Rachel Hadas: Summer Nights and Days
So far the nights feel lonelier than the days.
In light, the living keep me company,
and memories of voices through the years.
Jose Padua: Remember
Remember all ye tedious millionaires the bent
honeysuckle whose white flowers bloom in the
late spring. Remember the burden of the books
you burn…
William Wordsworth: Surprised by Joy
An elegy for Wordsworth’s daughter Catherine, who died in 1812, aged three.
Edwin Arlington Robinson: The Sheaves
Where long the shadows of the wind had rolled,
Green wheat was yielding to the change assigned;
And as by some vast magic undivined
The world was turning slowly into gold.
Baron Wormser: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Epitaph”
By tradition, poets have the authority to write epitaphs. It goes with their famous license, their claiming the verbal right to confront death in whatever context death presents itself while using poetry’s concision to arrive at a just, incisive summary.
John Keats: When I have fears that I may cease to be
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain
Claude McKay: The Lynching
The ghastly body swaying in the sun:
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue
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
