Linda Stern: At the Jetty
You climbed the jetty leading to the sea,
and I hung back to let you try your skill
at navigating life apart from me
though you were not so far I could not still
reach for you if you slipped and fell.
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Say what you will, and scratch my heart to find
Laugh at the unshed leaf, say what you will,
Call me in all things what I was before,
A flutterer in the wind, a woman still;
I tell you I am what I was and more.
Louise Bogan: Simple Autumnal
The measured blood beats out the year’s delay.
The tearless eyes and heart, forbidden grief,
Watch, the burned, restless, but abiding leaf,
The brighter branches arming the bright day.
Edna St. Vincent Millay: What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply
Meg Kearney: Two Sonnets
And what emotional impulse leads you
to speak of the heart, that cliché, its chambers
for sleeping, for weeping, and remember
the chamber for repair—of course you do
Meg Kearney (Two Poems)
When he was dying my little brother
said cancer was “the sins of our mother”
visited upon him. What’s also true:
her heart was the stone rolled away from the tomb.
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.
Meg Kearney: Hearts of Poets (Two Poems)
By the time his body washed ashore, all
that was left was burned on the beach, deathbed
a pyre lit by three friends; two then fled
Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Edna St. Vincent Millay: “And you as well must die” (Sonnet 19)
And you as well must die, beloved dust,
And all your beauty stand you in no stead;
This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head,
This body of flame and steel, before the gust
Of Death, or under his autumnal frost,
Jim Daniels: Ghost Guns
Plush Jesus dolls scattered
on the picked-over discount table
at the dollar store
William Shakespeare: Sonnets 73 & 74
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
Ruth Muskrat Bronson: Two Poems
If you could know the empty ache of loneliness,
Masked well behind the calm indifferent face
Of us who pass you by in studied hurriedness
Helen Hunt Jackson: Poppies on the Wheat
Along Ancona’s hills the shimmering heat,
A tropic tide of air with ebb and flow
Bathes all the fields of wheat until they glow
Like flashing seas of green
