Find and share the perfect poems.
To see you is to smell
your wood and lead shavings
that spill from the gray
metal pencil sharpener
nailed to the window sill
in Mrs. Rote's classroom—
all these decades ago. Today,
my mechanical one, empty,
with no shopping in sight,
I declare I hold you dear.
Copyright © 2020 by Kimiko Hahn. Originally published with the Shelter in Poems initiative on poets.org.
a golden shovel
The whale already taken got away: the moon alone
—Yosa Buson, translated by Hiroaki Sato
A bandana. A cardinal. An apple
No. 2 lead pencil—the mechanical pencil, now empty—appears more vivid
A box of toothpicks—now that I'm baking bran muffins
I cannot consider scent without you, I cannot
think that color so gay, so Japanese, so vernal
without you; not assassination or any death in any spring. I think of you
and I am man-and-woman, flawed as a Lincoln,
welcoming as a window-box, and so tenderly alliterative as to draw one near—
at times, perhaps, to withdraw from all—yes,