The Tree
Ezra Pound

I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
Knowing the truth of things unseen before;
Of Daphne and the laurel bow
And that god-feasting couple old
that grew elm-oak amid the wold.
’Twas not…

590 Light Years Away
In the same breath they use to introduce themselves,
three men in white coats ask if I have
tingling in the privates.
One asks it while my hand is still in his.
I want to make…

Carrying Our Words
By Ofelia Zepeda

We travel carrying our words.
We arrive at the ocean.
With our words we are able to speak
of the sounds of thunderous waves.
We speak of how majestic it is,
of the ocean…

Clearing
by Martha Postlethwaite

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into…

Who Are You Today?
Jordan Salkin
 

Very soon you will be gone,
So who are you today?
A brilliant soul or silhouette
Of conscience on display,

The bridge between the hopes and dreams
Of those who call you “Friend,”
A…

Humility

Poems arrive ready to begin.
     Poets are only the transportation

                                    -Mary Oliver

Oliver, Mary. Felicity. Penguin Press, 2015, p. 13.

Photo by Porfirio Trinidad Matos

The Falling
Jane Hirshfield
You turn towards meteor showers in August,
wishing yourself like that:
bright and burning wholly out.
When feeling finally comes it is
that falling, matter breaking away
from air, the sound
of crickets moving through the…

Mirascope
Brian Orozco

After the step I assumed
was last was another.
One explains
the sum of color.
Deciduous images
smuggled from sleep.
Now of these
two, pick one, and from
these four, pick three,
says the cuck.
In quicksand—as…

This feels close in spirit to a lot of modern working-class poetry — where transcendence is constantly interrupted by cigarettes, schedules, fatigue, and economic reality.

Author: Matthew Rice
Work: plastic: A Poem
Form: a sequence of clock-time fragments following workers…

It’s love that never spoke its name, understood only when it’s far too late—no sentimentality, just a slow, hard reckoning.

Those Winter Sundays

By Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the…

So Much Happiness
Naomi Shihab Nye
1952 –
 

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls…

I started the novel Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck the other day. The bolded line below is the excerpt from a poem by Robert Burns that inspired the title of the book.

The words are difficult to comprehend…

I speak with the future

Jane Hirshfield

We sit on our skeletons’ bones. 
We hear with our skeletons’ bones.
We speak of beauty by moving our jaws and our teeth.

The original meaning of Paradise: a place, 
a walled garden. …

Onions
By William Matthews

How easily happiness begins by   
dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter   
slithers and swirls across the floor   
of the sauté pan, especially if its   
errant path crosses a tiny slick
of olive oil. Then a…

James Richardson
TRASH PICKER

It's Monday and our trash is out at dawn
when a pickup, one of the really old ones
(from the Forties, maybe?) with the puffy fenders,
like a creature twisted together out of balloons,
wobbles down…

A classic and as relevant today as it was when it was released; perhaps more so.

STILL I RISE

BY MAYA ANGELOU

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the…

Life
Abdellatif Laâbi
Translated by Andre Naffis- Sahely
 

Life
It’s enough I woke up
the sun to my right
the moon to my left
and that I walked
from my mother’s womb
to the threshold of this century
Life
It’s…

Winter Walk
Lynette Roberts

She left the hut and bright log fire at noon
And walked outside on crisp white winter snow
To find the iced slopes shadowed like the moon,
The wild wood desolate and bare below;
The red…

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to…

The North Ship
Legend
Philip-Larkin

I saw three ships go sailing by,
Over the sea, the lifting sea,
And the wind rose in the morning sky,
And one was rigged for a long journey.

The first ship turned towards the…

It’s Getting Lighter
Mary Jo Bang
Snug inside the design that is my self—there
the disappearing birds, stained-glass bits
hurled against the sky, pierce the smoke
that waits for night to pry the window open
and allow every past absence…

Sight Lines

Arthur Sze

I’m walking in sight of the Río Nambe—
salt cedar rises through silt in an irrigation ditch—
the snowpack in the Sangre de Cristos has already dwindled before spring—
at least no fires erupt in the…

I was alerted to this poem by a reference Patti Smith made to it during a recent interview I heard her in. It made me curious so I sought it out.

Genie
by Arthur Rimbaud

He is love and the…