poem name stringlengths 7 245 | content stringlengths 4 88.7k | author stringlengths 2 57 | type stringlengths 4 411 ⌀ | age null |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Diorama
|
The Blue Hole Summer Fair, set up and spread out like a butterfly pinned down on paper. Twin bright-lit wings, identically shaped (and fenced) and sized. This side holds the waffled-tin (and oven-hot) huts of the Home Arts Booths and Contests, the hay-sweet display-cages for the 4-H livestock, the streamer-h... | Atsuro Riley | Activities,School & Learning,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity | null |
Heat Wave
|
Sheets entangle him Naked on his bed Like a toppled mast Slack sails bedeck At sea, no ballast For that even keel He cannot keep— No steering wheel As he falls asleep
| Samuel Menashe | The Body,Nature | null |
The Stars Are
|
The stars are Although I do not sing About them— The sky and the trees Are indifferent To whom they please The rose is unmoved By my nose And the garland in your hair Although your eyes be lakes, dies Why sigh for a star Better bay at the moon Better bay at the moon . . . Oh moon, moon, moo... | Samuel Menashe | Nature,Stars, Planets, Heavens,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire | null |
Incubus
|
The chain uncouples, and his jacket hangs on the peg over hers, and he's inside. She stalls in the kitchen, putting the kettle on, buys herself a minute looking for two matching cups for the lime-flower tea, not really lime but linden, heart-shaped leaves and sticky flowers that smell of antifreeze. She ... | Craig Arnold | Living,Disappointment & Failure,Life Choices,Marriage & Companionship,Love,Activities,Indoor Activities,Relationships,Men & Women,Social Commentaries | null |
Aperture
|
Open the window and you want to fly out,
though you never actually do—
I think I see you, still there on the ledge,
where I've left you.
How pulled-awake and flung
can one life be?
Again I thought, It will end.
Again I promised and clung.
I learned there that
to cling was in my nature.
I think I ... | Jennifer Tonge | Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Nature,Trees & Flowers | null |
On Munsungun
|
My father in the aluminum stern, cursing
another fouled blood-knot: all the shits
and fucks as integral to the art of fishing
as the bait-fish, little silver smelts
I sewed like a manual transmission,
the same inbred order and precision
needling the leader through the ass,
out the mouth, through the jaw,... | Ethan Stebbins | Living,Disappointment & Failure,Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Animals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams | null |
You Can't Buy Shoes in a Painting
|
You can't even buy a soda. You can only
see these things, see a mother steer
her son to the car, his head cocked
licking his ice cream.
Earlier, driving, trying to keep
between two cornfields, I couldn't see myself
into a map, couldn't be anywhere in it,
though I knew all the patient states
between u... | Jill Osier | Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture | null |
Descent
|
My father drummed darkness Through the underbrush Until lightning struck I take after him Clouds crowd the sky Around me as I run Downhill on a high— I am my mother's son Born long ago In the storm's eye
| Samuel Menashe | Relationships,Family & Ancestors | null |
Captain, Captive
|
Of your fate Fast asleep On the bed you made Dream away Wake up late
| Samuel Menashe | null | null |
Apotheosis
|
Taut with longing You must become The god you sought— The only one
| Samuel Menashe | Religion | null |
Humidifier
|
—After Robert Pinsky
Defier of closed space, such as the head, opener
Of the sealed passageways, so that
Sunlight entering the nose can once again
Exit the ear, vaporizer, mist machine, whose
Soft hiss sounds like another human being
But less erratic, more stable, or, if not like a human bei... | Louise Glück | null | null |
The Modern Pastoral Elegy
|
A Tick-Where-Appropriate Template
It begins with unspecified “you” and “we”
raising fists of defiance to the void,
the morning we opened the obituary,
a pun on “decompose” you’d have enjoyed.
These crocodile tears shed in rhyme,
in an age too commercial to care,
recall how we met the first... | Conor O'Callaghan | Living,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries | null |
Chicken Pig
|
It’s like being lost
in the forest, hungry, with a
plump live chicken in your cradling
arms: you want to savage the bird,
but you also want the eggs.
You go weak on your legs.
What’s worse, what you need
most is the companionship,
but you’re too hungry to know that.
That is something you only know after
yo... | Jennifer Michael Hecht | Relationships,Pets,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire | null |
On the Metro
|
On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me;
she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her.
