Moonlight What time the meanest brick and stone Take on a beauty not their own, And past the flaw of builded wood Shines the intention whole and good, And all the little homes of man Rise to a dimmer, nobler span; When colour’s absence gives escape To the deeper spirit of the shape,– Then earth’s great architecture swells Among her…
Abandoned Farmhouse He was a big man, says the size of his shoes on a pile of broken dishes by the house; a tall man too, says the length of the bed in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man, says the Bible with a broken back on the floor below the window, dusty with sun; but not a…
In light of decision-making by executive order and the White House signing ceremonies that seem to exude smug gloating – a poem and pictures. Decisions, signings, authorizations, treaties, orders have consequences. The hand that signed the paper The hand that signed the paper felled a city; Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath, Doubled the globe of dead and halved a…
Tides O patient shore, that canst not go to meet Thy love, the restless sea, how comfortest Thou all thy loneliness? Art thou at rest, When, loosing his strong arms from round thy feet, He turns away? Know’st thou, however sweet That other shore may be, that to thy breast He must return? And when in sterner test He folds…
On the Fifth Day the scientists who studied the rivers were forbidden to speak or to study the rivers. The scientists who studied the air were told not to speak of the air, and the ones who worked for the farmers were silenced, and the ones who worked for the bees. Someone, from deep in the Badlands, began posting facts.…
A Polished Performance Citizens of the polished capital Sigh for the towns up country, And their innocent simplicity. People in the towns up country Applaud the unpolished innocence Of the distant villages. Dwellers in the distant villages Speak of a simple unspoilt girl, Living alone, deep in the bush. Deep in the bush we found her, Large and innocent of…
Power by Audre Lorde The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds and a dead child dragging his shattered black face off the edge of my sleep blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders is the only liquid for miles and my…
Traveler, there is no road Caminante, no hay camino Traveler, your footprints are the only road, nothing else. Traveler, there is no road; you make your own path as you walk. As you walk, you make your own road, and when you look back you see the path you will never travel again. Traveler, there is no road; only a…
Song of the Dark Ages We digged our trenches on the down Beside old barrows, and the wet White chalk we shovelled from below; It lay like drifts of thawing snow On parados and parapet: Until a pick neither struck flint Nor split the yielding chalky soil, But only calcined human bone: Poor relic of that Age…
The simplest poems can be amongst the most profound. On the Steps of the Jefferson Memorial We invent our gods the way the Greeks did, in our own image—but magnified. Athena, the very mother of wisdom, squabbled with Poseidon like any human sibling until their furious tempers made the sea writhe. Zeus wore a crown of lightning bolts one minute,…
Spring comes earlier in the UK than it does here and the growing season is longer and cooler. Plath’s poem is set in March. The narcissus are already out in full bloom. But there’s a March wind blowing and a struggle to breathe. Plath’s octogenarian Percy is among the narcissi but never a narcissist. The photographs are of Innisfree Gardens…
Here is a scene of violence and inhumanity that feels torn from the front page of the newspaper or a report on the latest immigration raid outrage. But this is the kind of news that stays news because it keeps happening. Bent to the Earth They had hit Ruben with the high beams, had blinded him so that the van…
This writing has to do with some things I saw, felt and was part of. The period covered begins in early December 1915 and ends in July 1916. – David Jones, in the preface to In Parenthesis 1937 In Parenthesis is a poem-novella in seven parts that culminates in the dramatic attack on Mametz Wood at the Battle of the…
The temperature’s rising. Time to think about eating outside and settling in at a sidewalk cafe to watch the world go by. But beware! Dangers lurk everywhere and we need new punctuation to express our outraged reaction to a whole range of disasters. I love Paul Violi’s list in this poem. And – when you do venture out, sit down…
Jerry Harp’s commentary in the Kenyon Review brought this poem back to mind. Always good to be reminded of William Stafford. At The Bomb Testing Site by William Stafford At noon in the desert a panting lizard waited for history, its elbows tense, watching the curve of a particular road as if something might happen. It was looking at something…