When a whole being
births into your hands
still you see your hands
no matter how unworldly
the beauty of the child
Then the universe of words
works past cosmology
to a useful name a handle
in English unlike the Indigenous
... – by HEID E. ERDRICH | 28 Views added 1 year ago
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In this kingdom
the sun never sets;
under the pale oval
of the sky
there seems no way in
or out,
and though there is a sea here
there is no tide.
For the egg itself
is a moon
glowing faintly
in the galaxy of the barn,
safe... – by Linda Pastan | 97 Views added 1 year ago
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Crows, crows, crows, crows
then the slow flapaway over the hill
and the dead oak is... – by ED OCHESTER | 22 Views added 1 year ago
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Man, the egregious egoist,
(In mystery the twig is bent,)
Imagines, by some mental twist,
That he alone is sentient
Of the intolerable load
Which on all living creatures lies,
Nor stoops to pity in the toad
The speechless sorrow of its... – by Elinor Wylie | 12 Views added 1 year ago
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It is Monday, I am twelve years old,
summer still feel like summer to me...
Ernest Green
My elementary school principal was white
I only had one white teacher, she was named
after the juice the... – by Afaa Michael Weaver | 42 Views added 1 year ago
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The dog trots freely in the street
and sees reality
and the things he sees
are bigger than himself
and the things he sees
are his reality
Drunks in doorways
Moons on trees
The dog trots freely thru the street
and the things he sees
are... – by LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI | 57 Views added 1 year ago
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Diagram of a diagram: if properly decoded,
the first image which will appear
is a circle. Or, go backwards.
... – by Katie Willingham | 24 Views added 1 year ago
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Dear stranger, reading this small, true book
By a simple man who loved much and wasn't loved,
Merging your own life with the lines on this page,
Lines that remind you of some frightening shore,
Cold rains, shipwreck, and loud winds and waves,
... – by Stephen Stepanchev | 31 Views added 1 year ago
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I met a man a dying man and I said me too.
Met a dead man and I said me too. Must be
dead cuz the living can’t meet the dead and he
said me too. Did you know the dead can fall
in love he said. Fact. Did you know the dead
fall in love better... – by Diane Seuss | 279 Views added 1 year ago
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I am glad I resisted the temptation,
if it was a temptation when I was young,
to write a poem about an old man
eating alone at a corner table in a Chinese restaurant.
I would have gotten it all wrong
thinking: the poor bastard, not a friend... – by Billy Collins | 149 Views added 1 year ago
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From the five good emperors
I have learned that there were five good emperors,
From the lemon tree I’ve planted
now I know that leaves unpummeled yet will drop,
From the clock, the time, it’s five p.m.,
from the sun the length of day,
... – by Lisa Jarnot | 4 Views added 1 year ago
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In a crumpled shirt (so casual for a god)
Bow tucked loosely under an arm still jittery from battle
He balanced himself on a flat boat painted black.
Each wave as I kneel closer a migrant flag
A tongue with syllables no script can catch.... – by Meena Alexander | 21 Views added 1 year ago
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A student at the military school 1956
and a literary teacher at the nearby high school
fall in love Cute:
each day after school the military student left
a love letter on her door Thao (an orphan)
wrote back and left a love letter... – by Hoa Nguyen | 64 Views added 1 year ago
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He hardly spoke any words
only two —
or you could call it one
the last thing
he said
was bye-bye
flight-feathers
veined and hairlike
with interlocking barbules
of sound
the bye-bye trapped
a breath of air
the two linked words
... – by Moniza Alvi | 86 Views added 1 year ago
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My thumb & index finger
frame a zero, then an 8
sleeping on its side, & I say,
Leonardo, show me how
the miraculous scapula
moves like a torn wing
half-fused, barely unstuck,
& a life dares to lift off.
Floating... – by YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA | 36 Views added 1 year ago
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They return to the site whence they came with eyes tearful,
with psalms trumpeting the air.
They stand ever so watchful;
guarding the graves of their ghosts and their kind.
They shall not forget. They shall not want.