I sit, take out my own book—Cioran, The Temptation to Exist—and notice her glancing up from hers
to take i... | C. K. Williams | Living,Growing Old,Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Unrequited Love,Relationships,Men & Women,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality | null |
Conches on Christmas
|
Diluvian, draggled and derelict posse, this
barnacled pod so pales
next to everything we hear of red tides and pilot whales
that a word like “drama” makes me sound remiss
except that there
was a kind of littoral drama in the way the shells
silently, sans the heraldry of bells,
neatly, sans an astrological aff... | Mike Chasar | Nature,Animals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Winter,Religion,Christianity | null |
Address: The Archaeans, One Cell Creatures
|
Although most are totally naked and too scant for even the slightest color and although they have no voice that I’ve ever heard for cry or song, they are, nevertheless, more than mirage, more than hallucination, more than falsehood. They have confronted sulfuric boiling black sea bottoms and stayed,... | Pattiann Rogers | Arts & Sciences,Sciences | null |
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
|
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out... | T. S. Eliot | Living,Disappointment & Failure,Growing Old,Time & Brevity,Love,Classic Love,Desire,Heartache & Loss,Realistic & Complicated,Unrequited Love,Relationships,Men & Women,Religion,Faith & Doubt,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life | null |
The Miscarriage
|
Some species can crack pavement with their shoots
to get their share of sun some species lay
a purple froth of eggs and leave it there
to sprinkle tidepools with tadpole confetti
some species though you stomp them in the carpet
have already stashed away the families
that will inherit every floor at midnight
... | Amit Majmudar | Living,Parenthood,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Men & Women | null |
Novelette
|
With her one horrid eye persistently unfastened, a vigilant bird
watched my grandfather during the Great Depression
use each evening of one whole year to wander his corn fields
knowing this world is just one pig after another
in one pen after another. Therefore, the bird heard him suppose,
shouldn’t he with his... | Adrian Blevins | Living,Disappointment & Failure,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Home Life,Nature,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire | null |
Human Hunger
|
I
Comstock stands in the densely odorous kitchen
sniffing Mrs. Yapp’s squab pies. His hunger
makes him wide awake and he can imagine Mrs. Yapp
twenty years ago when she was a bouncing Evelina
and I delight to see them there, Comstock and Mrs. Yapp,
in the creaking steaming kitchen of darkly scarred wood
beside... | Mark Halliday | null | null |
Sparrow Trapped in the Airport
|
Never the bark and abalone mask
cracked by storms of a mastering god,
never the gods’ favored glamour, never
the pelagic messenger bearing orchards
in its beak, never allegory, not wisdom
or valor or cunning, much less hunger
demanding vigilance, industry, invention,
or the instinct to claim some small... | Averill Curdy | Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Animals,Mythology & Folklore | null |
Salvation
|
Finally, I gave up on obeisance,
and refused to welcome
either retribution or the tease
of sunny days. As for the can’t-be-
seen, the sum-of-all-details,
the One—oh, when it came
to salvation I was only sure
I needed to be spared
someone else’s version of it.
The small prayers I devised
had in th... | Stephen Dunn | Living,Religion,Faith & Doubt | null |
Canada Anemone
|
I count nineteen white blossoms
which would not be
visible except for
their wiry stems that catapult them
above the grass like
the last white pop
of fireworks, a toothed blast
of leaf below. It’s
the Fourth of July
on the bank of Hinkson Creek
fifty years ago, the powder-
bitterness, the red
... | Fleda Brown | Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Trees & Flowers,Independence Day | null |
To You
|
Beginning on a line by Silvio Rodríguez
How will it taste—the beer the gravedigger
will drink after bestowing your dirt coat?
What will he say—you keeled the outrigger
too south, & when the breakers rolled, no boats
heard your Mayday? & will he ask his friends
at the bar—if someone calls a M... | Kevin A. González | Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams | null |
The Guru
|
Here comes the wise man in the story of sick times,
telling you how to find the passage of satisfaction.
He is many million years old and has been walking
many thousand miles, more miles, more lengths of road
than the shrunk-up earth of these days possesses,
to find you. He has a veda from before creation
to s... | A. F. Moritz | Religion,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries | null |
Poem of Disconnected Parts
|
At Robben Island the political prisoners studied.
They coined the motto Each one Teach one.
In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners
Address them always as “Profesor.”
Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I
Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say.
Culture the lock, culture ... | Robert Pinsky | Religion,Other Religions,The Spiritual,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,History & Politics,War & Conflict | null |
Stomackes
|
We know far more about the philosophical underpinnings of Puritanism than we do about what its practitioners consumed at countless meals. —James Deetz
1 Yes. So we must reconnect ideas of God, and the definitions of “liberty,” and the psychology of our earliest models of governance, with o... | Albert Goldbarth | Activities,Eating & Drinking,Religion,Christianity,Other Religions,The Spiritual,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Mythology & Folklore,Thanksgiving | null |
Poem on His Birthday [Facs. drafts]
| Dylan Thomas | null | null | |
Country Songs
| Ben Belitt | null | null | |
1 January 1965
|
The Wise Men will unlearn your name.
