All Poems
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© William Stanley Merwin
When Hans Hofmann became a hedgehog
somewhere in a Germany that has
The Hills in Half Light
© Patricia Goedicke
Or will we be lost forever?
In the silence of the last breath
Light
© C. K. Williams
Another drought morning after a too brief dawn downpour,
unaccountable silvery glitterings on the leaves of the withering maples—
the lost baby poem
© Paul Celan
the time i dropped your almost body down
down to meet the waters under the city
and run one with the sewage to the sea
what did i know about waters rushing back
what did i know about drowning
or being drowned
[My prime of youth is but a frost of cares]
© Chidiock Tichborne
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain.
The day is gone and I yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
For My Wife
© Wesley McNair
How were we to know, leaving your two kids
behind in New Hampshire for our honeymoon
Unholy Sonnet 1
© Mark Jarman
I can say almost anything about you,
O Big Idea, and with each epithet,
Create new reasons to believe or doubt you,
Black Hole, White Hole, Presidential Jet.
But what’s the anything I must leave out? You
Solve nothing but the problems that I set.
Men at My Father’s Funeral
© William Matthews
The ones his age who shook my hand
on their way out sent fear along
my arm like heroin. These weren’t
men mute about their feelings,
or what’s a body language for?
In the Fog
© Plato
I stared into the valley: it was gone—
wholly submerged! A vast flat sea remained,
gray, with no waves, no beaches; all was one.
Inscription for a Gravestone
© Robinson Jeffers
I am not dead, I have only become inhuman:
That is to say,
Some Assembly Required
© Sonia Sanchez
Standing in line at the SuperSave, it all falls
Into place, Princess Di and the aliens and diet
Come Up from the Fields Father
© Walt Whitman
Lo, ’tis autumn,
Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,
Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,
Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,
(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?
Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)
The Bitterness of Children
© Thomas Lux
Foreseeing typographical errors
on their gravestones, the children
from infancy—are bitter.
Little clairvoyants, blond, in terror.
His death in Benares
© Kabir
his front yard
is the true Benares
— Devara Dasimayya,
tr. A.K. Ramanujan
His death in Benares
Won’t save the assassin
From certain hell,
A Little Called Pauline
© Gertrude Stein
A little called anything shows shudders.
Come and say what prints all day. A whole few watermelon. There is no pope.
No cut in pennies and little dressing and choose wide soles and little spats really little spices.
A little lace makes boils. This is not true.
To Kathleen, after Neruda
© Craig Erick Chaffin
your hips formed in India, your face
barely imagined by Da Vinci.
Your eyes threaten green lightning
from the Atlantic. You could crush me