained or kept in storage.
So you felt anxious to be alone.
Easier to hear, explore a city, room,
mound of hours, no one walking beside you.
Talking to self endlessly, but mostly listening.
This would not be strange.
It would be the tent you slept in.
Waking calmly inside whatever
you had to do would be freedom.
It would be your country.
The men in front of me had whole acres
in their eyes. I could feel them cross, recross each day.
Memory, stitched. History, soothed.
What we do or might prefer to do. Have done.
How we got here. Telling ourselves a story
till it’s compact enough to bear.
Passing the walls, wearing the sky,
the slight bow and rising of trees.
Everything ceaselessly holding us close.
So we are accompanied.
Never cast out without a line of language to reel us back.
That is what happened, how I got here.
So maybe. One way anyway.
A story was sewn, seed sown,
this was what patriotism meant to me—
to be at home inside my own head long enough
to accept its infinite freedom
and move forward anywhere, to mysteries coming.
Even at night in a desert, temperatures plummet,
billowing tent flaps murmur to one other.
Copyright © 2017 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 5, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
Here we are, on top of the utopian arc. The water is shallow. An oil spill shimmers on the surface like a lens catches light and folds it in front of a mirror. If someone stands next to you, they are there, even when outside the picture. Which makes total obscurity relative to luck and such. Unlike the law, architecture lasts. A façade, like an ideal, can be oppressive unless balanced by a balcony on which you can stand and call down to those in the street, Come over here and look up at us. Aren’t we exactly what you wanted to believe in?
Copyright © 2017 by Mary Jo Bang. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 3, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
If space and time, as sages say,
Are things which cannot be,
The fly that lives a single day
Has lived as long as we.
But let us live while yet we may,
While love and life are free,
For time is time, and runs away,
Though sages disagree.
The flowers I sent thee when the dew
Was trembling on the vine,
Were withered ere the wild bee flew
To suck the eglantine.
But let us haste to pluck anew
Nor mourn to see them pine,
And though the flowers of love be few
Yet let them be divine.
This poem is in the public domain.
I will eat the apple
read Stephen’s note this morning.
He is volunteering to play Eve.
He wrote, I will eat the apple
—but there are no apples in the house.
We have no lascivious Honeycrisp,
no bonny Braeburn, no upright Baldwin.
We’re out of spry Granny Smiths,
the skulking Northern Spy,
or the mysterious Pink Lady.
Stephen does have an Adam’s apple
and I have an Apple computer,
but you can’t compare apples and oranges.
The note said, I will eat the apple.
Perhaps Stephen’s chasing out the doctors.
Perhaps he’s not falling far from the tree.
Or he’s already eaten from the tree of knowledge:
in Latin, malum means both apple
and evil. I think Stephen is sending a warning.
He means, I will protect you.
He writes, I will eat the apple.
Copyright © 2017 by Kim Roberts. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 10, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
Phones were ringing
in the pockets of the living
and the dead
the living stepped carefully among.
The whole still room
was lit with sound—like a switchboard—
and those who could answer
said hello. Then
it was just the dead, the living
trapped inside their bloody clothes
ringing and ringing them—
and this was
the best image we had
of what made us a nation.
Copyright © 2017 by Wayne Miller. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 9, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
‘In Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours,
Faith and unfaith can ne’er be equal powers:
Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all.
‘It is the little rift within the lute,
That by and by will make the music mute,
And ever widening slowly silence all.
‘The little rift within the lover’s lute
Or little pitted speck in garnered fruit,
That rotting inward slowly moulders all.
‘It is not worth the keeping: let it go:
But shall it? answer, darling, answer, no.
And trust me not at all or all in all’.
This poem is in the public domain.
You’re used to it, the way,
in the first wide-eyed
minutes, climbing from parking lot
to fire trail, or rifling through
cupboards in a rented kitchen,
I can’t help but tell you
we should visit here again,
my reverie inserting
a variation in the season,
or giving friends the room
next door, in stubborn panic
to fix this happiness in place
by escaping from it.
“We’re here now,” you say,
holding out the book I bought
with its dog-eared maps and lists
and, on the cover, a waterfall,
white flecks frozen, very close.
Copyright © 2017 by Nate Klug. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 23, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
Now cosmos in bloom and snow-in-summer
opening along the garden’s stone borders,
a moment toward a little good fortune,
water from the watering can,
to blossom, so natural, it seems, and still
the oldest blooms outside my door are flourishing
according to their seedtime.
They have lived as in trust
of tended ground, not of many seasons
as the lingering bud in late summer,
when leaves have reached their greenest,
when a chill enters the nights,
when a star I’ve turned to, night after night,
vanished in the shift of constellations.
But when on a bare branch,
even in August, a sprig starts,
sprig to stem—as if to say, See,
there’s kinship with the perennials
you think so hardy—voice
the moment among the oaks, toast
the spring in summer, as once each May
a shot of vodka is poured on bare dirt
among gravestones to quench the dead,
among the first stars of this new evening.
Copyright © 2017 by James Brasfield. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 17, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
Here you go
light low and long
in the fields
at sunset and sunrise
Everything twice
a doubled existence
two nows
two thens
two names
yours and the other one
also yours
folded into a paper boat
the points of which
constellate stars
There is no life after death. Why
should there be. What on
earth would have us believe this.
Heaven is not the American
highway, blackened chicken alfredo
from Applebee’s nor the
clown sundae from Friendly’s. Our
life, this is the afterdeath,
when we blink open, peeled and
ready to ache. Years ago
my aunt banged on the steering, she
insisted there had to be a
God, a heaven. We were on our
way to a wedding. I would
have to sit at the same table as the
man who saw no heaven
in me. Today I am thinking about
Mozart, of all people, who
died at 35 mysteriously, perhaps of
strep. What a strange cloth
it is to live. But that we came from
death and return to it, made
different by form, shaped again back
into anti–, anti–. On my run,
I think of Jack Gilbert, who said we
must insist while there is still
time, but insist toward what. Why we
must fill the void with light—
isn’t that our human insistence? But
we drift into a distance of
distance until proximity fails, our
name lifts away with any
future concerns, the past a flattened
coin that cannot spin. I am
matter spun from death’s wool—and
I bewilder the itch, I who am
I am just so happy to go.
Copyright © 2017 by Natalie Eilbert. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 15, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
They kept showing up, for days,
dead on the windowsill,
and for days I did nothing about the ladybugs
except to ask if their entering the house
unnoticed and dying before I saw them
was symbolic.
Thinking so was easy.
They symbolized birth and death,
change and rebirth.
It was also possible the tiny beetles
embodied an inborn need
to show themselves,
to turn up in every and any place,
even as the dried-out remains of the once lively.
Or they stood for the burden of being one thing
relieved by becoming another,
which all the world’s children suffer.
This went on and on, and could’ve gone on
forever, so finally I opened the window
and blew them into the wide open
because everything and everyone should get a chance
to be mourned, and they got theirs,
but first they had to die, which is life,
not symbolism.
Copyright © 2017 by Hayan Charara. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 25, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
That the deepest wound is the least unique
surprises nobody but the living.
Secretly, and with what feels like good reason,
we’re the pain the people we love
put the people they no longer love in.
Copyright © 2017 by Graham Foust. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 5, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
Autumn is over the long leaves that love us,
And over the mice in the barley sheaves;
Yellow the leaves of the rowan above us,
And yellow the wet wild-strawberry leaves.
The hour of the waning of love has beset us,
And weary and worn are our sad souls now;
Let us part, ere the season of passion forget us,
With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow.
This poem is in the public domain.
This poem is in the public domain.
Copyright © 2017 by John Koethe. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 20, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
I knew her for a little ghost
That in my garden walked;
The wall is high—higher than most—
And the green gate was locked.
And yet I did not think of that
Till after she was gone—
I knew her by the broad white hat,
All ruffled, she had on.
By the dear ruffles round her feet,
By her small hands that hung
In their lace mitts, austere and sweet,
Her gown's white folds among.
I watched to see if she would stay,
What she would do—and oh!
She looked as if she liked the way
I let my garden grow!
