Richard St. John: Death of the Tragedians
He was torn apart by dogs
set loose by playwrights, jealous that the gods
gave him more talent
Barbara Crooker: Climbing the Eiffel Tower at Night
We climb into this ladder of light.
William Blake and Catherine Boucher: Four Images from The First Book of Urizen
The globe of life-blood trembled
Branching out into roots:
Fib’rous, writhing upon the winds:
Fibres of blood, milk and tears
Chard deNiord: Meadow Altar
So, he spoke
to his horses, now loosed from the wagon and grazing
nearby with heads bowed to the fescue and rye,
as if also praying, which, of course, they had no need
to do, blessed and saved as they were already
Elizabeth Romero: Phantom Director
What a bandied about word love is but what other word for the way
Your voice
reaches inside me as though it were my own?
Philip Levine: The Poem of Chalk
He knew feldspar,
he knew calcium, oyster shells, he
knew what creatures had given
their spines to become the dust time
pressed into these perfect cones
H C Palmer: Two Poems
My father believed the bedrock beneath our ranch—
once an immense sea—
was still alive, that natural rhythms persisted
in its sluggish consolidation.
Naomi Shihab Nye: 300 Goats
O lead them to a warm corner,
little ones toward bulkier bodies.
Lead them to the brush, which cuts the icy wind.
Another frigid night swooping down
Moudi Sbeity: Watching the Tall Burly Man at the Ice Cream Shop Lick His Cone
I watched him walk away from the register,
all rough and tarnished, hard in the heart –
I could tell – even mad in the eyes, lifting the
cone to his slightly cocked head, tongue sticking
out, wiping itself in a swirl along the sugar spire.
Gwendolyn B. Bennet: Four Poems
Something of old forgotten queens
Lurks in the lithe abandon of your walk
And something of the shackled slave
Sobs in the rhythm of your talk.
Sean Sexton: Heavenward
An orange glow back-lights the sky before dawn
with approaching newness made of blue. The world
still drips from a perfect midafternoon rain arriving
yesterday to carry into dark.
Edna St. Vincent Millay: ‘She had a horror he would die at night’
She had a horror he would die at night.
And sometimes when the light began to fade
She could not keep from noticing how white
The birches looked and then she would be afraid
Thomas A. Thomas: While hearing the poet
when love was blue water in a green cathedral
under a new blue sky and the water fell from
cliff stone into sun-sparkled air
