Pillow
Li-Young LeeThere's nothing I can't find under there ( Read more... )

Ludwig van Beethoven's Return to Vienna
Rita Dove

Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn,
or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me....
-- The Heiligenstadt TestamentThree miles from my adopted city ( Read more... )

These poems aren't meant to be a set or anything; I'm just presenting them together because they're very short.

Three Tankas
Tada Chimako, trans. Jeffrey Angles

one narcissus
draws close to another
like the only
two adolescent boys
in the universe

***

the hot water in
the abandoned kettle
slowly cools
still carrying the resentment
of colder water

***

( cut for eye trauma imagery )

A Black Man Talks of Reaping
Arna BontempsI have sown beside all waters in my day ( Read more... )

Sea Grapes
Derek Walcott

That sail which leans on light,
tired of islands,
a schooner beating up the Caribbean

for home, could be Odysseus,
home-bound on the Aegean;
that father and husband's

longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is
like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's name
in every gull's outcry.

( This brings nobody peace... )

Approximations
Robert Hayden

I.
In dead of winter
wept beside your open grave.
Falling snow.

II.
Darkness, darkness.
I grope and falter. Flare
of a match.

III.
Not sunflowers, not
roses, but rocks in patterned
sand grow here. And bloom.

IV.
On the platform at
dawn, grey mailbags waiting;
a crated coffin.

Now that it is April, it is time for NATIONAL POETRY MONTH. Which means daily poetry posts, and probably a lot less journal space devoted to whining! It is basically one of the highlights of my lj year (...man, that is a really dorky thing to say ( Read more... )

The Return
(after Pasternak)
Robert HaydenRooms are grotesque with furniture of snow ( Read more... )

The Preacher: Ruminates behind the Sermon
Gwendolyn BrooksI think it must be lonely to be God ( Read more... )

Sphinx
Robert Hayden

If he could not solve the riddle,
she would not leap
from those gaunt rocks to her death,
but devour him instead.

It pleasures her to hold
him captive there --
to keep him in the reach of her
blood-matted paws.

( It is your fate, she has often said... )