She bent above my favourite mint
With conscious garden grace,
She smiled and smiled—there was no hint
Of sadness in her face.
She held her gown on either side
To let her slippers show,
And up the walk she went with pride,
The way great ladies go.
And where the wall is built in new
And is of ivy bare
She paused—then opened and passed through
A gate that once was there.
Originally published in Renascence and Other Poems (Mitchell Kennerley, 1917), this poem is in the public domain.
Copyright © 2017 by C. Dale Young. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 13, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
means nostalgia, I’m told, but also
nostalgia for what never was. Isn’t it
the same thing? At a café
in Rio flies wreathe my glass.
How you would have loved this: the waiter
sweating his knit shirt dark. Children
loping, in tiny suits or long shorts, dragging
toys and towels to the beach. We talk,
or I talk, and imagine your answer, the heat clouding our view.
Here, again, grief fashioned in its cruelest translation:
my imagined you is all I have left of you.
Copyright © 2017 by John Freeman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 10, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Ciccarello. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 11, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
Is it that in some brighter sphere
We part from friends we meet with here?
Or do we see the Future pass
Over the Present’s dusky glass?
Or what is that that makes us seem
To patch up fragments of a dream,
Part of which comes true, and part
Beats and trembles in the heart?
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 13, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
Copyright © 2017 by David Rivard. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 6, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
let ruin end here
let him find honey
where there was once a slaughter
let him enter the lion’s cage
& find a field of lilacs
let this be the healing
& if not let it be
From Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Danez Smith. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.
She is the gypsy Whose young have rooted In the very flesh of her scalp. Her eyes are drill-holes where Your senses spin, and you are stone Even as you stand before her. She opens her lips to speak, And have you believe. She has more tongues to deceive Than you can deafen your ears to. If you could look away, the voices From the heads of her vipers Would be hard to argue. If you could look away, The pedestals of your feet might move. If you could look away, The song from the cathedral of her mouth Would fall to the floor like a lie.
From Waxworks by Frieda Hughes. Copyright © 2003 by Frieda Hughes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
Ah, my darling, when over the purple horizon shall loom
The shrouded mother of a new idea, men hide their faces,
Cry out and fend her off, as she seeks her procreant groom,
Wounding themselves against her, denying her fecund embraces.
This poem is in the public domain.
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor’d youth,
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed:
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O! love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love, loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter’d be.
This poem is in the public domain.
The dead bird, color of a bruise,
and smaller than an eye
swollen shut,
is king among omens.
Who can blame the ants for feasting?
Let him cast the first crumb.
~
We once tended the oracles.
Now we rely on a photograph
a fingerprint
a hand we never saw
coming.
~
A man draws a chalk outline
first in his mind
around nothing
then around the body
of another man.
He does this without thinking.
~
What can I do about the white room I left
behind? What can I do about the great stones
I walk among now? What can I do
but sing.
Even a small cut can sing all day.
~
There are entire nights
I would take back.
Nostalgia is a thin moon,
disappearing
into a sky like cold,
unfeeling iron.
~
I dreamed
you were a drowned man, crown
of phosphorescent, seaweed in your hair,
water in your shoes. I woke up desperate
for air.
~
In another dream, I was a field
and you combed through me
searching for something
you only thought you had lost.
~
What have we left at the altar of sorrow?
What blessed thing will we leave tomorrow?
Copyright © 2016 by Cecilia Llompart. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 26, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
The three witches, casting a spell
Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights hast thirty one
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse,
Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,
For the ingredients of our cauldron.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
This poem is in the public domain.
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.
The last light has gone out of the world, except
This moonlight lying on the grass like frost
Beyond the brink of the tall elm’s shadow.
It is as if everything else had slept
Many an age, unforgotten and lost
The men that were, the things done, long ago,
All I have thought; and but the moon and I
Live yet and here stand idle over the grave
Where all is buried. Both have liberty
To dream what we could do if we were free
To do some thing we had desired long,
The moon and I. There’s none less free than who
Does nothing and has nothing else to do,
Being free only for what is not to his mind,
And nothing is to his mind. If every hour
Like this one passing that I have spent among
The wiser others when I have forgot
To wonder whether I was free or not,
Were piled before me, and not lost behind,
And I could take and carry them away
I should be rich; or if I had the power
To wipe out every one and not again
Regret, I should be rich to be so poor.
And yet I still am half in love with pain,
With what is imperfect, with both tears and mirth,
With things that have an end, with life and earth,
And this moon that leaves me dark within the door.
This poem is in the public domain.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
This poem is in the public domain.
Wearing nothing but snakeskin
boots, I blazed a footpath, the first
radical road out of that old kingdom
toward a new unknown.
When I came to those great flaming gates
of burning gold,
I stood alone in terror at the threshold
between Paradise and Earth.
There I heard a mysterious echo:
my own voice
singing to me from across the forbidden
side. I shook awake—
at once alive in a blaze of green fire.
Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.
I leapt
to freedom.
Copyright © 2015 by Ansel Elkins. Used with permission of the author.
Death devours all lovely things; Lesbia with her sparrow Shares the darkness,—presently Every bed is narrow Unremembered as old rain Dries the sheer libation, And the little petulant hand Is an annotation. After all, my erstwhile dear, My no longer cherished, Need we say it was not love, Now that love is perished?
This poem is in the public domain.
When I rise up above the earth,
And look down on the things that fetter me,
I beat my wings upon the air,
Or tranquil lie,
Surge after surge of potent strength
Like incense comes to me
When I rise up above the earth
And look down upon the things that fetter me.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 10, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
"Intermissa, Venus, diu." Venus, again thou mov'st a war Long intermitted, pray thee, pray thee spare! I am not such, as in the reign Of the good Cynara I was; refrain Sour mother of sweet Loves, forbear To bend a man, now at his fiftieth year Too stubborn for commands so slack: Go where youth's soft entreaties call thee back. More timely hie thee to the house (With thy bright swans) of Paulus Maximus: There jest and feast, make him thine host If a fit liver thou dost seek to toast. For he's both noble, lovely, young, And for the troubled client fills his tongue: Child of a hundred arts, and far Will he display the ensigns of thy war. And when he, smiling, finds his grace With thee 'bove all his rivals' gifts take place, He'll thee a marble statue make, Beneath a sweet-wood roof, near Alba lake; There shall thy dainty nostril take In many a gum, and for thy soft ear's sake Shall verse be set to harp and lute, And Phrygian hau'boy, not without the flute. There twice a day in sacred lays, The youths and tender maids shall sing thy praise! And in the Salian manner meet Thrice 'bout thy altar, with their ivory feet. Me now, nor girl, nor wanton boy Delights, nor credulous hope of mutual joy; Nor care I now healths to propound Or with fresh flowers to girt my temples round. But why, oh why, my Ligurine, Flow my thin tears down these pale cheeks of mine? Or why my well-graced words among, With an uncomely silence, fails my tongue? Hard-hearted, I dream every night I hold thee fast! but fled hence with the light, Whether in Mars his field thou be, Or Tiber's winding streams, I follow thee.
This poem is in the public domain.
Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle,
Earth and high heaven are fixt of old and founded strong.
Think rather,—call to thought, if now you grieve a little,
The days when we had rest, O soul, for they were long.
Men loved unkindness then, but lightless in the quarry
I slept and saw not; tears fell down, I did not mourn;
Sweat ran and blood sprang out and I was never sorry:
Then it was well with me, in days ere I was born.
Now, and I muse for why and never find the reason,
I pace the earth, and drink the air, and feel the sun.
Be still, be still, my soul; it is but for a season:
Let us endure an hour and see injustice done.
Ay, look: high heaven and earth ail from the prime foundation;
All thoughts to rive the heart are here, and all are vain:
Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation—
Oh why did I awake? when shall I sleep again?
This poem is in the public domain.
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
This poem is in the public domain.
There is no dusk to be,
There is no dawn that was,
Only there's now, and now,
And the wind in the grass.
Days I remember of
Now in my heart, are now;
Days that I dream will bloom
White peach bough.
Dying shall never be
Now in the windy grass;
Now under shooken leaves
Death never was.
