Poems

Find and share the perfect poems.

find poems find poets poem-a-day library (texts, books & more) materials for teachers poetry near you

from “The Trees Witness Everything”

The Wild Geese

They are not wisdom
or freedom or history.
They are not what’s lost.
They are nothing but wild geese.
I can hear them everywhere,
wings pushing down metaphor.

Late Spring

Does spring start grieving
in April or May? Once each
spring, the girl appears
in the white house behind mine.
The window opens.
The girl paces, phone to ear.
One day I look up,
the girl is gone, window closed,
and I go back to dying.

Utterance

Have you ever stood
on a highway in pitch-black
and heard nothing but singing?

The First Year

The year after death
is full of stretching, where things
pull so hard your bones
break, because they were never
bones, were always solitude.

Threshold

The crows have lifted
away all the question marks.
They aren’t interested
in finding truth, since they have
already seen our insides.

Copyright © 2021 by Victoria Chang. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 7, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

More by Victoria Chang

OBIT [Memory]

Memory—died August 3, 2015. The
death was not sudden but slowly over a
decade. I wonder if, when people die,
they hear a bell. Or if they taste
something sweet, or if they feel a knife
cutting them in half, dragging through
the flesh like sheet cake. The caretaker
who witnessed my mother’s death quit.
She holds the memory and images and
now they are gone. For the rest of her
life, the memories are hers. She said
my mother couldn’t breathe, then took
her last breath 20 seconds later. The
way I have imagined a kiss with many
men I have never kissed. My memory
of my mother’s death can’t be a
memory but is an imagination, each
time the wind blows, leaves unfurl
a little differently.

Victoria Chang

2017

Mr. Darcy

Then we are in the back seat of a car kissing
not the light kind but one where our
hands are on each other’s cheeks holding
each other’s heads as if they will fall

off why does so much love come at the beginning
then disappear then once again at the moment
before death why can’t the same kind exist
in between in the breaths in the

afternoon in the sitting room in a place of costumes
little girls dress like princesses one pink one
blue one yellow they wear plastic heels because
they still think they will never fall

Victoria Chang

2014

Dear P.

Someone will love you many will love

you many will brother you some of these

loves will bother you some will leave you

one might haunt you hunt you in your

sleep make you weep the tearless kind of

weep the kind of weep that drowns your

organs slowly there are little oars in your body

little boats grab onto them and row and row

someone will tell you no but you won’t know

he is right until you have already wrung your

own heart dry your hands dripping knives until

you have already reached your hands into his

body and put them through his heart love is

the only thing that is not an argument

Victoria Chang

2017

Related Poems

Green Flame

Slender as my ring finger, the female hummingbird crashed
into plate glass separating her and me
before we could ask each other’s name. Green flame,
she launched from a dead eucalyptus limb.
Almost on impact, she was gone, her needle beak
opening twice to speak the abrupt language of her going,
taking in the day’s rising heat as I took
one more scalding breath, horrified by death’s velocity.
Too weak from chemo not to cry
for the passage of her emerald shine,
I lifted her weightlessness into my palm.
Mourning doves moaned, who, who,
oh who while her wings closed against the tiny body
sky would quick forget as soon as it would forget mine

Pamela Uschuk

2020

Black Snow [I live between the bus stop]

I live between the bus stop
and something I can’t explain,
between the night sounding
with green leaves and a few
visible stars, between a horse
and philosophy wondering
if it is a great clenched fist
that keeps me from my life.
Now I live between my mother’s
death and my own. I close
my eyes and see a different
darkness. Under the trees
wind falls through my hair.
You were a place, Mother.
I’ve always wanted to be a place,
a destination with a park bench.
I’m afraid I’m only the weather.
Night is miles off approaching
like a storm. I’ve sat so long
it is like traveling. I’ve watched
the sun move out of the shade
and the shade move into the sun.

Carl Adamshick

2019

Vert

As in green, vert, a royal demesne
stocked with deer. Invert as in tipped
as a snow globe, going nowhere in circles
but not lost, not bereft as the wood
without deer, waiting for the white antlered
buck, or his does, or any slim yearling
to step along the berm, return. Vertigo
as in whirling round, swimming in the head,
unanchored by the long spring,
the horse cantering, the meadow dropping
like an elevator into the earth, falling
like Persephone through a crevice, a swiveling
crack, a loose screw, a lost way. Disordered
as in death lasts, my brother’s not coming back.
The spin of it continuous as in looking down
from height, and then it stops, the spinning
just slows, a chariot wheel stilled in grass.
The world is the same, but it isn’t. The tipped
views of trees when hanging from your knees.
The deer in twos and threes watching.

Catherine Staples

2015

© Academy of American Poets, 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038