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Poetry, to be understood, must be clear. It mustn't be fancy.

Mary Oliver

The world did not have to be beautiful to work, but it is.

Mary Oliver

"A poem is words that see and speak beyond their own horizon."

"One way to see more is to borrow someone's seeing."

"Poems: they preserve a knowledge we can't keep I mind without help, because it is knowledge we don't want to remember."

"Art is the realm that gives us a way to acknowledge that uncertainty, unknowing, and mystery are not experiences that can be, or should be, entirely solved."

"Inside the body of a lyric poem, a meaningful image, symbol, music, sentence is found to summon, with memorably brevity, an unsayable whole... To write or read the words that became Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" is to give something otherwise unholdable, a holdable shape and a way it can be returned to and looked at more."

Jane Hirshfield, 2024 Blaney Lecture: "Making the Invisible Visible"

what we see is a world that cannot cherish us,

but which we cherish.

- Mary Oliver

“What worlds die

as a result of our rituals

of coming to know the world?”

- Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé, from an interview, 2023

EAGLE POEM

by Joy Harjo

To pray you open your whole self

To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

To one whole voice that is you.

And know there is more

That you can’t see, can’t hear,

Can’t know except in moments

Steadily growing, and in languages

That aren’t always sound but other

Circles of motion.

Like eagle that Sunday morning

Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky

In wind, swept our hearts clean

With sacred wings.

We see you, see ourselves and know

That we must take the utmost care

And kindness in all things.

Breathe in, knowing we are made of

All this, and breathe, knowing

We are truly blessed because we

We’re born, and die soon within a

True circle of motion

Like eagle rounding out the morning

Inside us.

We pray that it will be done

In beauty.

Never Mention to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas

by Sandra Cisneros

That you made love

on an office desk

on the seventeenth floor

with a view of the Alamo.

Saw it upside down.

Your head dangling

off the edge of the desk.

But saw it right for once.

Shook from memory —

Bosnia. How neighbor

upon neighbor fired.

Grief in one century

bred in another ire.

Reason collapsed

like Stari Most, a bridge

of five hundred years.

What do you know

of tears?

What you choose

to remember—

Beware.

AFTER THE DIAGNOSIS

by Christian Wiman, 2013

No remembering now

when the apple sapling was blown

almost out of the ground.

No telling how,

with all the other trees around,

it alone was struck.

It must have been luck,

he thought for years, so close

to the house it grew.

It must have been night.

Change is a thing one sleeps through

when young, and he was young.

If there was a weakness in the earth,

a give he went down on his knees

to find and feel the limits of,

there is no longer.

If there was one random blow from above

the way he's come to know

from years in this place,

the roots were stronger.

Whatever the case,

he has watched this tree survive

wind ripping at his roof for nights

on end, heats and blights

that left little else alive.

No remembering now...

A day's changes mean all to him

and all days come down

to one clear pane

through which he sees

among all the other trees

this leaning, clenched, unyielding one

that seems cast

in the form of a blast

that would have killed it,

as if something at the heart of things,

and with the heart of things,

had willed it.

REVERSE SUICIDE

by Matt Rasmussen 2013

The guy Dad sold your car to

comes back to get his money,

leaves the car. With filthy rags

we rub it down until it doesn’t shine

and wipe your blood into

the seams of the seat.

each snowflake stirs before

lifting into the sky as I

learn you won’t be dead.

The unsuffering ends

when the mess of your head

pulls together around

a bullet in your mouth.

You spit it into Dad’s gun

before arriving in the driveway

while the evening brightens

and we pour bag after bag

of leaves on the lawn,

waiting for them to leap

onto the bare branches.

AT PEGASUS

by Terrence Hayes, 1999

They are like those crazy women who tore Orpheus when he refused to sing, these men grinding in the strobe & black lights of Pegasus. All shadow & sound. "I'm just here for the music," I tell the man who asks me to the floor. But I have held a boy on my back before. Curtis & I used to leap barefoot into the creek; dance among maggots & piss, beer bottles & tadpoles slippery as sperm; we used to pull off our shirts, & slap music into our skin. He wouldn't know me now at the edge of these lovers' gyre, glitter & steam, fire, bodies blurred sexless by the music's spinning light. A young man slips his thumb into the mouth of an old one, & I am not that far away. The whole scene raw & delicate as Curtis's foot gashed on a sunken bottle shard. They press hip to hip, each breathless as a boy carrying a friend on his back. The foot swelling green as the sewage in that creek. We never went back. But I remember his weight better than I remember my first kiss. These men know something I used to know. How could I not find them beautiful, the way they dive & spill into each other, the way the dance floor takes them, wet & holy in its mouth.

“If you are reading this and don’t read much poetry, or feel uncertain in relation to it, you are more than welcome here. Maybe you are browsing in a bookstore, or have been assigned this book for a class, or have received it as a gift. Please know that I chose these poems thinking of you. I, too, feel certain, unsure of what poetry is for, especially during eerie, frightening, and confusing times. But finding these 75 poems helped me, and I hope they will help you, too.”

