There is the picker, stretches for the knife,
There are the ravening who claw the fruit,
More, those adjuring wax that lasts a life,
And foxes, freak for cunning, after loot.
For that sweet suck the hornet whines his wits,
But husbandman will dry her for the pits.

For a Student Sleeping in a Poetry Workshop

© David Wagoner

I've watched his eyelids sag, spring open

Vaguely and gradually go sliding

The Shortest Night

© Yusef Komunyakaa

I went into the forest searching

for fire inside pleading wood,

A Crown of Autumn Leaves

© Annie Finch

For Mabon (fall equinox), Sept. 21
Our voices press
from us
and twine
around the year's
fermenting wine

The Clearing

© Jane Kenyon

The dog and I push through the ring
of dripping junipers
to enter the open space high on the hill
where I let him off the leash.

The Maldive Shark

About the Shark, phlegmatical one,

Pale sot of the Maldive sea,

Falling: The Code

© Li-Young Lee

2.
I lie beneath my window listening
to the sound of apples dropping in

For the Old Gnostics

© Robert Bly

The Fathers put their trust in the end of the world

And they were wrong. The Gnostics were right and not

The Corn-Stalk Fiddle

When the corn’s all cut and the bright stalks shine
Like the burnished spears of a field of gold;
When the field-mice rich on the nubbins dine,
And the frost comes white and the wind blows cold;
Then its heigho fellows and hi-diddle-diddle,
For the time is ripe for the corn-stalk fiddle.