A poem by Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova is a poet who lived in Russia at the turn of the last century and led a life that was full of hardship and tragedy. Here is a poem that uses tight language and great imagery and reflects the difficult life that was hers. This poem was originally written in Russian but nothing seems lost in translation.

The Sentence

     by Anna Akhmatova

And the stone word fell
On my still-living breast.
Never mind, I was ready.
I will manage somehow.

Today I have so much to do:
I must kill memory once and for all,
I must turn my soul to stone,
I must learn to live again—

Unless . . . Summer's ardent rustling
Is like a festival outside my window.
For a long time I've foreseen this
Brilliant day, deserted house.

A poem by Peter Everwine

Poet Peter Everwine brings us this quiet poem of reflection. We all know these times when one thought brings another and soon we are lost in the moment and filled with thoughful reflection.

Rain

     by Peter Everwine

Toward evening, as the light failed

and the pear tree at my window darkened,

I put down my book and stood at the open door,

the first raindrops gusting in the eaves,

a smell of wet clay in the wind.

Sixty years ago, lying beside my father,

half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain

drummed against our tent, I heard

for the first time a loon’s sudden wail

drifting across that remote lake—

a loneliness like no other,

though what I heard as inconsolable

may have been only the sound of something

untamed and nameless

singing itself to the wilderness around it

and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father

and of good companions gone

into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain

and the soft lapping of water, and did not know

whether it was grief or joy or something other

that surged against my heart

and held me listening there so long and late.

A poem by May Sarton

I always wonder what creatures wander around in the snow at night, too. The results in the morning always tell.

December Moon

     by May Sarton

Before going to bed
After a fall of snow
I look out on the field
Shining there in the moonlight
So calm, untouched and white
Snow silence fills my head
After I leave the window.
Hours later near dawn
When I look down again
The whole landscape has changed
The perfect surface gone
Criss-crossed and written on
Where the wild creatures ranged
While the moon rose and shone.
Why did my dog not bark?
Why did I hear no sound
There on the snow-locked ground
In the tumultuous dark?
How much can come, how much can go
When the December moon is bright,
What worlds of play we'll never know
Sleeping away the cold white night
After a fall of snow.

A poem by Ted Kooser

Ted Kooser is one of my favorite poets. He is a master at extracting the extraordinary from out of the ordinary. He is a verbal artist, crafting still lifes and capturing gesture with words. Here, as in many great poems, Kooser takes two things, a spiral notebook and growing old, and blends them together into one theme and comes up with a masterful and lasting work of art.

A Spiral Notebook

     by Ted Kooser

The bright wire rolls like a porpoise
in and out of the calm blue sea
of the cover, or perhaps like a sleeper
twisting in and out of his dreams,
for it could hold a record of dreams
if you wanted to buy it for that
though it seems to be meant for
more serious work, with its
college-ruled lines and its cover
that states in emphatic white letters,
5 SUBJECT NOTEBOOK. It seems
a part of growing old is no longer
to have five subjects, each
demanding an equal share of attention,
set apart by brown cardboard dividers,
but instead to stand in a drugstore
and hang on to one subject
a little too long, like this notebook
you weigh in your hands, passing
your fingers over its surfaces
as if it were some kind of wonder.

A poem by William Baer

 

Beautiful poetry happens when the poet takes two seemingly unrelated events and intertwines them together such that we come to realize indeed how similar each really is. This poem leaves us with that surprise, as the poet masterfully weaves two unique incidents together.

Snowflake

 

Timing’s everything. The vapor rises

high in the sky, tossing to and fro,

then freezes, suddenly, and crystalizes

into a perfect flake of miraculous snow.

For countless miles, drifting east above

the world, whirling about in a swirling free-

for-all, appearing aimless, just like love,

but sensing, seeking out, its destiny.

Falling to where the two young skaters stand,

hand in hand, then flips and dips and whips

itself about to ever-so-gently land,

a miracle, across her unkissed lips:

as he blocks the wind raging from the south,

leaning forward to kiss her lovely mouth.