They lie down in... – by Gerard Malanga | 7 Views added 1 year ago
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This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main,—
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids... – by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. | 6 Views added 1 year ago
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I was born in the century of the death of the rose
when the motor had already driven out the angels.
Quito watched as the last stagecoach rolled away,
and at its passing the trees ran past in perfect order,
and also the hedges and houses of new... – by JORGE CARRERA ANDRADE | 9 Views added 1 year ago
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The rain falling on a night
in mid-December,
I pull to my father’s engine
wondering how long I’ll remember
this. His car is dead. He connects
jumper cables to his battery,
then to mine without looking in
at... – by Terrance Hayes | 163 Views added 1 year ago
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|
You came You came from
You came from your homes Your family Your
rivers creeks came
with you in your blood in your songs
the hawks flew ... – by Dean Rader | 16 Views added 1 year ago
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Is it only when you’re little
you know tigers live in your closet—
one with your shoes on his two ears,
another with your umbrella tied to his tail;
the rest wearing your red coat
and blue trousers with the red buttons?
Is it only when you’re... – by Diane Glancy | 13 Views added 1 year ago
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|
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is... – by Gertrude Stein | 25 Views added 1 year ago
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It is a soft thing, it has been sifted
from the sieve of space and seems
asleep there under the moths of light.
Cluster of dust and fire, from up here
you are a stranger and I am dropping
through the funnel of air to meet... – by Anne Marie Macari | 16 Views added 1 year ago
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If I beg and pray you to set me free, then bind me more tightly still.
— Homer
I’m striving to be a better astronaut,
but consider where I’m coming from,
the exosphere,
a desk where the bluest air
thins to a lip. Impossible
to know the... – by Keith S. Wilson | 34 Views added 1 year ago
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|
It’s not spring yet, but I can’t
wait anymore. I get the hoe,
pull back the snow from the old
furrows, expose the rich dark earth.
I bare my hand and dole out shriveled peas,
one by one.
I see my grandmother’s hand,
doing just this,... – by Linda M. Hasselstrom | 12 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
He said, ‘Tracking across space-time in their long-drawn elliptical
orbits, as many Comets as fish in the sea
are announcing their approach by a fall, from seven Radiants,
of meteors, bombarding Earth with heavenly
debris; myriads... – by Daisy Aldan | 13 Views added 1 year ago
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First
there was some other order of things
never spoken
but in dreams of darkest creation.
Then there was black earth,
lake, the face of light on water.
Then the thick forest all around
that light,
and then the human clay
whose blood we... – by LINDA HOGAN | 27 Views added 1 year ago
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|
They in their cruel traps, and we in ours,
Survey each other’s rage, and pass the hours
Commiserating each the other’s woe,
To mitigate his own pain’s fiery glow.
Man could but little proffer in exchange
Save that his cages have... – by Countee Cullen | 20 Views added 1 year ago
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|
She sings the letters
to my daughter, strings them
marigolds into garlands
in the order of the alphabet
E, F, G, she
tugs the haitch, taut and long
far from the breast, a letter
the length of a coast, the width
of a gull’s caw, she now... – by Divya Victor | 5 Views added 1 year ago
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|
They throw stones at the little girls
Over and over they throw stones
They who are their fathers
They who are their brothers
___
They burn the veil of the little girl
The pink one, her favorite
Not too short, not too long
With gilded... – by Marilyn Chin | 29 Views added 1 year ago
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are some things up there
uptown
I want to see
I want to see I'm going to look at that and see
I want to go up and see
that show. That show
I went to see, I went to see.
