In cases where the poem is too long to include, I’ve given an excerpt and a link to the full version. The same is true for cases where I provided a YouTube video instead of the poem’s text.
Best Poems: Classics
Sappho, “One Girl”
I Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough, Atop on the topmost twig,—which the pluckers forgot, somehow,— Forget it not, nay; but got it not, for none could get it till now. II Like the wild hyacinth flower which on the hills is found, Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound, Until the purple blossom is trodden in the ground.
William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold”
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
John Donne, “The Flea”
Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is; It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea our two bloods mingled be; Thou know’st that this cannot be said A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead, Yet this enjoys before it woo, And pampered swells with one blood made of two, And this, alas, is more than we would do. Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare, Where we almost, nay more than married are. This flea is you and I, and this Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is; Though parents grudge, and you, w’are met, And cloistered in these living walls of jet. Though use make you apt to kill me, Let not to that, self-murder added be, And sacrilege, three sins in killing three. Cruel and sudden, hast thou since Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence? Wherein could this flea guilty be, Except in that drop which it sucked from thee? Yet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now; ’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be: Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me, Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.
Matsuo Bashō, “In Kyoto”
In Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo, I long for Kyoto.
Anne Bradstreet, “To My Dear and Loving Husband”
If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee. If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if you can. I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold, Or all the riches that the East doth hold. My love is such that rivers cannot quench, Nor ought but love from thee give recompense. Thy love is such I can no way repay; The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray. Then while we live, in love let’s so persever, That when we live no more, we may live ever.
William Blake, “London”
I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear How the Chimney-sweepers cry Every blackning Church appalls, And the hapless Soldiers sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlots curse Blasts the new-born Infants tear And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale“
Here is the first stanza of one of Keats’s most famous odes: My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: ‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market“
Here is the first section of Christina Rossett’s long (but very fun and readable!) poem “Goblin Market”: Morning and evening Maids heard the goblins cry: “Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy: Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpeck’d cherries, Melons and raspberries, Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches, Swart-headed mulberries, Wild free-born cranberries, Crab-apples, dewberries, Pine-apples, blackberries, Apricots, strawberries;— All ripe together In summer weather,— Morns that pass by, Fair eves that fly; Come buy, come buy: Our grapes fresh from the vine, Pomegranates full and fine, Dates and sharp bullaces, Rare pears and greengages, Damsons and bilberries, Taste them and try: Currants and gooseberries, Bright-fire-like barberries, Figs to fill your mouth, Citrons from the South, Sweet to tongue and sound to eye; Come buy, come buy.”
Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d“
This is the first section of Whitman’s poem, an elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln: When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring, Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, And thought of him I love.
Emily Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for Death—”
Because I could not stop for Death— He kindly stopped for me— The Carriage held but just Ourselves— And Immortality. We slowly drove—He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility— We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess—in the Ring— We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain— We passed the Setting Sun— Or rather—He passed Us— The Dews drew quivering and Chill— For only Gossamer, my Gown— My Tippet—only Tulle— We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground— The Roof was scarcely visible— The Cornice—in the Ground— Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses’ Heads Were toward Eternity—
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”
Glory be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.
Best Poems from the Twentieth Century
Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask”
We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise We wear the mask!
William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens
Anna Akhmatova, “The Last Toast“
Marianne Moore, “Poetry”
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand: the bat holding on upside down or in quest of something to eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base— ball fan, the statistician— nor is it valid to discriminate against ‘business documents and school-books’; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be ‘literalists of the imagination—’ above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them,’ shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness, and that which is on the other hand genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
Claude McKay, “America”
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth. Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate, Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood. Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her walls with not a shred Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
Dorothy Parker, “Resumé“
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why”
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain Under my head till morning; but the rain Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh Upon the glass and listen for reply, And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain For unremembered lads that not again Will turn to me at midnight with a cry. Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, Yet knows its boughs more silent than before: I cannot say what loves have come and gone, I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more.