This poem is in the public domain.
Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.
This poem is in the public domain.
I
When the sea has devoured the ships,
And the spires and the towers
Have gone back to the hills.
And all the cities
Are one with the plains again.
And the beauty of bronze,
And the strength of steel
Are blown over silent continents,
As the desert sand is blown—
My dust with yours forever.
II
When folly and wisdom are no more,
And fire is no more,
Because man is no more;
When the dead world slowly spinning
Drifts and falls through the void—
My light with yours
In the Light of Lights forever!
This poem is in the public domain.
Deities!
Inexorable revealers,
Give me strength to endure
The gifts of the Muses,
Daughters of Memory.
When the sky is blue as Minerva's eyes
Let me stand unshaken;
When the sea sings to the rising sun
Let me be unafraid;
When the meadow lark falls like a meteor
Through the light of afternoon,
An unloosened fountain of rapture,
Keep my heart from spilling
Its vital power;
When at the dawn
The dim souls of crocuses hear the calls
Of waking birds,
Give me to live but master the loveliness.
Keep my eyes unharmed from splendors
Unveiled by you,
And my ears at peace
Filled no less with the music
Of Passion and Pain, growth and change.
But O ye sacred and terrible powers,
Reckless of my mortality,
Strengthen me to behold a face,
To know the spirit of a beloved one
Yet to endure, yet to dare!
This poem is in the public domain.
Yourself the sun, and I the melting frost, Myself the flax and you the kindly fire, Yourself the maze wherein my self is lost, I your disdain, yet you my heart's desire, Your love the port whereto my fancies sail, My hope the ship whose helm your fair hand guides, Your grace the wind that must my course avail My faith the flood, your frowns the ebbing tides, Yourself the spring and I the toiling bee. My thoughts in you, though yours elsewhere, do rest. You are the brook and I the deer embossed My heaven is you, yet you torment my ghost.
This poem is in the public domain.
Mine is a body that should die at sea!
And have for a grave, instead of a grave
Six feet deep and the length of me,
All the water that is under the wave!
And terrible fishes to seize my flesh,
Such as a living man might fear,
And eat me while I am firm and fresh,—
Not wait till I've been dead for a year!
This poem was originally published in Second April (1921). This poem is in the public domain.
Life, like a marble block, is given to all,
A blank, inchoate mass of years and days,
Whence one with ardent chisel swift essays
Some shape of strength or symmetry to call;
One shatters it in bits to mend a wall;
One in a craftier hand the chisel lays,
And one, to wake the mirth in Lesbia’s gaze,
Carves it apace in toys fantastical.
But least is he who, with enchanted eyes
Filled with high visions of fair shapes to be,
Muses which god he shall immortalize
In the proud Parian’s perpetuity,
Till twilight warns him from the punctual skies
That the night cometh wherein none shall see.
This poem is in the public domain.
Still dark, my baby girl leaps out
the window to greet the rising sun.
I stand below ready to catch her,
but every time she takes off
without fail, her laughter calling
to the orioles, calling
to my shame that had I the choice,
I would have never taught her to fly.
Somewhere there is a man with a gun
who will take pleasure in seeing her
skin against the pure blue sky—
and shooting her down.
My own mother did not flinch
when I first raised my arms
and lifted my feet off the ground,
above her head.
She only said you better hope
bulletproof skin comes with that
gift. Years later I found out it did.
Copyright © 2017 by Gary Jackson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 3, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
That night the air stank, the stars obscured behind wild horses of clouds. I walked on cobblestones on the edge of something I could not name: new land of unalterable decisions like a retinue of assassins coming right for me, who kept coming in a bad dream that dissolved like a black-and-white movie, the dark mouth enveloping the entire screen. The End. Then the aftermath like a heroin addict waking up in the overgrowth of a river path, no longer young. There are nights that pummel your life, chart an alternate course unasked for and colorless—the way it was the first time you encountered the one ready to eat out your heart— an innocent remark—a joke about ocelots or the weeds of purple carrots. That night I was caught in a before and after, an unsayable horror film of half-lives as we hipswayed and grunted along the Seine. When someone passed us, their teeth shone like those of a vampire happy with the waste of the world. Ready to drink it in. My body was four months pregnant, crossing over to a nightmared path of no return. But isn’t this the truth of every moment? To revise our lives into the I belong—to this tribe of the unreliable narrators, luminous in our stories and in our squalor.
Copyright © 2017 by Susan Rich. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 31, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
This poem is in the public domain.
This poem is in the public domain.
Copyright © 2017 by Carrie Fountain. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 19, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
Copyright © 2017 by Howard Altmann. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 23, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
It would be easy to forgive,
If I could but remember;
If I could hear, lost love of mine,
The music of your cruelties,
Shaking to sound the silent skies,
Could voice with them their song divine,
Red with pain’s leaping ember:
It would be easy to forgive,
If I could but remember.
It would be easy to forget,
If I could find lost Sorrow;
If I could kiss her plaintive face,
And break with her her bitter bread,
Could share again her woeful bed,
And know with tears her pale embrace.
Make yesterday, to-morrow:
It would be easy to forget,
If I could find lost Sorrow.
This poem is in the public domain.
Mind was a prison, ruby lined
in its lipstick noir—everything woman
I was expected to be, trapped between
papered walls. What they said to do, I did not
but only levitated at the burning,
the body a water in which I drowned, the life
a windshield dirty with love. What they
said to think, I thought not but instead made
my mind into a birdcage with wings
(Title is from an Anne Sexton Poem.)
Copyright © 2017 by Melissa Studdard. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 29, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
This poem is in the public domain.
The Soul unto itself
Is an imperial friend –
Or the most agonizing Spy –
An Enemy – could send –
Secure against its own –
No treason it can fear –
Itself – its Sovereign – of itself
The Soul should stand in Awe –
Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
It’s a little bit
true that the
hole in my jacket
pocket
the breast pocket
yeah all relaxed
has a hole &
pens keep
slipping through
one’s in the lining
but this one
perched
now it’s a writing
bird
silly black out there
wants to
tell its
song. Miguel’s
book was
in the air &
I was on
a train
my feet are cold
and you wouldn’t
be in the
air so
long it doesn’t happen
like this
there’s no climate
in a plane
and I was in one
but not on
earth
my mother
is gone
each thing I do
is a little
bit wrong. I’m willing
to apologize
but they never
help it’s
just pointing
out the hole
& people
forget but I
won’t forget
you
Copyright © 2017 by Eileen Myles. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 12, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
I begin
to talk to violets.
Tears fall into my soup
and I drink them.
Sooner or later
everyone donates something.
I carry wood, stone, and
hay in my head.
The eyes of the violets
grow very wide.
At the end of the day
I reglue the broken foot
of the china shepherd
who has put up with me.
Next door, in the house
of the clock-repairer,
a hundred clocks tick
at once. He and his wife
go about their business
sleeping peacefully at night.
Copyright © 2018 by Mary Ruefle. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 31, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
My heart is what it was before,
A house where people come and go;
But it is winter with your love,
The sashes are beset with snow.
I light the lamp and lay the cloth,
I blow the coals to blaze again;
But it is winter with your love,
The frost is thick upon the pane.
I know a winter when it comes:
The leaves are listless on the boughs;
I watched your love a little while,
And brought my plants into the house.
I water them and turn them south,
I snap the dead brown from the stem;
But it is winter with your love,—
I only tend and water them.
There was a time I stood and watched
The small, ill-natured sparrows’ fray;
I loved the beggar that I fed,
I cared for what he had to say,
I stood and watched him out of sight;
Today I reach around the door
And set a bowl upon the step;
My heart is what it was before,
But it is winter with your love;
I scatter crumbs upon the sill,
And close the window,—and the birds
May take or leave them, as they will.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 4, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Stay, stay at home, my heart, and rest; Home-keeping hearts are happiest, For those that wander they know not where Are full of trouble and full of care; To stay at home is best. Weary and homesick and distressed, They wander east, they wander west, And are baffled and beaten and blown about By the winds of the wilderness of doubt; To stay at home is best. Then stay at home, my heart, and rest; The bird is safest in its nest; O’er all that flutter their wings and fly A hawk is hovering in the sky; To stay at home is best.
