Alice Dunbar-Nelson: Sonnet
I had no thought of violets of late,
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet
In wistful April days, when lovers mate
And wander through the fields in raptures sweet.
Michelle Bitting: Now at Holiday Time I Think About the Moment I Heard You Passed On
a stone’s throw from lots
where talented Sharon Tate expired and Jim Morrison
fluttered psychedelic, fiery birds rising from the boulevard
of broken wings
Umit Singh Dhuga: Three poems
We were huddled by the Campbell House bar
on the penultimate Monday of July
downing pint after pint of tepid water.
My first reading sober, your last one alive.
Edna St. Vincent Millay: “Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!”
Was it my enemy or my friend I heard,
“What a big book for such a little head!”
Come, I will show you now my newest hat,
And you may watch me purse my mouth and prink!
John Greenleaf Whittier: Forgiveness
My heart was heavy, for its trust had been
Abused, its kindness answered with foul wrong…
John Clare: The Instinct of Hope
Is there another world for this frail dust
To warm with life and be itself again?
Bill Knott: Sonnet
The way the world is not
astonished at you
it doesn’t blink a leaf
when we step from the house
William Carlos Williams: Sonnet in Search of an Author
Nude bodies like peeled logs
sometimes give off a sweetest
odor, man and woman
John Okrent: This Costly Season
I picture Whitman,
wending his way through wounded Union
soldiers—his democratic nostrils, the smell of dead
or dying flesh. And in all the dooryards, the smell of lilacs.
Christine Rhein: Our Corner Acre, April Afternoon
Side by side, we dig in the withered flowerbed,
the sudden warmth, and once again you say, See
how much the light has shifted. I nod my head
at another changing season, our aching knees.
Edna St. Vincent Millay: When you, that at this moment are to me
When you, that at this moment are to me
Dearer than words on paper, shall depart,
And be no more the warder of my heart…
Sally Bliumis-Dunn: Diminution
Did she believe—she did, I think— the right
cliché could save us, help us not to feel
alone, so many bees in that same hive—
spilt milk, sow’s ear, Achilles heel.
Countee Cullen: Yet Do I Marvel
I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind
Vox Populi 