There are some things up
there uptown
... – by Rebecca Wolff | 19 Views added 1 year ago
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|
I celebrate myself
And what I hereby cede you shall hereby cede,
For the country relinquished by me as good is relinquished by you
I loafe and convey to the United States
All the right, title and interest ... in my country, occupied and... – by Beth Piatote | 5 Views added 1 year ago
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|
It would be a quieter holiday, no fireworks
or loud parades, no speeches, no salutes to any flag,
a day of staying home instead of crowding away,
a day we celebrate nothing gained in war
but what we're given—how the sun's warmth
is democratic,... – by John Daniel | 32 Views added 1 year ago
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|
father, it was an honor to be there, in the dugout
with you, the glory of great black men swinging their lives
as bats, at tiny white balls
burning in at unbelievable speeds, riding up & in & out
a curve breaking down wicked, like a ball falling... – by QUINCY TROUPE | 18 Views added 1 year ago
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|
Dear Sirs:
I have been enjoying the law and order of our
community throughout the past three months since
my wife and I, our two cats, and miscellaneous
photographs of the six grandchildren belonging to
our previous neighbors (with whom we... – by June Jordan | 87 Views added 1 year ago
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|
Think not, when the wailing winds of autumn
Drive the shivering leaflets from the tree,—
Think not all is over: spring returneth,
Buds and leaves and blossoms thou shalt see.
Think not, when the earth lies cold and sealed,
And the weary birds... – by Harriet Beecher Stowe | 1,836 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
You are the ice cream sandwich connoisseur of your generation.
Blessed are your floral shorteralls, your deeply pink fanny pack with travel-size lint roller just in case.
Level of splendiferous in your outfit: 200.
Types of invisible pain... – by Chen Chen | 100 Views added 1 year ago
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|
Herodotus says the king made a bowl to leave behind
the memory of a number. We don’t know the number.
We don’t know if it was divisible by two or three.
I want, at the moment, the number to indicate
a ratio, part of a proportion, because the... – by MICHELLE MITCHELL-FOUST | 3 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
of the missing plastic is in the garage. when you ask to
write inside of my writing. when you drop me off in the
K-Mart parking lot and say you will be back later. the minimall
is close by a horse farm. at birthday parties he would
pull me... – by LAURA MARIE MARCIANO | 59 Views added 1 year ago
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|
Let my music be found wanting
in comparison
to yours (as it must)
let me be found loving
(as you were)
extravagantly the beautiful
let me find you
and the song (forever)
between us
in these terrible... – by Eloise Klein Healy | 4 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
gin-heavy heaven, blessed ground to think gay & mean we.
bless the fake id & the bouncer who knew
this need to be needed, to belong, to know how
a man taste full on vodka & free of sin. i know not which god to pray to.
i look to christ, i... – by Danez Smith | 78 Views added 1 year ago
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|
by the time it arrived
had made its plan heretofore
stonewall it had not a penny
thats not true it had several pennies
can you make a sovereign nation a national park how condescending
instead just tell them to honor the treaty
... – by JULIAN TALAMANTEZ BROLASKI | 14 Views added 1 year ago
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As we
embrace resist
the future the present the past
we work we struggle we begin we fail
to understand... – by Layli Long Soldier | 109 Views added 1 year ago
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—for Antonio Gomez
. . . it seems like the whites don't want to get
involved with the Indians. They think we're bad.
We drink. Our families drink. Dirty. Ugly. And
the teachers don't want to help us . . . because they
don't understand. So we... – by CRISOSTO APACHE | 6 Views added 1 year ago
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I.
In a dark night,
With anxious love inflamed,
O, happy lot!
Forth unobserved I went,
My house being now at rest.
II.
In darkness and in safety,
By the secret ladder, disguised,
O, happy lot!
In darkness and concealment,
My house... – by St John of the Cross | 19 Views added 1 year ago
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For my great aunt & Jonathan Hicks
my first venture west was in Windows 98
or Independence, Missouri. class in the computer lab
& we were supposed to be playing some typing game
or another. the one i remember had a haunted theme.
ghosts... – by Nate Marshall | 4 Views added 1 year ago
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One
Green moves through the tops of trees and grows
lighter greens as it recedes, each of which includes a grey, and among the
greys, or beyond them, waning finely into white, there is one white spot,
absolute; it could be an egret or... – by COLE SWENSEN | 11 Views added 1 year ago
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Miep managed to snap them up for 27.50 guilders. Burgundy-colored suede and leather ...
— Anne Frank, Tuesday, August 10, 1943
When Miep took us home with her
She held us up in the air,
... – by Phillis Levin | 8 Views added 1 year ago
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Everything is perfect, dear friend.
—KEROUAC
Get some sleep.
Don't give advice.