This poem is in the public domain.
It was easy enough to bend them to my wish, it was easy enough to alter them with a touch, but you adrift on the great sea, how shall I call you back? Cedar and white ash, rock-cedar and sand plants and tamarisk red cedar and white cedar and black cedar from the inmost forest, fragrance upon fragrance and all of my sea-magic is for nought. It was easy enough— a thought called them from the sharp edges of the earth; they prayed for a touch, they cried for the sight of my face, they entreated me till in pity I turned each to his own self. Panther and panther, then a black leopard follows close— black panther and red and a great hound, a god-like beast, cut the sand in a clear ring and shut me from the earth, and cover the sea-sound with their throats, and the sea-roar with their own barks and bellowing and snarls, and the sea-stars and the swirl of the sand, and the rock-tamarisk and the wind resonance— but not your voice. It is easy enough to call men from the edges of the earth. It is easy enough to summon them to my feet with a thought— it is beautiful to see the tall panther and the sleek deer-hounds circle in the dark. It is easy enough to make cedar and white ash fumes into palaces and to cover the sea-caves with ivory and onyx. But I would give up rock-fringes of coral and the inmost chamber of my island palace and my own gifts and the whole region of my power and magic for your glance.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 3, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
I am less of myself and more of the sun;
The beat of life is wearing me
To an incomplete oblivion,
Yet not to the certain dignity
Of death. They cannot even die
Who have not lived.
The hungry jaws
Of space snap at my unlearned eye,
And time tears in my flesh like claws.
If I am not life’s, if I am not death’s,
Out of chaos I must re-reap
The burden of untasted breaths.
Who has not waked may not yet sleep.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 17, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Come to me in the silence of the night; Come in the speaking silence of a dream; Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright As sunlight on a stream; Come back in tears, O memory, hope, love of finished years. O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet, Whose wakening should have been in Paradise, Where souls brimful of love abide and meet; Where thirsting longing eyes Watch the slow door That opening, letting in, lets out no more. Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live My very life again though cold in death: Come back to me in dreams, that I may give Pulse for pulse, breath for breath: Speak low, lean low, As long ago, my love, how long ago!
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 11, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
If trees fall in a wood and no one hears them,
Do they exist except as a page of lines
That words of rapture or grief are written on?
They are lines too while alive, pointing away
From the primer of damped air and leafmold
That underlie, or would if certain of them
Were not melon or maize, solferino or smoke,
Colors into which a sunset will collapse
On a high branch of broken promises.
Or they nail the late summer’s shingles of noon
Back onto the horizon’s overlap, reflecting
An emptiness visible on leaves that come and go.
How does a life flash before one’s eyes
At the end? How is there time for so much time?
You pick up the book and hold it, knowing
Long since the failed romance, the strained
Marriage, the messenger, the mistake,
Knowing it all at once, as if looking through
A lighted dormer on the dark crest of a barn.
You know who is inside, and who has always been
At the other edge of the wood. She is waiting
For no one in particular. It could be you.
If you can discover which tree she has become,
You will know whether it has all been true.
for Wolf Kahn
From Plundered Hearts: New and Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). Copyright © 2014 by J. D. McClatchy. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
(at St. Mary’s)
may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that
From Quilting: Poems 1987-1990 by Lucille Clifton. Copyright © 2001 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with permission of BOA Editions Ltd. All rights reserved.
Words are hoops Through which to leap upon meanings, Which are horses’ backs, Bare, moving.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on May 5, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
I sing the will to love: the will that carves the will to live, the will that saps the will to hurt, the will that kills the will to die; the will that made and keeps you warm, the will that points your eyes ahead, the will that makes you give, not get, a give and get that tell us what you are: how much a god, how much a human. I call on you to live the will to love.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on May 6, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Now, dear, it isn’t the bold things, Great deeds of valour and might, That count the most in the summing up of life at the end of the day. But it is the doing of old things, Small acts that are just and right; And doing them over and over again, no matter what others say; In smiling at fate, when you want to cry, and in keeping at work when you want to play— Dear, those are the things that count. And, dear, it isn’t the new ways Where the wonder-seekers crowd That lead us into the land of content, or help us to find our own. But it is keeping to true ways, Though the music is not so loud, And there may be many a shadowed spot where we journey along alone; In flinging a prayer at the face of fear, and in changing into a song a groan— Dear, these are the things that count. My dear, it isn’t the loud part Of creeds that are pleasing to God, Not the chant of a prayer, or the hum of a hymn, or a jubilant shout or song. But it is the beautiful proud part Of walking with feet faith-shod; And in loving, loving, loving through all, no matter how things go wrong; In trusting ever, though dark the day, and in keeping your hope when the way seems long— Dear, these are the things that count.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 3, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
All essences of sweetness from the white
Warm day go up in vapor, when the dark
Comes down. Ascends the tune of meadow-lark,
Ascends the noon-time smell of grass, when night
Takes sunlight from the world, and gives it ease.
Mysterious wings have brushed the air; and light
Float all the ghosts of sense and sound and sight;
The silent hive is echoing the bees.
So stir my thoughts at this slow, solemn time.
Now only is there certainty for me
When all the day's distilled and understood.
Now light meets darkness: now my tendrils climb
In this vast hour, up the living tree,
Where gloom foregathers, and the stern winds brood.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on May 25, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
All that I dream
By day or night
Lives in that stream
Of lovely light.
Here is the earth,
And there is the spire;
This is my hearth,
And that is my fire.
From the sun's dome
I am shouted proof
That this is my home,
And that is my roof.
Here is my food,
And here is my drink,
And I am wooed
From the moon's brink.
And the days go over,
And the nights end;
Here is my lover,
Here is my friend.
All that I
Could ever ask
Wears that sky
Like a thin gold mask.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 23, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
The diagnosis was god, twice a day until the spirit untangles itself. I took a trip into unscripted days past, teenagers submit to the window an open facing yawn. A walnut fell into the grave of my loved one and stayed there beating patient like a word. I was still unmoved by disbelief watching my father mumble the pledge and hot white stars he can’t remember. Nobody got hurt, some un- fulfilled potential exits the room. Enter, knowledge. Men came to dispel ambiguity and raced my intention to a hard boiling over. Each new decade we stayed was a misinterpretation of genre. We showed our teeth over the years to those who would listen. In the face of the absent subject I felt my desire go flaccid. The leaves fell dutifully one by one from their limbs. But I wrote to you against all odds. Money. Paperwork. Love’s heavy open door. Critique. Indignity. Vision and often enough time.
Copyright © 2018 by Wendy Xu. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 5, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
—Wisława Szymborska
My handwriting is all over these woods.
No, my handwriting is these woods,
each tree a half-print, half-cursive scrawl,
each loop a limb. My house is somewhere
here, & I have scribbled myself inside it.
What is home but a book we write, then
read again & again, each time dog-earing
different pages. In the morning I wake
in time to pencil the sun high. How
fragile it is, the world—I almost wrote
the word but caught myself. Either one
could be erased. In these written woods,
branches smudge around me whenever
I take a deep breath. Still, written fawns
lie in the written sunlight that dapples
their backs. What is home but a passage
I’m writing & underlining every time I read it.
Copyright © 2018 by Maggie Smith. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 8, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Beyond the cheat of Time, here where you died, you live; You pace the garden walk, secure and sensitive; You linger on the stair: Love’s lonely pulses leap! The harpsichord is shaken, the dogs look up from sleep. Here, after all the years, you keep the heirdom still; The youth and joy in you achieve their olden will, Unbidden, undeterred, with waking sense adored; And still the house is happy that hath so dear a lord. To every inmate heart, confirmed in cheer you brought, Your name is as a spell midway of speech and thought, And to a wonted guest (not awestruck heretofore), The sunshine that was you floods all the open door.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 9, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
For Sylvia Marlowe Out of her left hand fled the stream, from her right the rain puckered the surface, drop by drop, the current splayed in a downward daze until it hit the waterfall, churned twigs and leaves, smashed foam over stone: from her fingers slid eddies, bubbles rose, the fugue heaved up against itself, against its own falling: digressed in curlicues under shadowed banks, around root tangles and beaver-gnawed sticks. She had the face of a pike, the thrusting lower jaw and silvered eye, pure drive. The form fulfilled itself through widowhood, her skin mottled with shingles, hands crooked, a pain I fled. Now that tempered tumult moves my time into her timing. Far beyond her dying, my tinnitus, I am still through the thrum of voices trying to hear.
