Eleanor Lerman: Monday, Tuesday
Aqueous lunar days when the sky was plowed
with stars, days of desire in the dance clubs,
days of luster, days of pearl—when was the last time
you remember our days of paradise? The days
before the demon days of pretty things ran out?
Molly Fisk: Maybe I’ll Just Sing To Him
As the planned flaw in a woven blanket
banishes hubris or lets mischief out,
her breasts greet each other unevenly.
Donna Spruijt-Metz: Birthday with Empty Hands
Today is our firstborn’s birthday—and you
are missing the party.
You’ve been pulled away on
death’s urgent business.
Jordan Smith: These Days
The danger of elegy is that it just tells us what we already know: we lose and suffer and become the subject of the loss and suffering of others. Liam had no patience for what he called the “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed” school of poetry.
Sean Sexton: Not
Not the listless woods these days,
their ongoing summer song
same as the year-round sound in my head.
Dawn Potter: Why, as the evening steps forward,
as the late noise of traffic, of shrill birdsong,
dies away, do I always recall
those brief summers, when the old folks
reclined in the grass on the hill
Donna Spruijt-Metz: Person
I wouldn’t call you back—not
to a body that would be unable
to walk the mountains freely. Even though I miss you—
even though the hole you left in me is vast—please—
trust me.
Robert Cording: Broken
Now, my brother’s fifty-year marriage
broken off as if their past was
an imposter that had been discovered.
And my best friend’s wife can’t find
the name for husband,
though he sits next to her.
W. H. Auden: Stop all the clocks
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
Thomas McGuire: Garden Plots
I’ve come to half believe what Ho Chi Minh
said about his need for more poets
who could lead a charge, sharpen bayonets.
Barbara Huntington: Our Big Toes
I’d let that old woman repeat her crime if
I could see
Fred’s happy faces
one more time
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Song of a Second April
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.
Robert Cording: Reading Poems with David
Over the phone, David begins to read
and Mary, in old age, in a nursing home,
returns to life in David’s voice, voicing
her words, her questioning
of her own bafflement
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Leaving It There
I stop weeding, stand still a while, hands on hips,
because it’s back again — that feeling of elation
tangled with grief.
