someone told me all poets write about birds.

Dedication

by Czeslaw Milosz

You whom I could not save listen to me. Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another. I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words. I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.

What strengthened me, for you was lethal. You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one, inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty. Blind force with accomplished shape.

Here is a valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge going into white fog. Here is a broken city, and the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave when I am talking with you.

What is poetry which does not save nations or people? A connivance with official lies, a song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment, readings for sophomore girls.

That I wanted good poetry without knowing it, that I discovered, late, it salutary aim, in this and only this I find salvation.

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds to feed the dead who would come disguised as birds. I put this book here for you, who once lived so that you should visit us no more.

Warsaw, 1945

#czesław miłosz

At least, my dear,

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

At least, my dear, you did not have to live to see me die.

Considering now how many things I did that must have caused you pain, sweating at certain memories, blushing dark blood, unable to gather home my scattered thoughts that graze the forbidden hills, cropping the mind-bane, I cut from the hedge for crook the one disservice I never did you,—you never saw me die.

I find my disorderly files among the unfinished poems, and photographs of picnics on the rocks, letters from you in your bold hand. I find in the pocket of a coat I could not bring myself to give away a knotted handkerchief, containing columbine-seeds. A few more moments such as these and I shall have paid all.

Not that you ever— O, love inflexible, O militant forgiveness, I know you kept no books against me! In my own hand are written down the sum and the crude items of my inadequacy.

It is only that there are moments when for the sake of a little quiet in the brawling mind I must search out, recorded in my favour, one princely gift. The most I ever did for you was to outlive you. But that is much.

(Sonnet, xviii)

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

When I too long have looked upon your face, wherein for me a brightness unobscured save by the mists of brightness has its place, and terrible beauty not to be endured, I turn away reluctant from your light, and stand irresolute, a mind undone, a silly, dazzled thing deprived of sight from having looked too long upon the sun. Then is my daily life a narrow room in which a little while, uncertainly, surrounded by impenetrable gloom, among familiar things grown strange to me making my way, I pause, and feel, and hark, till I become accustomed to the dark.

To Certain "Brothers"

by Langston Hughes

You sicken me with lies, with truthful lies. And with your pious faces. And your wide, out-stretched, mock-welcome, Christian hands. While underneath is dirt and ugliness, and rottening hearts, and wild hyenas howling in your soul's waste lands.

#langston hughes

Mornings at Blackwater

by Mary Oliver

For years, every morning, I drank from Blackwater Pond. It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt, the feet of ducks.

And always it assuaged me from the dry bowl of the very far past.

What I want to say is that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will be, darling citizen.

So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world. And live your life.

We Should Be Well Prepared

by Mary Oliver

The way the plovers cry goodbye. The way the dead fox keeps on looking down the hill with open eye. The way the leaves fall, and then there's the long wait. The way someone says: we must never meet again. The way mold spots the cake, the way sourness overtakes the cream. The way the river rushes by, never to return. The way the days go by, never to return. The way somebody comes back, but only in a dream.

To a Young Poet

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Time cannot break the bird's wing from the bird. Bird and wing together go down, one feather.

No thing that ever flew, not the lark, not you, can die as others do.

Not This, Not That

by Mary Oliver

Nor anything, not the eastern wind whose other name is rain, nor the burning heats of the dunes at the crown of summer, nor the ticks, that new, ferocious populace,

not the President who loves blood, nor the governmental agencies that love money,

will alter

my love for you, my friends and my beloved, or for you, oh ghosts of Emerson and Whitman,

or for you, oh blue sky of a summer morning, that makes me roll in a barrel of gratitude down hills,

or for you, oldest of friends: hope; or for you, newest of friends: faith;

or for you, silliest and dearest of surprises, my own life.

'Tis Easier to Pity

by Emily Dickinson

'Tis easier to pity those when dead that which pity previous would have saved— a Tragedy enacted secures Applause that Tragedy enacting too seldom does.

#emily dickinson

Now comes the long blue cold

by Mary Oliver

Now comes the long blue cold and what shall I say but that some bird in the tree of my heart is singing.

That same heart that only yesterday was a room shut tight, without dreams.

Isn't it wonderful—the cold wind and spring in the heart inexplicable. Darling girl. Picklock.

To Mrs. Professor in Defense of My Cat's Honor and Not Only

by Czeslaw Milosz

My valiant helper, a small-sized tiger, sleeps sweetly on my desk, by the computer, unaware that you insult his tribe.

Cats play with a mouse or with a half-dead mole. You are wrong, though: it's not out of cruelty. They simply like a thing that moves.

For, after all, we know that only consciousness can for a moment move into the Other, empathize with the pain and panic of a mouse.

And such as cats are, all of Nature is. Indifferent, alas, to the good and the evil. Quite a problem for us, I am afraid.

Natural history has its museums, but why should our children learn about monsters, an earth of snakes and reptiles for millions of years?

Nature devouring, nature devoured, butchery day and night smoking with blood. And who created it? Was it the good Lord?

Yes, undoubtedly, they are innocent, spiders, mantises, sharks, pythons. We are the only ones who say: cruelty.

Our consciousness and our conscience alone in the path anthill of galaxies put their hope in a humane God.

Who cannot but feel and think, who is kindred to us by his warmth and movement, for we are, as He told us, similar to Him.

Yet if it is so, then He takes pity on every mauled mouse, every wounded bird. Then the universe for Him is like a Crucifixion.

Such is the outcome of your attack on the cat: a theological, Augustinian grimace, which makes difficult our walking on this earth.

1995

#czesław miłosz

Stars

by Langston Hughes

O, sweep of stars over Harlem streets, O, little breath of oblivion that is night. A city building to a mother's song. A city dreaming to a lullaby. Reach up your hand, dark boy, and take a star. Out of the little breath of oblivion that is night, take just one star.

#langston hughes

There you were, and it was like spring

by Mary Oliver

There you were, and it was like spring— like the first fair water with the light on it, hitting the eyes. Why are we made the way we are made, that to love is to want? Well, you are gone now, and this morning I have walked out to the back shore, to the ocean which, even if we think we have measured it, has no final measure. Sometimes you can see the great whales there, breaching and playing. Sometimes the swans linger just long enough for us to be astonished. Then they lift their wings, they become again a part of the untouchable clouds.

sashayed

Dear —

I am not land or timber nor are you ocean or celestial body, but rather we are the small animals we have always been. The land and the sea know each other at the threshold where they meet, as we know something of one another, having shown, at different times, some bit of flesh, some feeling. We call the showing knowing instead of practice. We seem to say, at different times, A feeling comes. What is the metaphor for two animals sharing the same space? Marriage? We share a practice, you and I, a series of postures. Here is how I become a tree [ ] and you [ ] a body in space.

Donika Kelly (b. 1983) in Poetry, September 2018

#donika kelly

Apostrophe to Man

(on reflecting that the world is ready to go to war again)

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Detestable race, continue to expunge yourself, die out. Breed faster, crowd, encroach, sing hymns, build bombing airplanes; make speeches, unveil statues, issue bonds, parade; convert again into explosives the bewildered ammonia and the distracted cellulose; convert again into putrescent matter drawing flies the hopeful bodies of the young; exhort, pray, pull long faces, be earnest, be all but overcome, be photographed; confer, perfect your formulae, commercialize bacteria harmful to human tissue, put death on the market; breed, crowd, encroach, expand, expunge yourself, die out, Homo called sapiens.