Copyright © 2018 by Rosanna Warren. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 11, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
If there’s one true thing, it’s that Google will make money off us no matter what. If we want to know what percentage of America is white (as it seems we do) what percentage of the population is gay (as it seems we do) what percentage of the earth is water: the engine is ready for our desire. The urgent snow is everywhere is a line by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and many have asked, apparently, where am I right now. Also when will I die. Do you love me may be up there, generating high cost-per-click, but not as high as how to make pancakes, what time is it in California. So many things I wanted to ask you, now that you’re gone, and your texts bounce back to me undeliverable. Praise to the goddess of the internet search, who returns with her basket of grain, 67,000 helpful suggestions to everything we request: how to solve a Rubik’s Cube, what to do when you’re bored, how old is the earth, how to clear cache, what animal am I, why do we dream, where are you now, come back.
Copyright © 2018 by Rachel Richardson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 15, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
the shape
of this
&her smell
&the shine in the small
lit room
to the boy
replace him
w you &
let me love
that shine
in you
let me.
Copyright © 2018 by Eileen Myles. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 21, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Say your body’s
life-size trip clock
starts in schlep
on the down slope.
Then the long hand
slaloms you steep
as your face tocks
the take of nine-to-five.
It’s just your timing
and mindset that’s semi-
rattled, and everyone
comes to the skit a little
pusillanimous to begin.
What is a kind of
smudgy justice:
the ancestors’ DNA
in full wig effect,
frizzy edges crimped,
oblivious to wind.
Are you really inside
that mirror slice?
Pacing over past
junkets still, a hybrid
hallucination got
stock-carded into
a being strange to be,
like that griffen
who slips so casual
onto someone else’s
map of laughing tropic
locales. Friend, look hard.
Mix. Step out. The center
bit by bit gets beiged.
You are one hundred
percent half-and-half.
In the hemi is the how.
Copyright © 2018 by Pimone Triplett. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 25, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
First, above all, I live forever. And
thereafter redecorate paradise
in the majesty of the Roof Nightclub,
DJ Lucifer, at predawn hours
terrifies the floorboards to give way to
Apollyon’s abyss, reflecting scarred light
on the wall. The mirror alive with tremors.
Herons bring news of consolation.
I rebuke them for my brilliance
and enrich uranium in my cove
across Navy Island. The hospital
vanishes in the fog, so I arrange rain
to restore magenta ginger lilies
where my mother walked to born me.
Malignant fireflies at Christmas;
sorrel then sorrow, such is Kingston, there
funky carols seethe asphalt with famine.
Forever ends. Never a moment holds
‘still-here,’ when sand murmurs through my fingers.
I number and chant down stars, ellipsoidal
as fire ants with, “I think I will be
killed once I die!” and again return
the Super Ape, to conquer the Roof Club,
rip off Apollyon’s hell fence; skin him; dance
thundering subatomic dub music,
until my rage yields settled coral.
A million embers of eyes split from coals
to see me loom out the shadows’ sunray
by the turntable wearing a splash crown.
Copyright © 2018 by Ishion Hutchinson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 9, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
I can never remake the thing I have destroyed; I brushed the golden dust from the moth’s bright wing, I called down wind to shatter the cherry-blossoms, I did a terrible thing. I feared that the cup might fall, so I flung it from me; I feared that the bird might fly, so I set it free; I feared that the dam might break, so I loosed the river: May its waters cover me.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on May 12, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome Has many sonnets: so here now shall be One sonnet more, a love sonnet, from me To her whose heart is my heart’s quiet home, To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome; Whose service is my special dignity, And she my loadstar while I go and come. And so because you love me, and because I love you, Mother, I have woven a wreath Of rhymes wherewith to crown your honoured name: In you not fourscore years can dim the flame Of love, whose blessed glow transcends the laws Of time and change and mortal life and death.
This poem is in the public domain.
after Willie Cole Through the artist’s eyes, we catch this breath of fire, lifting water up to flight. This dead weight sinks our histories back into deep sleep, hidden away to dream of repair. Waking, we clutch at the real weight of a movable flood, catching streams that pour through metal still cold to the touch. Time takes little care over us. Current flowing, its song sighs across weft, warp, wrinkle, fold. It collars us in its minutae. Iron, pierced for steam’s escape! Ease across what was once shift, now skirt, scarf, shirt sleeve, sheet. Warm what will soon cool. Stiffen what will turn soft. Smoothe our way, and drape us in the dignity of this new day.
Copyright © 2018 by Tsitsi Ella Jaji. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 14, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
What is a wound but a flower dying on its descent to the earth, bag of scent filled with war, forest, torches, some trouble that befell now over and done. A wound is a fire sinking into itself. The tinder serves only so long, the log holds on and still it gives up, collapses into its bed of ashes and sand. I burned my hand cooking over a low flame, that flame now alive under my skin, the smell not unpleasant, the wound beautiful as a full-blown peony. Say goodbye to disaster. Shake hands with the unknown, what becomes of us once we’ve been torn apart and returned to our future, naked and small, sewn back together scar by scar.
Copyright © 2018 by Dorianne Laux. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 17, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Sometimes I tremble like a storm-swept flower,
And seek to hide my tortured soul from thee,
Bowing my head in deep humility
Before the silent thunder of thy power.
Sometimes I flee before thy blazing light,
As from the specter of pursuing death;
Intimidated lest thy mighty breath,
Windways, will sweep me into utter night.
For oh, I fear they will be swallowed up—
The loves which are to me of vital worth,
My passion and my pleasure in the earth—
And lost forever in thy magic cup!
I fear, I fear my truly human heart
Will perish on the altar-stone of art!
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on May 19, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
You ask me again this evening at what price Does wisdom finally come in any life Or at any age & now I think I know The answer swear to me that when I tell you It is only everything you believe You will travel as far from this city as you can before The streets grow smeared & lost to the smug & promiscuous coming of the day
Copyright © 2018 by David St. John. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 23, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
A second death in as many days and I succeed at being
Strong and contained, until the tweet
Where one young brother says I’m not scared of dying,
I’m scared of breaking my mother’s heart. I am flesh
Two rooms down the hall from my mother’s flesh
Holding in my hands the news which is not new and today, at last, I understand
How primal and intelligent her need
To be done with this—
Our sorrow, our joy, anything at all thought ours—
To be done with the almost unavoidable assertion
Of a self she refused
To let her body take on—and to be done
Permanently, by making
A useful choice, through a man made useful by her choosing,
A man of Irish-Scandinavian stock (the only criteria,
I have wondered, in angrier moments), so that
Her boys, my brothers and I, or at least our bodies
Emerged from hers looking Spanish, maybe Greek or Italian.
Three boys, each passing
Closer to her one True North.
When she tells me not to put forward that I am Black, she is saying I love you.
She is saying I want you to live. I see now. When she told my brother she wished
He’d just find a nice blonde girl and settle down, I took her by the face
And, staring into her even-keeled nonchalance,
Told her I love you and you are crazy. Today
I see: I am flesh, I am free
To inhabit my life: to stand, to sit, to breathe, to play tag
Or with a toy gun, to walk away, or to run, to put my hands up, to ask why.
Today on a walk I took to release
How it felt to be shut out—this time,
By the editor of the African diasporic journal
Who asked not me but someone who didn’t know me
Was I Black—
I cross 112th and Amsterdam and suddenly
Am 20 years-old again,
Drunk, out-of-control in pain without knowing
Why, trying to jump a taxi
Because I’d spent my money on booze, and the cop
Whose car pulled into the crosswalk to block me,
To stop me as I ran, gets out and says to me
If you don’t pay the man, I’ll arrest you.
I was underage. I jumped a taxi. I was incoherent and angry.
