Petals Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart; The end lost in dream, They float past our view, We only watch their glad, early start. Freighted with hope, Crimsoned with joy, We scatter the leaves of our opening rose; Their widening scope, Their distant employ, We… Continue reading Amy Lowell
Why is it we love so fully what has washed up on the beaches of our hearts, those lost messages, lost friends, the daylight stars we never get to see? Bad luck never takes a vacation, my friend once wrote. It lies there among the broken shells and stones we collect, a story he would… Continue reading Richard Jackson
The world is always ending: day succumbs to stingy night. Sleep travels in a pill. Vietnam splinters in the East. Bathwater cools, stomachs sag. The ears harbor static. The eye hoards cataract. Who denies the essential flaw? Every poem fails. — Nancy Sullivan, from “eclipse 1—what happened” of “Eclipses,” The Treasury of American Poetry, ed.… Continue reading Nancy Sullivan
Desire itself is movement Not in itself desireable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring Except in the aspect of time Caught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being. Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of… Continue reading T. S. Eliot
Of tears, the aftermark Of almost too much love, The sweet of bitter bark And burning clove. — Robert Frost, from “To Earthward,” The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged (Henry Holt, 1979)
A word sticks in the wind’s throat; A wind-launch drifts in the swells of rye; Sometimes, in broad silence, The hanging apples distill their darkness. You, in a green dress, calling, and with brown hair, Who come by the field-path now, whose name I say Softly, forgive me love if I also call you Wind’s… Continue reading Richard Wilbur
Closing the book, I find I have left my head inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound, words adjusting themselves to their meaning. Long passages open at successive pages. An echo, continuous from the title onward, hums behind me. From in here the world… Continue reading William Stafford
