Why read poetry if it won’t make you rich? by Joy Sullivan
For starters, your soul will get bigger.
Your love, more terrible and luminous.
Soon, you’ll say tender things at parties
after too much champagne. A sidewalk
quince, wet with midnight, will stop
you in your tracks. In time, you’ll
find the perfect metaphor for your
child’s face. All at once, you’ll see
the world and want it again;
clothes flapping on the line,
lilacs strewn and seeding, the luck
of worms. An artichoke with its heart
torn hot and steaming from the throbbing
crown will suddenly turn you on.
The Good Life by Susan Allison
The thing about good living
is that it happens, despite
plotting and planning, it happens
contrary to all devices. It happens
when you are renting the only room
you can afford and you somehow
catch the way the light is coming through
the broken dirty windows.
The door is open
and the wind blows in like balm.
It’s warm and you see the colors of the
faded gray frame of the door
against the rust-colored leaves
in the small patch of jungle
down by the alley.
The good life
comes through your eyes
and your ears and your skin,
the way a wild animal comes at you
when it is just curious.
Little Dog's Rhapsody in the Night by Mary Oliver
He puts his cheek against mine
and makes small, expressive sounds.
And when I’m awake, or awake enough
he turns upside down, his four paws
in the air
and his eyes dark and fervent.
“Tell me you love me,” he says.
“Tell me again.”
Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over
he gets to ask.
I get to tell.
Explaining Time to My Dog by Kat Giordano
a work day is sixteen walks long—eight of those big ones,
where we don't make that left turn off 14th and pass the
house with the year-round inflatables. a year is the time
between when the other houses take their inflatables
down and when they put them back out, the time between
fireworks finales, but also the time it takes me to walk to
the mailbox and back with you staring out the window. but
also the time it takes for me to run a 5k in the morning. in
other words, a year is also 30 minutes. 30 minutes is the
length of a walk, but also the refractory period after a walk
before i have to start spelling it again instead. i'm sorry, but
it is what it is. we all have words the people we love can't
say to us, not because they'll hurt us but because it'll feel
too good too fast and your feelings are scary, that look on
your face when you're running full-tilt at someone who's
not ready yet, who's still putting their shoes on. it's the not-
readiness they're afraid of, the way it makes them feel to
see you feeling. the way they wish they had something to
say other than "wait" and the way they can't define that
word. it hurts, but you figure it out eventually, the sounds
of the letters, the shapes of them in their mouths, the
certain way they breathe, like their hand is already on the
leash across the room.
Object Permanence by Nicole Sealey
We wake as if surprised the other is still there,
each petting the sheet to be sure.
How we have managed our way
to this bed—beholden to heat like dawn
indebted to light. Though we’re not so self-
important as to think everything
has led to this, everything has led to this.
There’s a name for the animal
love makes of us—named, I think,
like rain, for the sound it makes.
You are the animal after whom other animals
are named. Until there’s none left to laugh,
days will start with the same startle
and end with caterpillars gored on milkweed.
O, how we entertain the angels
with our brief animation. O,
how I’ll miss you when we’re dead.
In the Meantime by Tom Hirons
Meanwhile, flowers still bloom.
The moon rises, and the sun.
Babies smile and somewhere,
Against all the odds,
Two people are falling in love.
Strangers share cigarettes and jokes.
Light plays on the surface of water.
Grace occurs on unlikely streets
And we hold each other fast
Against entropy, the fires and the flood.
Life leans towards living
And, while death claims all things at the end,
There were such precious times between,
In which everything was radiant
And we loved, again, this world.
If I Had Three Lives by Sarah Russell
If I had three lives, I’d marry you in two.
The other? Perhaps that life over there
at Starbucks, sitting alone, writing – a memoir,
maybe a novel or this poem. No kids, probably,
a small apartment with a view of the river,
and books – lots of books, and time to read.