A poem by Jane Kenyon

Ice Storm

For the hemlocks and broad-leafed evergreens
a beautiful and precarious state of being…
Here in the suburbs of New Haven
nature, unrestrained, lops the weaker limbs
of shrubs and trees with a sense of aesthetics
that is practical and sinister…

I am a guest in this house.
On the bedside table Good Housekeeping, and
A Nietzsche Reader… The others are still asleep.
The most painful longing comes over me.
A longing not of the body…

It could be for beauty—
I mean what Keats was panting after,
for which I love and honor him;
it could be for the promises of God;
or for oblivion, nada; or some condition even more
extreme, which I intuit, but can't quite name.

A poem by Noel Coward

Who knows where memories come from. And just as mysterious, where do they go? We all long for the simpler times in life before pure memory turned into rampant desire. Here, Noel Coward presents a timeless message that everyone can relate to.

Nothing Is Lost

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.

A poem by Howard Nemerov

The fast pace of modern life with all the technological advances that come with it is something that everyone can benefit from. And yet in another sense, at times a fast life can seem so unfulfulling that we feel like victims. Here is a poem that addresses stillness in the face of our speedy pace and the fact of our destiny in it.

Fugue

You see them vanish in their speeding cars,
The many people hastening through the world,
And wonder what they would have done before
This time of time speed distance, random streams,
Of molecules hastened by what rising heat?
Was there never a world where people just sat still?


Yet they might be all of them contemplatives
Of a timeless now, drivers and passengers
In the moving cars all facing to the front
Which is the future, which is destiny,
Which is desire and desire's end -
What are they doing but just sitting still?


And still at speed they fly away, as still
As the road paid out beneath them as it flows
Moment by moment into the mirrored past;
They spread in their wake the parading fields of food,
The windowless works where who is making what,
The grey towns where the wishes and the fears are done.

A poem by Russell Edson

A poem that justifies the existence of people as they are in those moments when they are who they are, and wishing for something else, confront the validity of the notion that this is all there is - to be who we are is to be alone.

One Lonely Afternoon

Since the fern can't go to the sink for a drink, I graciously
submit myself to the task, returning with two glasses of water.
And so we sit, the fern and I, sipping water together. ...

Of course I'm more complex than a fern, full of deep
thoughts as I am. But I lay this aside for the easy company of
an afternoon friendship.
Yet, had I my druthers, I'd be speeding through the sky for
Stockholm, sipping bloody marys with wedges of lime. ...

And so we sit one lonely afternoon sipping water together.
The fern looking out of its fronds, as I look out of mine. ...

A poem by Robert Creeley

I treasure this poem and reread it for its melodious sound. And like the rhythmic rain, it soaks me each time.

The Rain
All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon,
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

A poem by Jay Leeming

The Light Above Cities

Sitting in darkness,
I see how the light of the city
fills the clouds, rosewater light
poured into the sky
like the single body we are. It is the sum
of a million lives; a man drinking beer
beneath a light bulb, a dancer spinning
in a fluorescent room, a girl reading a book
beneath a lamp.

Yet there are others—astronomers,
thieves, lovers—whose work is only done
in darkness. Sometimes
I don't want to show these poems
to anyone, sometimes
I want to remain hidden, deep in the coals
with the one who pulls the stars
through a telescope's glass, the one who listens
for the click of the lock, the one
who kisses softly a woman's eyes.

A poem by Matt Cook

I love poetry about little moments. They present themselves at odd angles, juxtaposed just so, enabling us to see the instance in an entirely different way and new appreciation is born.

A Girl in Milwaukee and a Girl in Brooklyn

My wife is talking on the phone in Milwaukee
To her girlfriend in Brooklyn.
But, in the middle of all that, my wife has to go pee.
And it turns out that the girl in Brooklyn,
At the very same time, also has to go pee.
So they discuss this for a moment,
And they're both very intelligent people.
They decide to set their phones down and go to the bathroom
(This was back when people set their phones down).
So they do this, and now we have a live telephone line open
Between Milwaukee and Brooklyn
With no one speaking through it for about two minutes as
A girl in Milwaukee and a girl in Brooklyn go to the bathroom.