T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“
Here is how Eliot’s famous poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” begins: Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question… Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.
Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
Wilfred Owen, “Dulce Et Decorum Est”
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
Langston Hughes, “Harlem“
E.E. Cummings, “next to of course god america i”
next to of course god america i love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh say can you see by the dawn’s early my country ’tis of centuries come and go and are no more what of it we should worry in every language even deafanddumb thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry by jingo by gee by gosh by gum why talk of beauty what could be more beaut- iful than these heroic happy dead who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter they did not stop to think they died instead then shall the voice of liberty be mute? He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water
Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool“
Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”
The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Randall Jarrell, “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz”
The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother’s countenance Could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.
Derek Walcott, “A Far Cry From Africa”
A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies, Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt. Corpses are scattered through a paradise. Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries: “Waste no compassion on these separate dead!” Statistics justify and scholars seize The salients of colonial policy. What is that to the white child hacked in bed? To savages, expendable as Jews? Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break In a white dust of ibises whose cries Have wheeled since civilization’s dawn From the parched river or beast-teeming plain. The violence of beast on beast is read As natural law, but upright man Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain. Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum, While he calls courage still that native dread Of the white peace contracted by the dead. Again brutish necessity wipes its hands Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again A waste of our compassion, as with Spain, The gorilla wrestles with the superman. I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both, or give back what they give? How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live?
Sylvia Plath, “Metaphors”
I’m a riddle in nine syllables, An elephant, a ponderous house, A melon strolling on two tendrils. O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising. Money’s new-minted in this fat purse. I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf. I’ve eaten a bag of green apples, Boarded the train there’s no getting off.
Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck“
This is the first stanza of one of Rich’s greatest and best-known poems:
Seamus Heaney, “Digging”
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Audre Lorde, “Never to Dream of Spiders”
Time collapses between the lips of strangers my days collapse into a hollow tube soon implodes against now like an iron wall my eyes are blocked with rubble a smear of perspectives blurring each horizon in the breathless precision of silence one word is made. Once the renegade flesh was gone fall air lay against my face sharp and blue as a needle but the rain fell through October and death lay a condemnation within my blood. The smell of your neck in August a fine gold wire bejeweling war all the rest lies illusive as a farmhouse on the other side of a valley vanishing in the afternoon. Day three day four day ten the seventh step a veiled door leading to my golden anniversary flameproofed free-paper shredded in the teeth of a pillaging dog never to dream of spiders and when they turned the hoses upon me a burst of light.
Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”
Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Wislawa Szymborska, “The End and the Beginning”
After every war someone has to clean up. Things won’t straighten themselves up, after all. Someone has to push the rubble to the side of the road, so the corpse-filled wagons can pass. Someone has to get mired in scum and ashes, sofa springs, splintered glass, and bloody rags. Someone has to drag in a girder to prop up a wall, Someone has to glaze a window, rehang a door. Photogenic it’s not, and takes years. All the cameras have left for another war. We’ll need the bridges back, and new railway stations. Sleeves will go ragged from rolling them up. Someone, broom in hand, still recalls the way it was. Someone else listens and nods with unsevered head. But already there are those nearby starting to mill about who will find it dull. From out of the bushes sometimes someone still unearths rusted-out arguments and carries them to the garbage pile. Those who knew what was going on here must make way for those who know little. And less than little. And finally as little as nothing. In the grass that has overgrown causes and effects, someone must be stretched out blade of grass in his mouth gazing at the clouds.
Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise“
Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills Where he was digging. The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked, Loving their cool hardness in our hands. By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man. My grandfather cut more turf in a day Than any other man on Toner’s bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up To drink it, then fell to right away Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods Over his shoulder, going down and down For the good turf. Digging. The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.
Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese“
Best Poems by Living Writers
Simon Ortiz, “My Father’s Song”
Wanting to say things, I miss my father tonight. His voice, the slight catch, the depth from his thin chest, the tremble of emotion in something he has just said to his son, his song: We planted corn one spring at Acu— we planted several times but this one particular time I remember the soft damp sand in my hand. My father had stopped at one point to show me an overturned furrow; the plowshare had unearthed the burrow nest of a mouse in the soft moist sand. Very gently, he scooped tiny pink animals into the palm of his hand and told me to touch them. We took them to the edge of the field and put them in the shade of a sand moist clod. I remember the very softness of cool and warm sand and tiny alive mice and my father saying things.
Sharon Olds, “Sex Without Love”
How do they do it, the ones who make love without love? Beautiful as dancers, gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice, fingers hooked inside each other’s bodies, faces red as steak, wine, wet as the children at birth whose mothers are going to give them away. How do they come to the come to the come to the God come to the still waters, and not love the one who came there with them, light rising slowly as steam off their joined skin? These are the true religious, the purists, the pros, the ones who will not accept a false Messiah, love the priest instead of the God. They do not mistake the lover for their own pleasure, they are like great runners: they know they are alone with the road surface, the cold, the wind, the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio- vascular health—just factors, like the partner in the bed, and not the truth, which is the single body alone in the universe against its own best time.
Yusef Komunyakaa, “Facing It”
My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn’t dammit: No tears. I’m stone. I’m flesh. My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way—the stone lets me go. I turn that way—I’m inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap’s white flash. Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall. Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s wings cutting across my stare. The sky. A plane in the sky. A white vet’s image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I’m a window. He’s lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman’s trying to erase names: No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.
Joy Harjo, “A Map to the Next World“
Here are the first few lines of Harjo’s poem, which ends with the powerful line, “You must make your own map.” In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who would climb through the hole in the sky. My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens. For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet. The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.
Alberto Ríos, “Nani”
Sitting at her table, she serves the sopa de arroz to me instinctively, and I watch her, the absolute mamá, and eat words I might have had to say more out of embarrassment. To speak, now-foreign words I used to speak, too, dribble down her mouth as she serves me albondigas. No more than a third are easy to me. By the stove she does something with words and looks at me only with her back. I am full. I tell her I taste the mint, and watch her speak smiles at the stove. All my words make her smile. Nani never serves herself, she only watches me with her skin, her hair. I ask for more. I watch the mamá warming more tortillas for me. I watch her fingers in the flame for me. Near her mouth, I see a wrinkle speak of a man whose body serves the ants like she serves me, then more words from more wrinkles about children, words about this and that, flowing more easily from these other mouths. Each serves as a tremendous string around her, holding her together. They speak nani was this and that to me and I wonder just how much of me will die with her, what were the words I could have been, or was. Her insides speak through a hundred wrinkles, now, more than she can bear, steel around her, shouting, then, What is this thing she serves? She asks me if I want more. I own no words to stop her. Even before I speak, she serves.
Billy Collins, “Sonnet“
Rita Dove, “American Smooth”
We were dancing—it must have been a foxtrot or a waltz, something romantic but requiring restraint, rise and fall, precise execution as we moved into the next song without stopping, two chests heaving above a seven-league stride—such perfect agony, one learns to smile through, ecstatic mimicry being the sine qua non of American Smooth. And because I was distracted by the effort of keeping my frame (the leftward lean, head turned just enough to gaze out past your ear and always smiling, smiling), I didn’t notice how still you’d become until we had done it (for two measures? four?)—achieved flight, that swift and serene magnificence, before the earth remembered who we were and brought us down.
Cathy Song, “Spaces We Leave Empty”
The jade slipped from my wrist with the smoothness of water leaving the mountains, silk falling from a shoulder, melon slices sliding across the tongue, the fish returning. The bracelet worn since my first birthday cracked into thousand-year-old eggshells. The sound could be heard ringing across the water where my mother woke in her sleep crying thief. Her nightgown slapped in the wind as he howled clutching his hoard. The cultured pearls. The bone flutes. The peppermint disks of jade. The clean hole in the center, Heaven: the spaces we left empty.
