Bertha Rogers: When Winter — Lục bát
Here is an example of a traditional fixed form borrowed from Vietnamese folk poetry.
Michael Simms: Civilization and Her Discontents
On the morning of the important day, Civilization woke up on the wrong side of bed again, rolled over and fell on the floor.
Robert Frost: Reluctance
The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
Rita Sims Quillen: First Memory
People never believe me
when I tell them I recall
waking in my crib, lying watchful
Rick Campbell: James Dickey Said
In a Laramie bar
by the railroad tracks
our band played nights
under a sky wide and high,
stars shining like a score
Rachel Hadas: February 29, 2020
An extra day, an ordinary day,
predictable even in being extraordinary –
a bonus day in the old dispensation
we couldn’t guess was close to termination.
When did we start to sense the great subtraction?
Michael Simms: André Breton and the Birth of Surrealism
The Poem was worried. He’d heard rumors of Rondels in other lands being infested with illogic, and there was no known cure.
Edna St. Vincent Millay: I shall go back again to the bleak shore
I shall go back again to the bleak shore
And build a little shanty on the sand…
Mike Schneider: Photograph in TIME, 1985
A man in battle camouflage holds a machete
at the throat of a peasant farmer on his knees
genuflecting in a shallow grave he just dug.
Video: Bread and Roses | Joan Baez (lyrics included)
As we go marching, marching
We battle too for men
For they are women’s children
And we mother them again
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Pittsburgh
When I was a child,
I used to hear of this faraway place
where my people came to drown
themselves in search of America.
Paul Hostovsky: Wording
Cynosure, gravid, pabulum–
just three of the many
unusual specimens
I’d been lucky enough to glimpse
in the last few days.
Tayve Neese: I believe in chakras
tankas and sonnets
are a species of orchid
Robert Gibb: Angels in Homestead
Pale, sentinel, their stone wings
Open behind them, they stood about
As though the afterlife meant
To impress itself upon us
