Find and share the perfect poems.
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.
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
My father used to say,
“Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow’s grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat—
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth—
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like