Rick Campbell: Another List of Things I Have Attended to Sloppily
The garden gates, once my pride, now
slanted, ajar, hinges rusted and failing.
The rails of Della’s tree house
that somehow escaped their nails.
Elizabeth Romero: On the Corner
If
(by some miracle)
We could be both dead and alive
Rise from the blood and ashes
Gauzy like movie ghosts
Richard Wilbur: Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.
Michael Simms: Only You
I woke this morning remembering the room we had in Paris which looked out on the Seine.
Rafael Cadenas: Failure
How much I owe you!
You elevated me to a new rank washing me with a rough sponge, throwing me on to
my true battlefield, assigning me the weapons left behind by victory.
Gerry LaFemina: Grafton Street, St. Stephen’s Green
church bells call out deliberately
the twelfth hour, thus reminding us
we’re halfway between yesterday
& tomorrow
Tayve Neese: At thirteen
Oh, Mariah, my life is now an apology
for how I forgot you, and let the tide
of my own life take me out to sea
when I knew that you needed me.
Peter Blair: Estivation
Against blue dusk
a bat dives, veers
over the bank, dips,
swoops up
above the library
Rachel Hadas: Lyric Leap
lacuna, hiatus, sidebar,
sudden swerve, and you are far
along already toward surprise.
Jay Carson: Railroad Bill
I have always lived within the sound
of the Pennsylvania Railroad
which moans, then sings, and rides me at night
to the sound of my father’s voice
Video: Rambling with Eileen Myles
Director Chelsea McMullan takes an inspirational walk with legendary American poet, essayist and one-time presidential candidate Eileen Myles, perambulating and talking poetry through the streets of their adoptive home of New York. (running time: 5 min.)
Emily Dickinson: How happy is the little stone
Fulfilling absolute Decree
In casual simplicity—
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Self-Reliance
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion.
Majid Naficy: The Engraver
You put on your eyeglasses
And read me your daughter’s will
Word by word.
