split the lark and you'll find the music

A poetry repository

[apoemaday]

Her Kind

by Anne Sexton

I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.

[sashayed]

To The Young Who Want To Die

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale. The gun will wait. The lake will wait. The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait: will wait a week: will wait through April. You do not have to die this certain day. Death will abide, will pamper your postponement. I assure you death will wait. Death has a lot of time. Death can attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is just down the street; is most obliging neighbor; can meet you any moment. You need not die today. Stay here—through pout or pain or peskyness. Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow. Graves grow no green that you can use. Remember, green's your color. You are Spring.

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems, 1987

[apoemaday]

It Was Like This: You Were Happy

by Jane Hirshfield

It was like this: you were happy, then you were sad, then happy again, then not.

It went on. You were innocent or you were guilty. Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent. Mostly, it seems you were silent — what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness — between you, there is nothing to forgive — but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you or your days: they will be wrong, they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man, all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad, you slept, you awakened. Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

[apoemaday]

As the Ruin Falls

by C.S. Lewis

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you. I never had a selfless thought since I was born. I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through: I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure are the goals I seek, I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin: I talk of love — a scholar's parrot may talk Greek — But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack, I see the chasm. And everything you are was making My heart into a bridge by which I might get back From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains You give me are more precious than all other gains.

[derangedrhythms]

W. B. Yeats, The Winding Stair and Other Poems; Oil and Blood

TEXT ID: IN tombs of gold and lapis lazuli Bodies of holy men and women exude Miraculous oil, odour of violet. But under heavy loads of trampled clay Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood; Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.

[apoemaday]

The Door

by Margaret Atwood

The door swings open, you look in. It’s dark in there, most likely spiders: nothing you want. You feel scared. The door swings closed. 

The full moon shines, it’s full of delicious juice; you buy a purse, the dance is nice. The door opens And swings closed so quickly you don’t notice.

The sun comes out, you have swift breakfasts with your husband, who is still thin; you wash the dishes, you love your children, you read a book, you go to the movies. It rains moderately. 

The door swings open, you look in: why does this keep happening now? Is there a secret? The door swings closed. 

The snow falls, you clear the walk while breathing heavily; it’s not as easy as once. Your children telephone sometimes. The roof needs fixing. You keep yourself busy. The spring arrives.

The door swings open: it’s dark in there, with many steps going down. But what is that shining? Is it water? The door swings closed. The dog has died. This happened before. You got another; not this time though. Where is your husband? You gave up the garden. It became too much. At night there are blankets; nonetheless you are wakeful.

The door swings open: O god of hinges, god of long voyages, you have kept faith. It’s dark in there. You confide yourself to the darkness You step in. The door swings closed.

[apoemaday]

A Wife in London

by Thomas Hardy

December 1899

I. She sits in the tawny vapour That the Thames-side lanes have uprolled, Behind whose webby fold-on-fold Like a waning taper The street-lamp glimmers cold.

A messenger's knock cracks smartly, Flashed news in her hand Of meaning it dazes to understand Though shaped so shortly: He — he has fallen — in the far South Land…

II. 'Tis the morrow; the fog hangs thicker, The postman nears and goes: A letter is brought whose lines disclose By the firelight flicker His hand, whom the worm now knows:

Fresh — firm — penned in highest feather — Page-full of his hoped return, And of home-planned jaunts of brake and burn In the summer weather, And of new love that they would learn.

[vlindervin7]

perfect poem

[apoemaday]

Love Poem

by Richard Brautigan

It’s so nice to wake up in the morning all alone and not have to tell somebody you love them when you don’t love them anymore.

[plasmapop]

09/04/2026 • every time @softinvasions writes a villanelle about how sonnets suck i write another suckful sonnet*. metrical malpractice!

*sonnets do not even have to have 14 lines if you are pure of heart and sonnetpilled enough

[apoemaday]

The Door

by Margaret Atwood

The door swings open, you look in. It’s dark in there, most likely spiders: nothing you want. You feel scared. The door swings closed. 

The full moon shines, it’s full of delicious juice; you buy a purse, the dance is nice. The door opens And swings closed so quickly you don’t notice.

The sun comes out, you have swift breakfasts with your husband, who is still thin; you wash the dishes, you love your children, you read a book, you go to the movies. It rains moderately. 

The door swings open, you look in: why does this keep happening now? Is there a secret? The door swings closed. 

The snow falls, you clear the walk while breathing heavily; it’s not as easy as once. Your children telephone sometimes. The roof needs fixing. You keep yourself busy. The spring arrives.

The door swings open: it’s dark in there, with many steps going down. But what is that shining? Is it water? The door swings closed. The dog has died. This happened before. You got another; not this time though. Where is your husband? You gave up the garden. It became too much. At night there are blankets; nonetheless you are wakeful.

The door swings open: O god of hinges, god of long voyages, you have kept faith. It’s dark in there. You confide yourself to the darkness You step in. The door swings closed.

[insilverrolled]

Against Entropy

John M. Ford [x]

The worm drives helically through the wood And does not know the dust left in the bore Once made the table integral and good; And suddenly the crystal hits the floor. Electrons find their paths in subtle ways, A massless eddy in a trail of smoke; The names of lovers, light of other days Perhaps you will not miss them. That's the joke. The universe winds down. That's how it's made. But memory is everything to lose; Although some of the colors have to fade, Do not believe you'll get the chance to choose. Regret, by definition, comes too late; Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

[havingapoemwithyou]

Sanity by Caroline Bird

[apoemaday]

Lines for Winter

by Mark Strand

Tell yourself as it gets cold and gray falls from the air that you will go on walking, hearing the same tune no matter where you find yourself — inside the dome of dark or under the cracking white of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow.

Tonight as it gets cold tell yourself what you know which is nothing but the tune your bones play as you keep going. And you will be able for once to lie down under the small fire of winter stars.

And if it happens that you cannot go on or turn back and you find yourself where you will be at the end, tell yourself in that final flowing of cold through your limbs that you love what you are.

[apoemaday]

The Raincoat

by Ada Limón

When the doctor suggested surgery and a brace for all my youngest years, my parents scrambled to take me to massage therapy, deep tissue work, osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine  unspooled a bit, I could breathe again, and move more in a body unclouded by pain. My mom would tell me to sing songs to her the whole forty-five-minute drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty- five minutes back from physical therapy. She’d say that even my voice sounded unfettered by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang, because I thought she liked it. I never asked her what she gave up to drive me, or how her day was before this chore. Today, at her age, I was driving myself home from yet another spine appointment, singing along to some maudlin but solid song on the radio, and I saw a mom take her raincoat off and give it to her young daughter when a storm took over the afternoon. My god, I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet.

[apoemaday]

This Be the Verse

by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.

[apoemaday]

Affirmation

by Donald Hall

To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage, that began without harm, scatters into debris on the shore, and a friend from school drops cold on a rocky strand. If a new love carries us past middle age, our wife will die at her strongest and most beautiful. New women come and go. All go. The pretty lover who announces that she is temporary is temporary. The bold woman, middle-aged against our old age, sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand. Another friend of decades estranges himself in words that pollute thirty years. Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge and affirm that it is fitting and delicious to lose everything.