A poem by Charles Simic

Words fail us. There are thoughts and feelings that are too rich and cavernous to be captured by the simple descriptors that we have invented and devised. Charles Simic said,"Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them. We are always at the beginning, eternal apprentices." Here, Simic succeeds.

Little Night Music

Of neighbors' voices and dishes
Being cleared away
On long summer evenings
With the windows open
As we sat on the back stairs,
Smoking and sipping beer.

The memory of that moment,
So sweet at first,
The two of us chatting away,
Till the stars made us quiet.
We drew close
And held fast to each other
As if in sudden danger.
That one time, I didn't recognize
Your voice, or dare turn
To look at your face
As you spoke of us being born
With so little apparent cause.
I could think of nothing to say.
The music over, the night cold.

A poem by Mary Oliver

The power and absolute beauty of this poem are both piercing and unrestrained. If only I could imagine my own strong, thick wings.......

Landscape

Isn't it plain the sheets of moss, except that
they have no tongues, could lecture
all day if they wanted about

spiritual patience? Isn't it clear
the black oaks along the path are standing
as though they were the most fragile of flowers?

Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.

Every morning, so far, I'm alive. And now
the crows break off from the rest of the darkness
and burst up into the sky—as though

all night they had thought of what they would like
their lives to be, and imagined
their strong, thick wings.

A poem by Linda Pastan

What We Want

What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names—
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don't remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.

A poem by Jeffrey Harrison

Drift, float along with this poem by Jeffrey Harrison. It is a rich and wandering summation of where our minds can take us and take root if we will.

Green Canoe
I don't often get the chance any longer
to go out alone in the green canoe
and, lying in the bottom of the boat,
just drift where the breeze takes me,
down to the other end of the lake
or into some cove without my knowing
because I can't see anything over
the gunwales but sky as I lie there,
feeling the ribs of the boat as my own,
this floating pod with a body inside it...

also a mind, that drifts among clouds
and the sounds that carry over water—
a flutter of birdsong, a screen door
slamming shut-as well as the usual stuff
that clutters it, but slowed down, opened up,
like the fluff of milkweed tugged
from its husk and floating over the lake,
to be mistaken for mayflies at dusk
by feeding trout, or be carried away
to a place where the seeds might sprout.

A poem by Richard Jackson

Words are the building blocks along the path on which we are taken in this poem. Words carry us along, intertwined with our images until the end when we are left to carry on with our own vision.

The Prayer

Blessed be the year climbing its cliffs, the month crossing the fields
of hours and days, the bridges of minutes, the grass where we stood
that first moment, the festival music keeping our time, the hood
of the season's sky above us, the moment's fictive shield
against history, her tattered glance, her broken smile, everything real
or imagined, bless the rivers I invented to carry us, the woods
I planted as our own, bless even the sweet hurt, even the herd
of stars that trample my real heart which she has taught to heal.
Blessed be these trackless words running downstream
following the remote valleys she has cut through my life,
and blessed be the sounds they cannot make, but mean,
and blessed be all these pages watermarked with her name,
these thoughts that wander the unmapped roads of strife
and love, her blessed world whose dream is always a dream.

A poem by Mary Oliver

I am always amazed at the images that can be created by just a few words that simply exist next to one another. Alone they are devoid, but together, take they you places and cause you to wander an unexpected terrain.
Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

A poem by Maxine Kumin

I just love to find these poems, these rare gems, that are stirring and unlike any other. They gently transport me to another place and for a lovely time, I am suspended.

After Love

Afterwards, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries.

These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.

Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.

The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar

and overhead, a plane
singsongs, coming down.

Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept.

A poem by Ranier Maria Rilke

Rilke's poems are masterful in their use of images to describe. He knew and often spoke of languages limitation. Where do we keep the deepest parts of ourselves that are masked from day to day existance, these parts that are central to our being yet are not always readily available to access? We keep our true selves far away from our verbal ability to express. A great deal goes on beyond the spoken word.

Moving Forward

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my sense, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.