Take care of your teeth and gums.
Don't be afraid of anything beyond your control. Don't be afraid, for... – by Ron Padgett | 91 Views added 1 year ago
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|
13.
After the dinosaurs fell
asleep, after those terrible lizards
began their slow decay into mythology,
Andre the Giant was there to cradle
their bodies in his soft hands and weep.
24.
Andre the Giant wrestled the... – by W. Todd Kaneko | 14 Views added 1 year ago
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When no one else would listen, Saint Anthony
preached seaward, his words fishnet for the lost
souls of the heretics. Caught up in despair, we plea
to the one who will listen: Saint Anthony,
please return Tía’s teeth or the misplaced key
to our... – by DEBORAH PAREDEZ | 3 Views added 1 year ago
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|
The past
will overtake
alien force
our house
formed
of my mind
to enter
explorer
in a forest
of myself
for all
my learning
Solitude
quiet
and quieter
fringe
of trees
by a river
bridges black
on the deep
... – by SUSAN HOWE | 54 Views added 1 year ago
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Make your mind what you want it to be.
—Curtis Mayfield
Tired of waiting for him, I think of a plan to stick it to the
Man—he waylaid me with promises: protection, his valuable keys.
Nights of seduction, I would glide to the curb in my... – by Lynn Crosbie | 8 Views added 1 year ago
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|
I. GERYON
Geryon was a monster everything about him was red
Put his snout out of the covers in the morning it was red
How stiff the red landscape where his cattle scraped against
Their hobbles in the red wind
Burrowed himself down in the red... – by ANNE CARSON | 36 Views added 1 year ago
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|
Gwendolyn Brooks
I. 1981
When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we
cruise at twilight until we find the place the real
men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool.
His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we
drift by... – by Terrance Hayes | 40 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
You were a girl of satin and gauze
Now you are my mountain and waterfall companion.
Long ago I read those lines of Po Chu I
Written in his middle age.
Young as I was they touched me.
I never thought in my own middle age
I would have a... – by KENNETH REXROTH | 10 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
Once & could-be-future girl, believe we’re not like you. Sure,
the pickup was tucked in dusk, shed all carefree w/ its sunburn
shimmer. Still nothing new to say about the creek, how reeds
get moony, or when we saw pelicans hold hands & gossip.
... – by Bradley Trumpfheller | 5 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
Ashglory behind
your shaken-knotted
hands at the threeway.
Pontic erstwhile: here,
a drop,
on
the drowned rudder blade,
deep
in the petrified oath,
it roars up.
(On the vertical
breathrope, in those days,
higher than above,
... – by Paul Celan | 154 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
In this house are things:
a boy, a lantern,
dead mice, silverware,
running water, screams.
There is filth in this house,
and there is a mop,
and the filth is mop,
and the mop is filth.
And there is me: mop and filth.
This house is a... – by SOMTO IHEZUE | 17 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
Quick passage into
memory and behind
only blank spaces,
blue stain on pink
litmus or merely
known so closely
something falls away
receding from touch,
caught in the air
your fingers move,
agile water-fly
padding the surface
of... – by MICHAEL ANANIA | 8 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
The wind ain’t never been nothing but breath.
Every hurricane season—rhapsody—Black bodies
emerge from water and wake in the trees. Somewhere,
stone cracks, and we hear: Stacy, a surname left
like a charred femur after a ritual. In search
of... – by CHRISTELL VICTORIA ROACH | 1 View added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
I hear you
Outside my winter studio
Moaning in the alley below my bedroom window
Calling for god the machine of all magics
All spells written on our bodies
All the right incense of rank summer
The flowers breaking through the confusion
You... – by Dan Taulapapa McMullin | 3 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
Even though it’s May & the ice cream truck
parked outside my apartment is somehow certain,
I have a hard time believing winter is somehow,
all of a sudden, over — the worst one of my life,
the woman at the bank tells me. Though I’d like to be,
... – by Hieu Minh Nguyen | 27 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
Protruding, rebelling against the lips,
the long, pointed, ill-fated fang stared at me,
(in spite of awkward attempts to hide it).