Above your head no star will flame.
One weary sound will be the same—
the hoarse roar of the gale.
The shadows fall from your tired eyes
as your lone bedside candle dies,
for here the calendar breeds nights
till stores of candles fail.
What prompts this melancholy... | Joseph Brodsky | Living,Death,Growing Old,Time & Brevity,Nature,Winter,New Year | null |
1-800-FEAR
|
We'd like to talk with you about fear they said so
many people live in fear these days they drove up
all four of them in a small car nice boy they said
beautiful dogs they said so friendly the man ahead
of the woman the other two waiting in the drive I
was ... | Jody Gladding | Living,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture | null |
The Bean Eaters
|
They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.
Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.
And remembering ...
Remembering, with twin... | Gwendolyn Brooks | Living,Growing Old,Marriage & Companionship,Relationships,Home Life | null |
The Spider
|
I
The spider expects the cold of winter.
When the shadows fall in long Autumn
He congeals in a nest of paper, prepares
The least and minimal existence,
Obedient to nature. No other course
Is his; no other availed him when
In high summer he spun and furled
The gaudy catches. I am that spider,
Caugh... | Richard Eberhart | Nature,Animals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Summer,Winter,Religion,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Poetry & Poets | null |
The Distances
|
The accumulation of reefs
piling up one over the others
like thoughts of the sky increasing as the head rises
unto horizons of wet December days perforated
with idle motions of gulls . . . and our feelings.
I’ve been wondering about what you mean,
standing in the spray of shadows before an ocean
ab... | Jim Carroll | null | null |
0
|
Philosophic
in its complex, ovoid emptiness,
a skillful pundit coined it as a sort
of stopgap doorstop for those
quaint equations Romans never
dreamt of. In form completely clever
and discrete—a mirror come unsilvered, loose watch face without the works, ... | Hailey Leithauser | Arts & Sciences,Philosophy | null |
!
|
Dear Writers, I’m compiling the first in what I hope is a series of publications I’m calling artists among artists. The theme for issue 1 is “Faggot Dinosaur.” I hope to hear from you! Thank you and best wishes. | Wendy Videlock | Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality | null |
Tinder and Flint
| Lew R. Sarett | null | null | |
Hospital Poems
| Merrill Moore | null | null | |
Color of Dreams
| Witter Bynner | null | null | |
By Way of Contrast
| Babette Deutsch | null | null | |
("Your life, so rarefied...")
| George H. Dillon | null | null | |
("I think you are closer to me...")
| George H. Dillon | null | null | |
("Yours is the Attic and ambiguous...")
| George H. Dillon | null | null | |
Questions and Answers
| John Wheelwright | null | null | |
This Fountainhead
| Ben Belitt | null | null | |
A Labyrinth of Being
| R. P. Blackmur | null | null | |
Reflections
| Norman Macleod | null | null | |
So Ordered
| Merrill Moore | null | null | |
1 January 1965
|
The Wise Men will unlearn your name.
Above your head no star will flame.
One weary sound will be the same—
the hoarse roar of the gale.
The shadows fall from your tired eyes
as your lone bedside candle dies,
for here the calendar breeds nights
till stores of candles fail.
What prompts this melancholy... | Joseph Brodsky | Living,Death,Growing Old,Time & Brevity,Nature,Winter,New Year | null |
1-800-FEAR
|
We'd like to talk with you about fear they said so
many people live in fear these days they drove up
all four of them in a small car nice boy they said
beautiful dogs they said so friendly the man ahead
of the woman the other two waiting in the drive I
was ... | Jody Gladding | Living,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture | null |
The Death of Atahuallpa
| William Jay Smith | null | null | |
Poet's Wish
| William Jay Smith | null | null | |
0
|
Philosophic
in its complex, ovoid emptiness,
a skillful pundit coined it as a sort
of stopgap doorstop for those
quaint equations Romans never
dreamt of. In form completely clever
and discrete—a mirror come unsilvered, loose watch face without the works, ... | Hailey Leithauser | Arts & Sciences,Philosophy | null |
!
|
Dear Writers, I’m compiling the first in what I hope is a series of publications I’m calling artists among artists. The theme for issue 1 is “Faggot Dinosaur.” I hope to hear from you! Thank you and best wishes. | Wendy Videlock | Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality | null |
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