All Poems
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Branch Library
© Edward Hirsch
I wish I could find that skinny, long-beaked boy
who perched in the branches of the old branch library.
Incident
© Natasha Trethewey
We tell the story every year—
how we peered from the windows, shades drawn—
The Cypress Broke
© Mahmoud Darwish
The cypress is the tree’s grief and not
the tree, and it has no shadow because it is
the tree’s shadow
Bassam Hajjar
My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun (764)
© Emily Dickinson
My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -
Maze without a Minotaur
© Dana Gioia
If we could only push these walls
apart, unfold the room the way
Plucking your eyebrows
© Kabir
Plucking your eyebrows,
Putting on mascara,
But will that help you
To see things anew?
Alpine Wedding
© Ralph Angel
All dark morning long the clouds are rising slowly up
beneath us, and we are fast asleep.
The mountains unmove
Passing Through
© Ai
“Earth is the birth of the blues,” sang Yellow Bertha,
as she chopped cotton beside Mama Rose.
Forever and a Day
© Samuel Menashe
No more than that
Dead cat shall I
Escape the corpse
I kept in shape
For the day off
Immortals take
Chomei at Toyama
© Ted Hughes
Swirl sleeping in the waterfall!
On motionless pools scum appearing
disappearing!
Ladies
© Ezra Pound
I have fed your lar with poppies,
I have adored you for three full years;
And now you grumble because your dress does not fit
And because I happen to say so.
There Are Black
© James Russell Lowell
And the convicts themselves, at the mummy’s
feet, blood-splattered leather, at this one’s feet,
they become cobras sucking life out of their brothers,
they fight for rings and money and drugs,
in this pit of pain their teeth bare fangs,
to fight for what morsels they can. . . .
Anniversary
© Louise Gluck
Someone should teach you how to act in bed.
What I think is you should
keep your extremities to yourself.
Theodicy
© Czeslaw Milosz
No, it won’t do, my sweet theologians.
Desire will not save the morality of God.
Sonnet: I Scarcely Grieve
© Henry Timrod
I scarcely grieve, O Nature! at the lot
That pent my life within a city’s bounds,
In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See . . .
© Gaius Valerius Catullus
In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
Last Dream
© Plato
Out of a motionless infernal
shudder and clang of steel on steel
as wagons moved toward the eternal,
a sudden silence: I was healed.