Stealing adolescent glances,
I dreamed it pierced me, pushing deep in the base of my neck.
I bit... – by Salwa Al-Neimi | 19 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
are ways to hold pain like night follows day
not knowing how tomorrow went down.
it hurts like never when the always is now,
the now that time won't allow.
there is no manner of tomorrow, nor shape of today
only like always having to... – by Raquel Salas Rivera | 115 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
WHEREAS a string-bean blue-eyed man leans back into a swig of beer work-weary lips at the dark bottle keeping cool in short sleeves and khakis he enters the discussion;
Whereas his wrist loose at the bottleneck to come across as candid “Well at... – by Layli Long Soldier | 66 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
This is no child that dances. This is flame.
Here fire at last has found its natural frame.
What else is that which burns and flies
From those enkindled eyes...
What is that inner blaze
Which plays
About that lighted face?...
This thing is... – by Louis Untermeyer | 23 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
Twenty-four haiku, for each year he lived
when you die, i’m told
they only use given names
christopher wallace
no notorious
neither b.i.g. nor smalls
just voletta’s son
brooklyn resident
hustler for loose change, loosies
and a lil... – by Chinaka Hodge | 36 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
Ahead and Around
Met, quarreled, quilled the bird of peace,
Untidied a pleasant plane.
Ahead accused Around of complete deceit,
Around accused Ahead of being discontented.
Neither listened to each.
Either lined on,
Making round straight and... – by Laura Riding Jackson | 45 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
This may sound queer,
but in 1985 I held the delicate hands
of Dan White:
I prepared him for burial; by then, Harvey Milk
was made monument—no, myth—by the years
since he was shot.
I remember when Harvey was shot:
twenty, and I knew I was... – by Randall Mann | 83 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
the gate—
work the lock with your fingers,
pull the smooth wire loop
over the top of the ʻōhia log post,
grasp the top rail with your right hand,
press your left booted heel
into the warm flank of your mount
the tap of a spur might... – by kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui | 12 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
All you violated ones with gentle hearts;
You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak;
Whose voices echo clamors of our cool capers,
And whose black faces have hollowed pits for eyes.
All you gambling sons and hooked children and bowery... – by Margaret Walker | 15 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
I do not have any memories of Waikīkī ever being like this
not even in my father’s stories was she so utterly alone.
No sunburnt tourists, no convertibles on Kalākaua Ave.
not even a leathery beach boy to survey the shoreline.
... – by Christy Passion | 42 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
first and most important
dream our missing friends forward
burn their reflections into empty chairs
we are less bound by time than the clockmaker fears
this morning all I... – by CAConrad | 143 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
The trouble with geraniums
is that they’re much too red!
The trouble with my toast is that
it’s far too full of bread.
The trouble with a diamond
is that it’s much too bright.
The same applies to fish and stars
and the electric light.
... – by Mervyn Peake | 204 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
So she went into the garden
to cut a cabbage-leaf
to make an apple-pie;
and at the same time
a great she-bear, coming down the street,
pops its head into the shop.
What! no soap?
So he died,
and she very imprudently married the Barber:
and... – by Samuel Foote | 14 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
This morning I didn’t even honi you when I came in.
I just walked right by your shallow breath,
your eyes shut in the living room, and that bed
stuffed with pulu. And all the blurred words
projecting onto the backs of your eyelids.
Ke alanui... – by Donovan Kūhiō Colleps | 22 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
13
Horse cart skirrs through the Upper East Gate
to the north beyond the city walls gaze
at the graves White poplars rustle xiao
xiao pine cypress line the wide road
Dead arranged under... – by Xiao Tong | 14 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
amy winehouse
All song is formal, and you
Maybe felt this and decided
You’d be formal too. (The eyeliner, the beehive: formal.)
When a desire to escape becomes formal,
It’s dangerous. Then escape requires
Nullity, rather than a walk in... – by Kathleen Ossip | 15 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
A tumbled down, and hurt his Arm, against a bit of wood.
B said, "My Boy, O! do not cry' it cannot do you good!"
C said, "A Cup of Coffee hot can't do you any harm."