Friends to laugh with, and a man sometimes,
for a weekend, to remember what skin feels like
when it’s alive. I’d be thinner in that life, vegan,
practice yoga. I’d go to art films, farmers markets,
drink martinis in swingy skirts and big jewelry.
I’d vacation on the Maine coast and wear a flannel shirt
weekend guy left behind, loving the smell of sweat
and aftershave more than I did him. I’d walk the beach
at sunrise, find perfect shell spirals and study pockmarks
water makes in sand. And I’d wonder sometimes
if I’d ever find you.
Misty by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
And sometimes when I move
at the edge of a greatness—
a lake or a sea or a mountainside—
my insignificance thrills me
and the largest of my sadnesses
dwindles smaller than the space
between grains of sand
and in that moment,
knowing my place,
comes a love so enormous
I can love anyone, anyone,
even myself.
I've Been Thinking About Love Again by Vievee Francis
Those who live to have it and
those who live to give it.
Of course there are those for whom both are true,
but never in the same measure.
Those who have it to give are
like cardinals in the snow. So easy
and beautifully lit. Some
are rabbits. Hard to see
except those who would prey upon them:
all that softness and quaking and blood.
Those who want it
cannot be satisfied. Eagle-eyed and with such talons,
any furred thing will do. So easy
to rip out a heart when it is throbbing so hard.
I wander out into the winter.
I know what I am.
Taking Turns by Jeanie Greensfelder
I pass a woman on the beach.
We both wear graying hair,
feel sand between our toes,
hear surf, and see blue sky.
I came with a smile.
She came to get one.
No. I'm wrong.
She sits on a boulder
by a cairn of stacked rocks.
Hands over her heart,
she stares out to sea.
Today's my turn to hold the joy,
hers the sorrow.
Starfish by Eleanor Lerman
This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?
Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.
And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.
Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.
So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.
Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn't Breaking by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons
equals the collective weight of every animal
on earth. Including the insects. Times three.
Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief—
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.
There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.
Falling by Patrick Phillips
The truth is that I fall in love
so easily because
it's easy.
It happens
a dozen times some days.
I've lived whole lives,
had children,
grown old, and died
in the arms of other women
in no more time
than it takes the 2-train
to get from City Hall to Brooklyn,
which brings me back
to you: the only one
I fall in love with
at least once every day—
not because
there are no other
lovely women in the world,
but because each time,
dying in their arms,
I call your name.
Heavy by Mary Oliver
That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying
I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this,
as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,
was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel,
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry
but how you carry it–
books, bricks, grief–
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?
Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?
How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe
also troubled –
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?
The Portrait by Stanley Kunitz
My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.
Do not ask your children to strive by William Martin
Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.
Affirmation by Donald Hall
To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.
To all of the women I've been before by Hannah Ro
I am making friends with all of the women I've been before. Trying, really. I meet her all the time, all thousands of hers, one for each day I've been alive. There are times she'll jump out at me from an old song or a photograph stuck between the pages of a book. Remember me? She'll ask. There are days I pull her out slowly, watch patiently as she walks across the tightrope in my mind. Some days she haunts me. The me who was selfish, the me who was cruel, who made all the wrong choices. She'll pull out a lawn chair, refuse to leave. I'm trying to let her stay, trying to make space for her here, trying to build a home for all of the women I've ever been to live.
Excerpt from On Beauty by Zadie Smith
“Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful...and decide what you want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.”
For Women Who Are Difficult to Love by Warsan Shire
you are a horse running alone
and he tries to tame you
compares you to an impossible highway
to a burning house
says you are blinding him
that he could never leave you
forget you
want anything but you
you dizzy him, you are unbearable
every woman before or after you
is doused in your name
you fill his mouth
his teeth ache with memory of taste
his body just a long shadow seeking yours
but you are always too intense
frightening in the way you want him
unashamed and sacrificial
he tells you that no man can live up to the one who
lives in your head
and you tried to change didn’t you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do love
split his head open?
you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love.