April Rain Song

April Rain Song
by Langston Hughes

Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk
The rain makes running pools in the gutter
The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain.



http://allpoetry.com/April-Rain-Song

The Power of the Dog

The Power of the Dog

by Rudyard Kipling

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

Buy a pup and your money will buy
Love unflinching that cannot lie--
Perfect passsion and worship fed
By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.
Nevertheless it is hardly fair
To risk your heart to a dog to tear.

When the fourteen years which Nature permits
Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,
And the vet's unspoken prescription runs
To lethal chambers or loaded guns,
Then you will find--it's your own affair--
But ... you've given your heart to a dog to tear. 

When the body that lived at your single will,
With its whimper of welcome, is stilled (how still!)
When the spirit that answered your every mood
Is gone--wherever it goes--for good,
You will discover how much you care,
And will give your heart to a dog to tear. 

We've sorrow enough in the natural way,
When it comes to burying Christian clay.
Our loves are not given, but only lent,
At compound interest of cent per cent.
Though it is not always the case, I believe,
That the longer we've kept 'em, the more do we grieve:
For, when debts are payable, right or wrong,
A short-term loan is as bad as a long--
So why in--Heaven (before we are there)
Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?

Found here:  http://www.bartleby.com/364/335.html

Small, Smaller

Small, Smaller
by Russell Hoban


I thought I knew all there was to know 
Of being small, until I saw once, black against the snow
A shrew, trapped in my footprint, jump and fall
And jump again and fall, the hole too deep, the walls too tall



Found here: http://stancarey.tumblr.com/post/108995343323/small-smaller

[I Saw Myself]

[I Saw Myself] 
by Lew Welch


I saw myself
a ring of bone
in the clear stream
of all of it

and vowed
always to be open to it
that all of it
might flow through

and then heard
“ring of bone” where
ring is what a

bell does 


Found here. 

Trevor

selection from Trevor
by Ocean Vuong

Trevor the hunter. Trevor the carnivore, the redneck, not

 a pansy, shotgunner, sharpshooter, not fruit or fairy. Trevor the meateater but not

veal. Never veal. Fuck that, never again after his daddy told him the story when he was seven, at the table, veal roasted with rosemary. How they were made. How the difference between veal & beef is the children. The veal are the children

of cows, are calves. They are locked in boxes the size of themselves. A body-box, like a coffin, but alive, like a home. The children, the veal, they stand very still because tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.

We love eatin what’s soft, his father said, looking dead

into Trevor’s eyes. Trevor who would never eat a child. Trevor the child with the scar on his neck like a comma. A comma you now

//

put your mouth to. That violet hook holding two complete thoughts, two complete bodies without subjects. Only verbs.


Read all of it here. 

Touched by an Angel

Touched by an Angel
Maya Angelou


We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.

Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.


Found here. 

In the Garden of Eden

IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN
Sheryl St. Germain

No one tells much about it,
but there were vultures in the Garden of Eden,
Turkey vultures, to be exact.
Dark eagles, they would soar like gods
voiceless, their wings held out in blessing,
their unfeathered heads the red jewels
of the sky of the garden.
They were vegetarian then.
There were no roadside kills,
no bones to pick, no dead flesh to bloom, ripen.
And they were happy.
They could not imagine
what they would become.


from her collection of poems: "How Heavy the Breath of God."
http://sheryl-stgermain.com/

The Naming of Cats

The Naming of Cats
T.S. Eliot

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey—
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter—
But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum-
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover—
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.


Hear T.S. Eliot recite this lovely poem here. 

I Have News For You

I Have News for You
by Tony Hoagland

There are people who do not see a broken playground swing
as a symbol of ruined childhood

and there are people who don't interpret the behavior
of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process.

There are people who don't walk past an empty swimming pool
and think about past pleasures unrecoverable

and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians.
I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings

do not send their sinuous feeder roots
deep into the potting soil of others' emotional lives

as if they were greedy six-year-olds
sucking the last half-inch of milkshake up through a noisy straw;

and other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without
debating the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality.

Do you see that creamy, lemon-yellow moon?
There are some people, unlike me and you,

who do not yearn after fame or love or quantities of money as
unattainable as that moon;
thus, they do not later
have to waste more time
defaming the object of their former ardor.

Or consequently run and crucify themselves
in some solitary midnight Starbucks Golgotha.

I have news for you—
there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room

and open a window to let the sweet breeze in
and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.

Found here. 

The Wild Swans at Coole

The Wild Swans at Coole

W.B. Yeats

The trees are in their autumn beauty,   

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water   

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones   

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me   

Since I first made my count;

I saw, before I had well finished,

All suddenly mount

And scatter wheeling in great broken rings   

Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,   

And now my heart is sore.