Harryette Mullen, “We Are Not Responsible”
We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives. We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions. We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honor your reservations. In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on. Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments. If you cannot understand English, you will be moved out of the way. In the event of a loss, you’d better look out for yourself. Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle your frightful claims. Our handlers lost your luggage and we are unable to find the key to your legal case. You were detained for interrogation because you fit the profile. You are not presumed to be innocent if the police have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet. It’s not our fault you were born wearing a gang color. It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights. Step aside, please, while our officer inspects your bad attitude. You have no rights we are bound to respect. Please remain calm, or we can’t be held responsible for what happens to you.
Natasha Trethewey, “Myth”
I was asleep while you were dying. It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow I make between my slumber and my waking, the Erebus I keep you in, still trying not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow, but in dreams you live. So I try taking you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning, my eyes open, I find you do not follow. Again and again, this constant forsaking. * Again and again, this constant forsaking: my eyes open, I find you do not follow. You back into morning, sleep-heavy, turning. But in dreams you live. So I try taking, not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow. The Erebus I keep you in—still, trying— I make between my slumber and my waking. It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow. I was asleep while you were dying.
Julia Alvarez, “Poetry Makes Nothing Happen?”
“Poetry Makes Nothing Happen” —W. H. Auden Listening to a poem on the radio, Mike Holmquist stayed awake on his drive home from Laramie on Interstate 80, tapping his hand to the beat of some lines by Longfellow; while overcome by grief one lonesome night when the bathroom cabinet still held her husband’s meds, May Quinn reached out for a book by Yeats instead and fell asleep cradling “When You Are Old,” not the poet’s best, but still…poetry made nothing happen, which was good, given what May had in mind. Writing a paper on a Bishop poem, Jenny Klein missed her ride but arrived home to the cancer news in a better frame of mind. While troops dropped down into Afghanistan in the living room, Naomi Stella clapped to the nursery rhyme her father had turned on, All the king’s horses and all the king’s men… If only poetry had made nothing happen! If only the president had listened to Auden! Faith Chaney, Lulú Pérez, Sunghee Chen— there’s a list as long as an epic poem of folks who’ll swear a poem has never done a thing for them…except…perhaps adjust the sunset view one cloudy afternoon, which made them see themselves or see the world in a different light—degrees of change so small only a poem registers them at all. That’s why they can be trusted, why poems might still save us from what happens in the world.
Elizabeth Alexander, “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe”
Poetry, I tell my students, is idiosyncratic. Poetry is where we are ourselves (though Sterling Brown said “Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”), digging in the clam flats for the shell that snaps, emptying the proverbial pocketbook. Poetry is what you find in the dirt in the corner, overhear on the bus, God in the details, the only way to get from here to there. Poetry (and now my voice is rising) is not all love, love, love, and I’m sorry the dog died. Poetry (here I hear myself loudest) is the human voice, and are we not of interest to each other?
Tracy K. Smith, “The United States Welcomes You”
Why and by whose power were you sent? What do you see that you may wish to steal? Why this dancing? Why do your dark bodies Drink up all the light? What are you demanding That we feel? Have you stolen something? Then What is that leaping in your chest? What is The nature of your mission? Do you seek To offer a confession? Have you anything to do With others brought by us to harm? Then Why are you afraid? And why do you invade Our night, hands raised, eyes wide, mute As ghosts? Is there something you wish to confess? Is this some enigmatic type of test? What if we Fail? How and to whom do we address our appeal? I hope you have found new poems to love or revisited old favorites from this list. Are you feeling eager for even more great poetry? Check out this list of 50 Must-Read Best poetry books, 50 Must-Read 2019 poetry collections, and many more articles on poetry from our archives.