D said, "A Doctor should be fetched, and he would cure the arm."... – by Edward Lear | 13 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat:
They took some honey, and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
"O lovely Pussy, O... – by Edward Lear | 33 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
Badu: This cyclone of good fortune.
You handling?
Kendrick:
... – by Camonghne Felix | 26 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
a meadow
after a snowfall
that a poem
hopes to... – by Francisco X. Alarcón | 119 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
To see you standing in the sagging bookstore door
So filled me with chagrin that suddenly you seemed as
Pink and white to me as newborn, hairless mouse. For
I had hoped to delight you at home. Be a furl
Of faint perfume and Vienna’s cord like... – by Margaret Danner | 42 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
Personification is inevitable. It goes hand
-in-hand with reinventing the wheel.
It reeks of misfortune. Gives a mess
its mass. Is why slime
never forgets
its shapelessness,
while memory
foam must, in what doesn’t leave
an... – by Rosebud Ben-Oni | 39 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
Last night, when the moon
slipped into my attic room
as an oblong of light,
I sensed she’d come to commiserate.
It was August. She traveled
with a small valise
of darkness, and the first few stars
returning to the northern sky,
and my... – by Kathleen Jamie | 39 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
When it comes to clothes, make
an allowance for the unexpected.
Be sure the spare in the trunk
of your station wagon with wood paneling
isn’t in need of repair. A simple jean jacket
says Hey, if you aren’t trying to smuggle
rare Incan coins... – by Aimee Nezhukumatathil | 15 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
Fast breaks. Lay ups. With Mercury's
Insignia on our sneakers,
We outmaneuvered the footwork
Of bad angels. Nothing but a hot
Swish of strings like silk
Ten feet out. In the roundhouse
Labyrinth our bodies
Created, we could almost
Last... – by YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA | 256 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
He glanced around to check if the treacherous gods
had really given him the reward promised for his accomplished song
and there she was, Eurydice restored, perfectly naked and fleshed
in her rhyming body again, the upper and lower smiles and... – by Albert F. Moritz | 12 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
Error is boundless.
Nor hope nor doubt,
Though both be groundless,
Will average... – by James Vincent Cunningham | 21 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
go to Bible study every Sunday
and swear she’s still not convinced,
but she likes to be around people who are.
We have the same conversation
every few years—I’ll ask her if she stops
to admire the perfect leaves
of the Japanese maple
she... – by AMY UYEMATSU | 36 Views added 1 year ago
| Rating
|
There will be no edges, but curves.
Clean lines pointing only forward.
History, with its hard spine & dog-eared
Corners, will be replaced with nuance,
Just like the dinosaurs gave way
To mounds and mounds of ice.
Women will still be... – by Tracy K. Smith | 40 Views added 1 year ago
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Cinco de Mayo celebrates a burning people,
those whose land is starved of blood,
civilizations which are no longer
holders of the night. We reconquer with our feet,
with our tongues, that dangerous language,
saying more of this world than the... – by Luis J. Rodríguez | 19 Views added 1 year ago
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We have done what we wanted.
We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry
of each other, and we have welcomed grief
and called ruin the impossible habit to break.
And now we are here.
The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.
... – by Mark Strand | 29 Views added 1 year ago
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Clean the spittoons, boy.
Detroit,
Chicago,
Atlantic City,
Palm Beach.
Clean the spittoons.
The steam in hotel kitchens,
And the smoke in hotel lobbies,
And the slime in hotel spittoons:
Part of my life.
Hey,... – by Langston Hughes | 156 Views added 1 year ago
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Through darkness they came,
covered in ash, scarred by depths
and distance, they bore salt and fire, breath steaming
at edges of decks, hands clutching
railings, their bodies dizzied by the lurching vessel,
... – by BRIAN KOMEI DEMPSTER | 12 Views added 1 year ago
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There's a certain sadness to this body of water
adjacent to the runway, its reeds and weeds,
handful of ducks, the water color
manmade. A still life. And still
life's a cold exercise in looking back,
back to Florida, craning my neck
like... – by Randall Mann | 19 Views added 1 year ago
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If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,
again, the earth's great, sonorous moan that says
you are the air of the now and gone, that says
all you love will turn to dust,
and will meet you there, do not
raise... – by Ross Gay | 105 Views added 1 year ago
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1
There is a gold light in certain old paintings
That represents a diffusion of sunlight.