I did not have the money to pay the man. I was not arrested.
Turning from the news, I complain now to a friend
I don’t know why we (all of us) should want to live—
It’s all so futile and banal. It’s all so pointless, even when it’s good—
As my mother rests inside her safe and dusty room
Next to the man she crossed an ocean to find.
I have thought her wrong
To think that we would need saving. But what do I know
Of having to choose one violence over another? Asleep now
She rests inside her flesh, my father close beside her
On his back, his forearm across his eyes,
He who chose her, too,
And over his own family, he knew to tell us, having learned early
That you must cross whatever line you have to cross.
Copyright © 2018 by Charif Shanahan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 24, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
You might say fear is a predictable emotion & I might agree. Whenever my husband leaves for his graveyard shift, when he prepares to walk out into the abyss of black sky, I am afraid tonight will be the night I become a widow. I don't want to love like this. But here we are: walking hand in hand in our parkas down the avenues & he pulls away from me. I might be in some dreamy place, thinking of the roast chicken we just had, the coconut peas & rice he just cooked, & how the food has filled our bellies with delight. How many times can I speak about black men & an officer enters the scene? I don't want to love like this. But there is a gun in the holster & a hand on the gun in the holster & my husband's hands are no longer in his pockets because it is night & we are just trying to breathe in some fresh evening air, trying to be unpredictable, to forget fear for a moment & live in love & love.
Copyright © 2018 by DéLana R. A. Dameron. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 25, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
The average mother loses 700 hours of sleep in the first year of her child’s life; or, what that first year taught me about America.
Most of us favor one side when we walk. As we tire,
we lean into that side and stop moving in a straight line—
so it takes longer to get anywhere,
let alone home.
In wilderness conditions,
where people don’t know the terrain,
a tired person might end up leaning so far into one side
they’ll walk in a circle rather than straight ahead.
It can kill you, such leaning
—and it can get you killed.
Rest helps.
I told my husband,
I walked in a circle in my mind but you came out okay.
Initially, he asked me to clarify,
but then he let it go.
Who wrote that first If You Lived Here You’d Be Home by Now sign?
It seems I’m going to have to move.
I am tired and also sick
of helping other people in lieu of helping myself.
Rest now.
It's really not that bad: we’re in the home stretch.
That’s the mind of a parent.
Relentless optimism in the face of sheer panic
and exhaustion.
Copyright © 2018 by Camille T. Dungy. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 28, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
As due by many titles I resign Myself to thee, O God. First I was made By Thee; and for Thee, and when I was decay’d Thy blood bought that, the which before was Thine. I am Thy son, made with Thyself to shine, Thy servant, whose pains Thou hast still repaid, Thy sheep, Thine image, and—till I betray’d Myself—a temple of Thy Spirit divine. Why doth the devil then usurp on me? Why doth he steal, nay ravish, that’s Thy right? Except Thou rise and for Thine own work fight, O! I shall soon despair, when I shall see That Thou lovest mankind well, yet wilt not choose me, And Satan hates me, yet is loth to lose me.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 14, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Science in its tedium reveals
that each spirit we spirit
ganks a solid half hour from
our life spans.
Or so says my doctor, a watery,
Jesus-eyed man, and hard to suffer
with his well-intended scrips for yoga
and neti pots, notably stingy with the better
drugs, in situ here amongst the disinfected
toys dreadful in their plastic baskets.
Above his head, the flayed men of medical
illustration are nailed for something like
décor. The eyeball scheme is best,
with its wondrous Canal of Schlemm,
first favorite of all weirdly named
eponymous body parts. It’s just a splotch
of violet on the diagram, but without which
our aqueous humours would burst
their meshy dams and overflow. Tears,
idle tears…so sad, so fresh the days
that are no more…is what I quote to him
as he thumps my back with his tiny
doctor’s’ tomahawk. But he’s used to me.
We have an understanding. What he
means to miser, I’ve come to spend
most lavishly. And I feel fortunate again,
to be historically shaky in the maths,
enough to avoid making an easy sum
of my truly happy hours, or nights curled
sulfurous on my side, a priced-to-sell
shrimp boiling in anxious sleep.
If we’re lucky, it’s always a terrible time
to die. Better the privilege of booze
than the whim of one more shambolic
butcher shelling peasants in a wood,
our world’s long spree of Caesars
starting wars to pay their bills
in any given era’s Rome. Turns out,
Lord Alfred’s stomach did for him,
and he died thirsty, calling for more opium.
Free of the exam room now, I spot the same
tattered goldfish in his smeary bowl
beside the door where he’s glugged along
for years, a mostly failed distraction
for poxed or broken children. I raise my fin
to him, celebrate the poison we’re all
swimming in, remembering the way
you say cheers in Hungarian:
Isten Isten, meaning, in translation,
“I’m a god. You’re a god.”
Copyright © 2018 by Erin Belieu. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 13, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
after Tyehimba Jess Freedom is what you can buy with a left jab & a right cross. You’ve got the uppercut of a champ. On a sweaty August night, you watch Ramos v Ramos from the Olympic on TV. You turn off the blaring AC, want to hear the fighters’ tssiiuu tssiiuu, exhaling as they attempt to break each other’s skin. You’re light on your feet like Mando, got Sugar’s hand speed. Freedom is your girl by your side telling you to fight. She brings your boxing license in a lunch bag while you labor at Lockheed, roots for you in Rocky Lane’s garage on a Sunday as you spar any man who dares. She wipes your burning face with a cool towel, the sinewed shape of your body surfacing quick after you trade in Budweiser for a jump rope. Freedom is the rattle in your jaw the first time you take a hook to the gut, the way a glove slides across your nose slick with Vaseline as you size up the weary contender, know that look in his eyes that whispers across the canvas between rounds. Finish me already, body shriveling in the corner, you’ve won.
Copyright © 2018 by Eloisa Amezcua. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 12, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
I began to die, then. I think
I was asleep. Dreaming
of an afterlife that revised
my flesh into what
I had wanted. Why do
I think of Ronald Reagan
the way one recalls
vague nightmare:
the sick heart and terror
which is percussive.
Was this the year
I saw him at the airport.
Men grimly tested
my body for hidden death,
waving a wand up
and down. My left arm
healed wrongly
and it was surgery
that put it right. Look,
if you want, at
the pale stippling of scar,
there. Some nights I wake
and everything hurts
a little. It is
amazing how long
a ruined thing
will burn. In the night,
there are words,
though often I've denied
their shape. Their sound.
My soul: whatever
it sings it is singing.
Copyright © 2018 by Paul Guest. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 10, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
A crocodile slips its earth-toned body
back into the river, in silence, violence down
and for its nightness
I cannot see the water. With fear
I am alone. Slick rocks smile thin anonymous light, they lie
about what I am. I see and try to hold
my body in my body, trace a vein
from the base of my palm through
the crook of my elbow, armpit, home—home
makes no sense. I've given up on what I know.
This blindness is a mirror turning
back to sand still hollowed, where
every sound is amplified. I want to be the crocodile’s
stomach that is my father, teeth
that are my mother, vertebrae
that aggregate the spine that are loves, knuckled
angles casing nerves. It’s me wading around
inside, mouth open. A humid numbness dense, low,
beneath the undertow: hands that coax and claim
my scaled neck, soothe and pull
each knotted shoulder. I give in to a third of moon caught
in cloud, its orange-grey halo drawn away
from what can be named, known. A curse and prayer
to go unchanged within this water, my movement
foreign, a rootless gurgle, flit of river vines
caging the dwindling
river’s brutal bed, the gorge, flushed
with new food: the blue heron’s bone-flight collapsed,
tangled feathers along the mudglut bank’s
saliva, lifting like shame in the open.
Copyright © 2018 by Aaron Coleman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 11, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Out of the deep and the dark, A sparkling mystery, a shape, Something perfect, Comes like the stir of the day: One whose breath is an odour, Whose eyes show the road to stars, The breeze in his face, The glory of Heaven on his back. He steps like a vision hung in air, Diffusing the passion of Eternity; His abode is the sunlight of morn, The music of eve his speech: In his sight, One shall turn from the dust of the grave, And move upward to the woodland.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 8, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
When they finished burying me, what was left of me
sent up a demand like a hand blooming in the fresh dirt:
When I’m back, I want a body like a slash of lightning.
