Molly Fisk: Two Poems
Part, partial, apart, apartheid,
apartments invaded, a woman
shot though she too was a piece
of the continent, she was a part
of the main.
Robert Cording: Pilgrims
a girl
dancing topless on a table
at the West End bar
more than fifty years ago,
and Richie Havens singing Freedom,
Freedom, Freedom from a jukebox,
everyone clapping their hands
Alexis Rhone Fancher: Out of Order
Promise me, my sister says. That you’ll be there if something happens to me. I know she worries about the fate of her children if she becomes injured, succumbs to a virus or is killed in a crash. Anything’s possible, she says. For better or worse, her sperm donor’s out of the picture.
Mary B. Moore: The Birds of Cutting
I’m tired today and blue to boot.
Nothing buoys me, yesses my no’s.
Even the cardinal on the fence,
a dusky girl, isn’t all red
like cardinal boys
Kathleen O’Toole: A dimmer hope
First crack of crimson
in the January morning sky
engenders such an ache, not
only for the sun’s escape
from cloud block, but ours
from winter’s grip.
Robinson Jeffers: Love the Wild Swan
I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: You Belong
It’s not true our hearts are our own—
they’re symbiotic as meadows in spring.
The heart exists for who grows in it.
W.H. Auden: Lullaby
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children
William Shakespeare: Sonnets 18 & 19
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws
And make the Earth devour her own sweet brood
Alison Luterman: Snowy Plover
Their wild wheelings trace the shape
of wonder and grief moving inside us,
pewter, then platinum.
It goes away like that; it comes back.
It carves a black, moving river in the air.
Chard deNiord: The Hawk
I was gazing out this morning from my perch in Bedford,
Virginia when I heard the screech of a red-
tailed hawk in the deep, cerulean sky
above a Blue Ridge mountain in which the other-
wise perfect silence was musical
Philip Terman: Too Much Already
Among the ruins, Nasser, dark in the shadows, hands gesturing in all directions. He speaks in a measured Arabic to the backdrop of rifles and bombs.
Barbara Crooker: The Vultures
Will we
recognize the bones of our constitution after they’ve been
picked clean, or will we be too baffled to recognize their white
gleaming?
Juan Garrido Salgado: Poem of Night and the Wind | Poema de la Noche y el Viento
The word is wind, silence is wind, night is wind.
Clouds that imprison the moon.
Light that is no longer light but darkness of clouds and sky.
In the distance the sleeping mountains wake with the leaves of the wind.