It is like happiness, when we are happy.
It comes from everywhere and from nowhere at once, this light,
And the poor soldiers sprawled at... – by Donald Justice | 12 Views added 1 year ago
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Some feel rain. Some feel the beetle startle
in its ghost-part when the bark
slips. Some feel musk. Asleep against
each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there.
When it falls apart, some feel the moondark air
drop its motes to the patch-thick... – by JOANNA KLINK | 65 Views added 1 year ago
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The mailman handing me a letter,
he paid a little. My daughter’s
third grade teacher, the electrician
putting a light over my back door:
they paid as well. The woman at the bank
who cashes my check. She paid a part of it.
The typist in... – by STEPHEN DOBYNS | 117 Views added 1 year ago
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I am the Earth
And the Earth is me.
Each blade of grass,
Each honey tree,
Each bit of mud,
And stick and stone
Is blood and muscle,
Skin and bone.
And just as I
Need every bit
Of me to make
My body fit,
So Earth needs
Grass and stone... – by Jane Yolen | 458 Views added 1 year ago
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This is a poem about the great ships that wandered
the oceans
And groaned sometimes in deep voices, grumbling about fog
and submerged peaks,
But usually they sliced the pages of tropical seas
... – by ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI | 36 Views added 1 year ago
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With me, life becomes sweeter,
so she loses some of
the ability to defend herself.
Yet even this gives her a forlorn
sense of satisfaction.
I know it by the distracted
half-smile on her face.
People believe love
can do so much! As when
they... – by Sandra Lim | 288 Views added 1 year ago
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Every door stands an open door:
our human settlements all temporary.
We share together the incidental shore
and teach the young to tend the lamp's wick,
weary of anyone small enough to bar our... – by Joan Kane | 117 Views added 1 year ago
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I love. Wouldn't we all like to start
a poem with "I love . . ."? I would.
I mean, I love the fact there are parallel lines
in the word "parallel," love how
words sometimes mirror what they mean.
I love mirrors and that stupid tale
about... – by C. Dale Young | 115 Views added 1 year ago
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The woodpecker keeps returning
to drill the house wall.
Put a pie plate over one place, he chooses another.
There is nothing good to eat there:
he has found in the house
a resonant billboard to post his intentions,
his voluble strength as... – by Jane Hirshfield | 8 Views added 1 year ago
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The songs we join in
are beeswax candles
burning with no smoke
a clean fire licking at the evening
our voices small flames quivering.
The songs string us like beads
on the hour. The ritual is
its own melody that leads us
where we have... – by Marge Piercy | 6 Views added 1 year ago
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I was formed inside the body
of a woman who wanted me
as she wanted her own life,
allowed to drink the milk
made only for me.
I was given mother-love,
its bounty and its cocoon
of those first years without language.
It is right to mourn the... – by ELANA BELL | 29 Views added 1 year ago
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This morning a cat—bright orange—pawing at the one patch of new grass in the sand-and tanbark-colored leaves.
And last night the sapphire of the raccoon's eyes in the beam of the flashlight.
He was climbing a tree beside the house, trying to get... – by Robert Hass | 47 Views added 1 year ago
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Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
... – by Delmore Schwartz | 164 Views added 1 year ago
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Another drought morning after a too brief dawn downpour,
unaccountable silvery glitterings on the leaves of the withering maples—
I think of a troop of the blissful blessed approaching Dante,
"a hundred spheres shining," he rhapsodizes, "the... – by Charles Kenneth Williams | 15 Views added 1 year ago
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is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail
it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea
love is less always... – by Edward Estlin Cummings | 75 Views added 1 year ago
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All birds—even those that do not fly
—have wings
A constant confession
Admission of omission
This is your punctuated equilibrium
And everything in between
Slow it down
The moment of extinction
The death of the last individual of a... – by Sun Yung Shin | 63 Views added 2 years ago
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