- the first paragraph of Matthew Zapruder’s introduction to the Best American Poetry 2022, which he selected.

WE FEEL NOW A LARGENESS COMING ON

by Tracy K. Smith, 2020

Being called all manner of things from the Dictionary of Shame— not English, not words, not heard, but worn, borne, carried, never spent— we feel now a largeness coming on, something passing into us. We know not in what source it was begun, but rapt, we watch it rise through our fallen, our slain, our millions dragged, chained. Like daylight setting leaves alight— green to gold to blinding white. Like a spirit caught. Flame-in-flesh. I watched a woman try to shake it, once, from her shoulders and hips. A wild annihilating fright. Other women formed a wall around her, holding back what clamored to rise. God. Devil. Ancestor. What Black bodies carry through your schools, your cities. Do you see how mighty you’ve made us, all these generations running? Every day steeling ourselves against it. Every day coaxing it back into coils. And all the while feeding it. And all the while loving it.

RAIN LIGHT

by W.S. Merwin, 2008

All day the stars watch from long ago

my mother said I am going now

when you are alone you will be all right

whether or not you know you will know

look at the old house in the dawn rain

all the flowers are forms of water

the sun reminds them through a white cloud

touches the patchwork spread on the hill

the washed colors of the afterlife

that lived there long before you were born

see how they wake without a question

even though the whole world is burning

I GO BACK TO MAY 1937

by Sharon Olds

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks, the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips aglow in the May air, they are about to graduate, they are about to get married, they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are innocent, they would never hurt anybody. I want to go up to them and say Stop, don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman, he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do, you are going to do bad things to children, you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of, you are going to want to die. I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it, her hungry pretty face turning to me, her pitiful beautiful untouched body, his arrogant handsome face turning to me, his pitiful beautiful untouched body, but I don’t do it. I want to live. I take them up like the male and female paper dolls and bang them together at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to strike sparks from them, I say Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

EVERYTHING IS WAITING FOR YOU

by David Whyte

After Derek Mahon

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you freedom. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. The stairs are your mentor of things to come, the doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you, and the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

… We become social creatures because we cannot live any other way. But in order to become social, there are a great many other things that we must not become, and we are frightened, all of us, of these forces within us that perpetually menace our precarious security. Yet the forces are there: we cannot will them away. All we can do is learn to live with them. And we cannot learn this unless we are willing to tell the truth about ourselves, and the truth about us is always at variance with what we wish to be. The human effort is to bring these two realities into a relationship resembling reconciliation. The human beings whom we respect the most, after all - and sometimes fear the most - are those who are most deeply involved in this delicate and strenuous effort….

… To become a social human being one modifies and suppresses and, ultimately, without great courage, lies to oneself about all one’s interior, uncharted chaos, so have we, as a nation, modified or suppressed and lied about all the darker forces in our history. We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations.

- James Baldwin, from The Creative Process, 1962

In each of the stories

where children

are led out of their beds

at night by a broken

father or angry stepmother

and marched off

to be fed into the mouth

of a dark wood,

the children are supposed

to die. In some stories

they do. In others they

survive but must kill

a witch or an animal

in order to live

which is, to be fair,

a different kind

of death but a death all

the same. Imagine

the fog around their small

ankles like a shoreline

in the dark. Imagine

how cold their skin

would be beneath the thin

overcoats

of their nightshirts,

the little heat

the parents are giving

off beginning to dissipate

like dew as the children

take that last step

into the corpse of trees

and are swallowed up.

There are so many ways

to eat the young.

Yesterday, Owen was riding

his red Radio Flyer

tricycle around and around

our red dining room

table. Get me, poppa,

get me, you’re a gob-a-lin,

come get me. And I know

I shouldn’t have

really become a goblin,

that that was not what he was

asking for. He wanted his

poppa and a funny voice.

Instead my body grew

like a shadow and turned green,

craven and heavy,

you can’t run from the gob-a-lin,

the gob-a-lin, the gob-a-lin,

I sang, and chased him

round the table, you

can’t run from the gob-a-lin

I’m going to eat

your skin. Then he stopped,

knowing that I was

no longer there and looked

up at my face and not

seeing my face began to cry

and shake. I knelt down

and held him,

and said I’m sorry

it’s just poppa,

was that too scary? We

won’t play that anymore and he

calmed a little and said

I don’t want him

poppa,

tell the gob-a-lin not to

come back. When you ask

parents how they ever raised

their children they will

often say

half the time I had no idea

what I was doing.

But I think we do know

what we are doing. And so does

the forest, and the dark

in the forest,

and the wind in the dark,

and the beasts,

the broken fathers, the angry

stepmothers,

the unconditional bond

become errant.

- Goblin, a poem by Matthew Dickman, 2022

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