If they heard me, I couldn’t hear their answers.
But silence has never stopped me from praying.
Alive, how many nights did I spend knelt between
the knees of gods and men begging for rain, rent,
and reasons to remain? A body like the sky seeking
justice. A body like light reaching right down into the field
where you thought you could hide from me.
They’ve taken their bald rose stems and black umbrellas
home now. They’ve cooked for one another, sung hymns
as if they didn’t prefer jazz. I’m just a memory now.
But history has never stopped me from praying.
Copyright © 2018 by Saeed Jones. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 28, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Dear Empire, I am confused each time I wake inside you.
You invent addictions.
Are you a high-end graveyard or a child?
I see your children dragging their brains along.
Why not a god who loves water and dancing
instead of mirrors that recite your pretty features only?
You wear a different face to each atrocity.
You are un-unified and tangled.
Are you just gluttony?
Are you civilization’s slow grenade?
I am confused each time I’m swallowed by your doors.
Copyright © 2018 by Jesús Castillo. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 29, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
We lay in shade diaphanous And spoke the light that burns in us As in the glooming’s net I caught her, She shimmered like reflected water! Romantic and emphatic moods Are not for her whom life eludes... Its vulgar tinsel round her fold? She'd rather shudder with the cold, Attend just this elusive hour, A shadow in a shadow bower, A moving imagery so fine, It must have been her soul near mine And so we blended and possessed Each in each the phantom guest, Inseparate, we scarcely met; Yet other love-nights we forget!
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 30, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
The planet pulls our bodies through the year. Delivers us, headlong, into the tears in currents. The ebbs and flows of blood in chambers, bombastic and flooded with unremembered names. Neighbors bourne feet first through their door arches. Down the corridors, lonesome and lost. Their voices suture the silence behind them and the little song pulsing its staccato cannot explain the day and the day and the day, like an arm and then another pulled through a sleeve.
Copyright © 2018 by Oliver de la Paz. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 3, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
In a dream I spoke with the Cyprus-born, And said to her, "Mother of beauty, mother of joy, Why hast thou given to men "This thing called love, like the ache of a wound In beauty's side, To burn and throb and be quelled for an hour And never wholly depart?" And the daughter of Cyprus said to me, "Child of the earth, Behold, all things are born and attain, But only as they desire,— "The sun that is strong, the gods that are wise, The loving heart, Deeds and knowledge and beauty and joy,— But before all else was desire."
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 7, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Except within poetic pale I have not found a nightingale, Nor hearkened in a dusky vale To song and silence blending; No stock-dove have I ever heard, Nor listened to a cuckoo-bird, Nor seen a lark ascending. But I have felt a pulse-beat start Because a robin, spending The utmost of his simple art Some of his pleasure to impart While twilight came descending, Has found an answer in my heart, A sudden comprehending.
This poem is in the public domain.
Let them come for what’s left: a chorus of bone, river and soot. Worthy enough. Holy enough. Like all the others, singular—or not. Wanting only for your name to blue my lips and call it miracle. Our love double-knotted, saddle-stitched held the world together. Until it didn’t— all the words you placed in me flushed and faltered. From memory, I recited their worn prattle—cut them clean with my bite. The jungle we made in blame grew and grew, fed on our melancholy. Not even the birds knew to change their songs.
Copyright © 2018 by Vandana Khanna. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 24, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
I kissed a kiss in youth Upon a dead man’s brow; And that was long ago,— And I’m a grown man now, It’s lain there in the dust, Thirty years and more;— My lips that set a light At a dead man’s door.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 15, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
This poem is in the public domain.
Temples he built and palaces of air, And, with the artist’s parent-pride aglow, His fancy saw his vague ideals grow Into creations marvelously fair; He set his foot upon Fame’s nether stair. But ah, his dream,—it had entranced him so He could not move. He could no farther go; But paused in joy that he was even there! He did not wake until one day there gleamed Thro’ his dark consciousness a light that racked His being till he rose, alert to act. But lo! What he had dreamed, the while he dreamed, Another, wedding action unto thought, Into the living, pulsing world had brought.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 29, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
If I had a million lives to live and a million deaths to die in a million humdrum worlds, I’d like to change my name and have a new house number to go by each and every time I died and started life all over again. I wouldn’t want the same name every time and the same old house number always, dying a million deaths, dying one by one a million times: —would you? or you? or you?
This poem is in the public domain. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 12, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
And then smelling it, feeling it before the sound even reaches him, he kneels at cliff’s edge and for the first time, turns his head toward the now visible falls that gush over a quarter- mile of uplifted sheet- granite across the valley and he pauses, lowering his eyes for a moment, unable to withstand the tranquility—vast, unencumbered, terrifying, and primal. That naked river enthroned upon the massif altar, bowed cypresses congregating on both sides of sun-gleaming rock, a rip in the fabric of the ongoing forest from which rises— as he tries to stand, tottering, half- paralyzed—a shifting rainbow volatilized by ceaseless explosion.
Copyright © 2018 by Forrest Gander. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 8, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
My words are dust.
I who would build a star,
I who would touch the heel of the white sun;
Staggering up the inaccessible sky,
I look upon the dust.
The stainless clouds go mounting
In shining spires;
And a little heap of dust
Are my desires.
Yet, dwelling long upon these peaks
Unchained upon the flickering western sky,
I have beheld them at the breath of darkness
Fade slowly out and die.
What of my lineage?
Arrogant and swift,
I bend above the dust,
Untouched of all my grief,
Untarnished of the hour,
And lo! the leaf—
The passionate climbing flower!
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 2, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Sometimes you don’t die
when you’re supposed to
& now I have a choice
repair a world or build
a new one inside my body
a white door opens
into a place queerly brimming
gold light so velvet-gold
it is like the world
hasn’t happened
when I call out
all my friends are there
everyone we love
is still alive gathered
at the lakeside
like constellations
my honeyed kin
honeyed light
beneath the sky
a garden blue stalks
white buds the moon’s
marble glow the fire
distant & flickering
the body whole bright-
winged brimming
with the hours
of the day beautiful
nameless planet. Oh
friends, my friends—
bloom how you must, wild
until we are free.
Copyright © 2018 by Cameron Awkward-Rich. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 30, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Turns out lots of lines prove blurry I once thought sharp. Some blur from further away, some from closer in. Plant/animal, for instance. On which side, and why, the sessile polyps, corals and sea anemones? Same problem saying why my self must be internal. Where do I see those finches glinting at the feeder? To experience the is-ness of what is, I’d need to locate the here-ness of what’s here. Or be located by it. Or share location with it. There’s a line I want to blur: between my senses and my self. And another: between my senses and the world. That anemone looks more like a lily than an appaloosa. Looks, and acts. I feel that fizz of finches sparkle on my tongue, the back of my throat. I don’t say these words until I hear them. My voice visits. Is visitation. I would choose the role of visitor over visited, if I got to choose. Those finches trill and warble in sequences of phrases. I can tell there’s pattern, but not what the pattern is. I can say I hear them (I do hear them) in my sleep, but I can’t say what that means. Their twitters and chirps start early, before I wake. I can say they chatter all day (they do), when I’m hearing them and when I’m not, but I can’t say how I know that. The back of my hand always feels as if it’s just been lightly touched.
Copyright © 2018 by H. L. Hix. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 29, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Her eyes were mostly shut. She didn’t speak.
The sun’s slow exile crossed the wall above the bed.
But once, when I bent to feed her a drop
of morphine from the little plastic beak,
her hand shot up and gripped my arm. She looked right at me.
When she said the words, it sounded like she meant: Don't leave me.
From the very first, we love like this: our heads turning
toward whatever mothers us, our mouths urgent
for the taste of our name.
