Video: Naomi Shihab Nye reads her poem Gate A-4
I heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately.”
H.D: The Flowering of the Rod
O, give me burning blue
and brittle burnt sea-weed
above the tide-line,
as I stand, still unsatisfied,
under the long shadow-on-snow of the pine.
Toi Derricotte: Not Forgotten
I love the way the black ants use their dead.
They carry them off like warriors on their steel
backs.
Majid Naficy: Ruthless Gods
I detest the world
Which has given its heart
To ruthless gods
James Crews: Two Poems
We keep going back to the rocky beach,
searching for the glint of sea glass
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Wilding
I crave it, this scraping away
of everything that isn’t
limb-thrash and lung-gasp
and skin-scream and heart-bang
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: The Parting
It was November outside–
the leaf-colored sofa inside
strangely vivid in the flickering
light
Betsy Sholl: Liminal
In Dante, some stanzas so blaze with light,
reading them, you feel your pupils constrict.
It’s like walking along the shore, ocean
flashing on your left, sun straight ahead
flooding your eyes
Byron Hoot: Two Poems About Fall
It is fall and ghosts walk
in the wind among fallen
leaves, mist, and fog more
easily than any other time
of the year
Sandy Solomon: Grief
I move back and forth
down the supermarket aisles,
the way I move back and forth
through grief’s famous stages.
Amy Lowell: Dreams in War Time
I dug a grave under an oak-tree.
With infinite care, I stamped my spade
Into the heavy grass.
Robert Okaji: The Continuing
The body attacks itself, realizes the futility
in compensation, as the spirit expands
over the horizon. I am old, and yet…
Pinecones linger. The neighbor’s dog
pees on our shared fence.
Baron Wormser: The Refusal
We take, rightly so, poets and writers as people who, in some way, shape, or form, are involved in praising the sheer energy of Being and, in that regard, are saying yes to the life force.
Helen Pletts: love lies like a silver thought on still water
and when the light catches up with it, I catch myself
and throw myself into the depths