All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,   

The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head,   

Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;   

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,   

Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,   

Mysterious, beautiful;   

Among what rushes will they build,

By what lake's edge or pool

Delight men's eyes when I awake some day   

To find they have flown away?

Brief for the Defense

A Brief for the Defense
by Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.

Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.

We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.



I first saw this poem on Rob Breszny's facebook page, but you can read it here. 

I go down to the shore

I go down to the shore
Mary Oliver

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.


This was printed in Mary Oliver's book A Thousand Mornings. You can hear Krista Tippet recite it in her interview with Mary Oliver here, read it on a billion blogs like this one, or hear John Green recite it on his podcast (at 0:56) here.

Fire

FIRE ~ Judy Brown

What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.
Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can douse the flames
almost as surely
as a pail of water would.

So building fires
requires attention
to the spaces in between,
as much as to the wood.

When we are able to build
open spaces
in the same way
we have learned
to pile on the logs,
then we can come to see how
it is fuel, and absence of the fuel
together, that make fire possible.

We only need to lay a log
lightly from time to time.

A fire
grows
simply because the space is there,
with openings
in which the flame
that knows just how it wants to burn
can find its way.

 Found here. 

My Dream

My Dream
by Eunice Akoth

Eunice Akoth is a 6th grader at an all girls school in Kibera, a slum of Nairobi. She recited this poem on stage at the Women in the World Annual Summit in 2015. Watch the whole video, it's amazing.

Every mighty king was once a crying baby!
Every great tree was once a tiny seed!
Every tall building was once in paper!
And so I dream my dream.


Read more here.

In Praise of Fractals

In Praise of Fractals ~ by Emily Grosholz

Variations on the Introduction to
The Fractal Geometry of Nature by Benoit Mandelbrot
(New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1983)

Euclid’s geometry cannot describe,
Nor Apollonius’, the shape of mountains,
Puddles, clouds, peninsulas or trees.
Clouds are never spheres,
Nor mountains cones, nor Ponderosa pines;
Bark is not smooth; and where the land and sea
So variously lie about each other
And lightly kiss, is no hyperbola.

Compared with Euclid’s elementary forms,
Nature, loosening her hair, exhibits patterns
(Sweetly disarrayed, afloat, uncombed)
Not simply of a higher degree n
But rather of an altogether different
Level of complexity:
The number of the scales of distances
Describing her is almost infinite.

How shall we study the morphology
Of the amorphous? Mandelbrot
Solved the conundrum by inventing fractals,
A lineage of shapes
Fretted by chance, whose regularities
Are all statistical, like Brownian motion,
Whose fine configurations
Turn out to be the same at every scale.

Some fractal sets are curves
(Space-filling curves!) or complex surfaces;
Others are wholly disconnected ‘dusts’;
Others are just too odd to have a name.
Poincar? once observed,
There my be questions that we choose to ask,
But others ask themselves,
Sometimes for centuries, while no one listens.

Questions that ask themselves without repose
May come to rest at last in someone’s mind.
So Mandelbrot in time
Designed his fractal brood to be admired
Not merely for its formal elegance
As mathematical structure,
But power to interpret, curl by curl,
Nature’s coiffure of molecules and mountains.

What gentle revolution of ideas
Disjoins the nineteenth century from ours!
Cantor’s set of nested missing thirds,
Peano’s curve of fractional dimension,
Mandelbrot’s fractals, counter the old rule
Of simple continuity,
Domesticating what short-sightedly
Was once considered monstrous.

Nature embraces monsters as her own,
Encouraging the pensive mathematician
To find anomaly
Inherent in the creatures all around us.
The masters of infinity,
Cantor, Peano, Hausdorff, and Lebesgue,
Discovered sets not in the end transcendent
But immanent, Spinoza’s darling Cause.

Imagination shoots the breeze with Nature,
And what they speak (mathematics) as they flirt
Reveals itself surprisingly effective
In science, a wrought gift
We don’t deserve or seek or understand.
So let us just be grateful,
And hope that it goes on, although our joy
Is always balanced by our bafflement.

This poem makes my heart sing. Read an introduction and get links to her other poems here. 

If

If
by e. e. cummings

 

If freckles were lovely, and day was night,
And measles were nice and a lie warn’t a lie,
Life would be delight,—
But things couldn’t go right
For in such a sad plight
I wouldn’t be I.

If earth was heaven and now was hence,
And past was present, and false was true,
There might be some sense
But I’d be in suspense
For on such a pretense
You wouldn’t be you.

If fear was plucky, and globes were square,
And dirt was cleanly and tears were glee
Things would seem fair,—
Yet they’d all despair,
For if here was there
We wouldn’t be we.


http://hellopoetry.com/poem/1597/if/