Copyright © 2018 by Jenny George. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 17, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
They heard the South wind sighing A murmur of the rain; And they knew that Earth was longing To see them all again. While the snow-drops still were sleeping Beneath the silent sod; They felt their new life pulsing Within the dark, cold clod. Not a daffodil nor daisy Had dared to raise its head; Not a fairhaired dandelion Peeped timid from its bed; Though a tremor of the winter Did shivering through them run; Yet they lifted up their foreheads To greet the vernal sun. And the sunbeams gave them welcome, As did the morning air— And scattered o’er their simple robes Rich tints of beauty rare. Soon a host of lovely flowers From vales and woodland burst; But in all that fair procession The crocuses were first. First to weave for Earth a chaplet To crown her dear old head; And to beauty the pathway Where winter still did tread. And their loved and white haired mother Smiled sweetly ’neath the touch, When she knew her faithful children Were loving her so much.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 9, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Death, I say, my heart is bowed
Unto thine, O mother!
This red gown will make a shroud
Good as any other.
(I, that would not wait to wear
My own bridal things,
In a dress dark as my hair
Made my answerings.
I, to-night, that till he came
Could not, could not wait,
In a gown as bright as flame
Held for them the gate.)
Death, I say, my heart is bowed
Unto thine, O mother!
This red gown will make a shroud
Good as any other.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 15, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
The full September moon sheds floods of light,
And all the bayou’s face is gemmed with stars,
Save where are dropped fantastic shadows down
From sycamores and moss-hung cypress trees.
With slumberous sound the waters half asleep
Creep on and on their way, ’twixt rankish reeds,
Through marsh and lowlands stretching to the Gulf.
Begirt with cotton fields, Anguilla sits
Half bird-like, dreaming on her Summer nest.
Amid her spreading figs and roses, still
In bloom with all their Spring and Summer hues,
Pomegranates hang with dapple cheeks full ripe,
And over all the town a dreamy haze
Drops down. The great plantations, stretching far
Away, are plains of cotton, downy white.
O, glorious is this night of joyous sounds;
Too full for sleep. Aromas wild and sweet,
From muscadine, late blooming jessamine,
And roses, all the heavy air suffuse.
Faint bellows from the alligators come
From swamps afar, where sluggish lagoons give
To them a peaceful home. The katydids
Make ceaseless cries. Ten thousand insects’ wings
Stir in the moonlight haze and joyous shouts
Of Negro song and mirth awake hard by
The cabin dance. O, glorious is this night!
The Summer sweetness fills my heart with songs,
I can not sing, with loves I can not speak.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 30, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Revived bitterness is unnecessary unless One is ignorant. To-morrow will be Yesterday unless you say the Days of the week back- Ward. Last weeks’ circus Overflow frames an old grudge. Thus: When you attempt to Force the doors and come At the cause of the shouts, you thumb A brass nailed echo.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 29, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing—
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief.'
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 22, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
You will transcend your ancestor’s suffering You will pick a blue ball. You will throw it to yourself. You will be on the other side to receive. Green leaves grow around your face. Hair stands on your body. You look at old photographs that say: The bread is warm! A child is a blessing! That’s what I said! I meant it! You could say this is a poem. Like the great halves of the roof that caved and carved together. Found us before words and tender-footing. Before wrongdoing and the octaves of blue above us all.
Copyright © 2018 by Sarah Gambito. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 12, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Snow is a strange white word; No ice or frost Has asked of bud or bird For Winter’s cost. Yet ice and frost and snow From earth to sky This Summer land doth know; No man knows why. In all men’s hearts it is: Some spirit old Hath turned with malign kiss Our lives to mould. Red fangs have torn His face, God’s blood is shed: He mourns from His lone place His children dead. O ancient crimson curse! Corrode, consume; Give back this universe Its pristine bloom.
This poem is in the public domain.
She walketh veiled and sleeping, For she knoweth not her power; She obeyeth but the pleading Of her heart, and the high leading Of her soul, unto this hour. Slow advancing, halting, creeping, Comes the Woman to the hour!— She walketh veiled and sleeping, For she knoweth not her power.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 3, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Suddenly night crushed out the day and hurled Her remnants over cloud-peaks, thunder-walled. Then fell a stillness such as harks appalled When far-gone dead return upon the world. There watched I for the Dead; but no ghost woke. Each one whom Life exiled I named and called. But they were all too far, or dumbed, or thralled; And never one fared back to me or spoke. Then peered the indefinite unshapen dawn With vacant gloaming, sad as half-lit minds, The weak-limned hour when sick men’s sighs are drained. And while I wondered on their being withdrawn, Gagged by the smothering wing which none unbinds, I dreaded even a heaven with doors so chained.
This poem is from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit) ©. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 4, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Give me hunger, O you gods that sit and give The world its orders. Give me hunger, pain and want, Shut me out with shame and failure From your doors of gold and fame, Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger! But leave me a little love, A voice to speak to me in the day end, A hand to touch me in the dark room Breaking the long loneliness. In the dusk of day-shapes Blurring the sunset, One little wandering, western star Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow. Let me go to the window, Watch there the day-shapes of dusk And wait and know the coming Of a little love.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 10, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Everything in the beginning is the same.
Clouds let us look at the sun.
Words let us watch a man about to be killed.
The eye-hollows of his skull see home.
When they stone him,
he knows what a stone is—each word, a stone:
The hole of his nose
as dark as the door I pass through.
I wander the halls numerously.
He’s no longer my grandfather in weight.
Among old bodies piled high, they aim.
Living can tranquilize you.
Copyright © 2018 by E. J. Koh. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 16, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Dark as a demon’s dream is one I love— In soul—but oh, how beautiful in form! She glows like Venus throned in joy above, Or on the crimson couch of Evening warm Reposing her sweet limbs, her heaving breast Unveiled to him who lights the golden west! Ah, me, to be by that soft hand carest, To feel the twining of that snowy arm, To drink that sigh with richest love opprest, To bathe within that sunny sea of smiles, To wander in that wilderness of wiles And blissful blandishments—it is to thrill With subtle poison, and to feel the will Grow weak in that which all the veins doth fill. Fair sorceress! I know she spreads a net The strong, the just, the brave to snare; and yet My soul cannot, for its own sake, forget The fascinating glance which flings its chain Around my quivering heart and throbbing brain, And binds me to my painful destiny, As bird, that soars no more on high, Hangs trembling on the serpent’s doomful eye.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 17, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
From the island he saw the castle and from the castle he saw the island. Some people live this way—wife/ mistress/wife/mistress. But this story isn’t the one I’m telling. From the island he saw the castle and that made him distant from power and from the castle he saw the island and that made him distant from imagining what power can do. The story I’m telling is the war coming. How can you go from island to castle to island to castle and not give birth to a war? No. I still can’t explain it.
Copyright © 2018 by Jennifer Kronovet. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 23, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
There is more glory in a drop of dew, That shineth only for an hour, Than there is in the pomp of earth’s great Kings Within the noonday of their power. There is more sweetness in a single strain That falleth from a wild bird’s throat, At random in the lonely forest’s depths, Than there’s in all the songs that bards e’er wrote. Yet men, for aye, rememb’ring Caesar’s name, Forget the glory in the dew, And, praising Homer’s epic, let the lark’s Song fall unheeded from the blue.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 24, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Soon as the sun forsook the eastern main
The pealing thunder shook the heav’nly plain;
Majestic grandeur! From the zephyr’s wing,
Exhales the incense of the blooming spring,
Soft purl the streams, the birds renew their notes,
And through the air their mingled music floats.
Through all the heav’ns what beauteous dies are spread!
But the west glories in the deepest red:
So may our breasts with every virtue glow,
The living temples of our God below!
Fill’d with the praise of him who gives the light,
And draws the sable curtains of the night,
Let placid slumbers soothe each weary mind,
At morn to wake more heav’nly, more refin’d;
So shall the labors of the day begin
More pure, more guarded from the snares of sin.
Night’s leaden sceptre seals my drowsy eyes,
Then cease, my song, till fair Aurora rise.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 2, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
If my lover were a comet
Hung in air,
I would braid my leaping body
In his hair.
Yea, if they buried him ten leagues
Beneath the loam,
My fingers they would learn to dig
And I’d plunge home!
This poem is in the public domain.