Poems that you love

[Lizzie]

Constantly Risking Absurdity

 
Constantly risking absurdity
                                             and death
            whenever he performs
                                        above the heads
                                                            of his audience
   the poet like an acrobat
                                 climbs on rime
                                          to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
                                     above a sea of faces
             paces his way
                               to the other side of day
    performing entrechats
                               and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
                               and all without mistaking
                     any thing
                               for what it may not be

       For he's the super realist
                                     who must perforce perceive
                   taut truth
                                 before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
                                  toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
                                     with gravity
                                                to start her death-defying leap

      And he
             a little charleychaplin man
                                           who may or may not catch
               her fair eternal form
                                     spreadeagled in the empty air
                  of existence



~Lawrence Ferlinghetti

[Lizzie]

Sestina: Like
BY A. E. STALLINGS

With a nod to Jonah Winter

Now we’re all “friends,” there is no love but Like,
A semi-demi goddess, something like
A reality-TV star look-alike,
Named Simile or Me Two. So we like
In order to be liked. It isn’t like
There’s Love or Hate now. Even plain “dislike”

Is frowned on: there’s no button for it. Like
Is something you can quantify: each “like”
You gather’s almost something money-like,
Token of virtual support. “Please like
This page to stamp out hunger.” And you’d like
To end hunger and climate change alike,

But it’s unlikely Like does diddly. Like
Just twiddles its unopposing thumbs-ups, like-
Wise props up scarecrow silences. “I’m like,
So OVER him,” I overhear. “But, like,
He doesn’t get it. Like, you know? He’s like
It’s all OK. Like I don’t even LIKE

Him anymore. Whatever. I’m all like ... ”
Take “like” out of our chat, we’d all alike
Flounder, agape, gesticulating like
A foreign film sans subtitles, fall like
Dumb phones to mooted desuetude. Unlike
With other crutches, um, when we use “like,”

We’re not just buying time on credit: Like
Displaces other words; crowds, cuckoo-like,
Endangered hatchlings from the nest. (Click “like”
If you’re against extinction!) Like is like
Invasive zebra mussels, or it’s like
Those nutria-things, or kudzu, or belike

Redundant fast food franchises, each like
(More like) the next. Those poets who dislike
Inversions, archaisms, who just like
Plain English as she’s spoke — why isn’t “like”
Their (literally) every other word? I’d like
Us just to admit that’s what real speech is like.

But as you like, my friend. Yes, we’re alike,
How we pronounce, say, lichen, and dislike
Cancer and war. So like this page. Click Like.

I read this when it appeared in Poetry magazine and almost posted it as a poem I hated . . .

I like this. Now that we have the heart, I can love it too.

[Todd]

That's a wonderful poem, Ray. Thank you for posting it.

[rayheinrich]

That's a wonderful poem, Ray. Thank you for posting it.

Oops! And then I screwed up and posted over it.
But here it is:


                        Palindrome     -     Lisel Mueller
       
        There is less difficulty—indeed, no logical difficulty at all—in
        imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which
        time goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the
        other. . . . Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own
        time as “forward” and time in the other galaxy as “backward.”                                
                                             —Martin Gardner, in Scientific American
       
        Somewhere now she takes off the dress I am
        putting on. It is evening in the anti-world
        where she lives. She is forty-five years away
        from her death, the hole which spit her out
        into pain, impossible at first, later easing,
        going, gone. She has unlearned much by now.
        Her skin is firming, her memory sharpens,
        her hair has grown glossy. She sees without glasses,
        she falls in love easily. Her husband has lost his
        shuffle, they laugh together. Their money shrinks,
        but their ardor increases. Soon her second child
        will be young enough to fight its way into her
        body and change its life to monkey to frog to
        tadpole to cluster of cells to tiny island to
        nothing. She is making a list:
                    Things I will need in the past
                                lipstick
                                shampoo
                                transistor radio
                                Sergeant Pepper
                                acne cream
                                five-year diary with a lock
        She is eager, having heard about adolescent love
        and the freedom of children. She wants to read
        Crime and Punishment and ride on a roller coaster
        without getting sick. I think of her as she will
        be at fifteen, awkward, too serious. In the
        mirror I see she uses her left hand to write,
        her other to open a jar. By now our lives should
        have crossed. Somewhere sometime we must have
        passed one another like going and coming trains,
        with both of us looking the other way.
       



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                                Things No Longer There     -     Billy Ramsell
       

                I gcead do Kobus Moolman
       
        Poor deleted Tarragona, our city of bonfires. Our city of casual drug use and vinyl
        that’s been consigned to the archive of snow.
       
        What what what’s missing, what’s conspicuous by its absence from the main square
        and its tributaries: the future perfect or future continuous?
       
        I can’t find that beautiful thing you asked me for. I can’t find my memory of making it.
       
        When that device was triggered in Placa del Pi at first no one noticed anything. But
        then the different parts of speech began to shrivel and petrify, to disappear completely;
        interjections, measure words gone within a fortnight.
       
        We’d open our mouths to utter them but nothing.
       
        Shortly after that came the battalions, marching in ebony lockstep across a border we’d
        misplaced, had long ago forgotten ever existed.
       
        They just appeared one Sunday in their expressionless squadrons, they appeared like
        chimes solidifying in their obsidian fatigues.
       
        They occupied Jew Hill, the barracks, the Generality.
       
        By then all the hard-edged abstract words had rotted, had grown incontinent and squelching,
        as the canker advanced with terminal facility from diamantine epidermis to pulpy interior.
       
        No plums anymore.
       
        When they come they come in the predawn to confiscate recollection, targeting random
        apartments in the sour-milk light, each wears a xxxxx helmet.
       
        No sausages. No xxxxxxx. None of those lavender-remembering pears I’d bring in baskets
        for you every October.
       
        They’re unscrewing the street signs on xxxxxxxx and xxxxxxxx                      
       
        Your clean, cedar-hinting scent, your scent of xxxxxxxxxx                                 
       
        xxxxxxxxxx   I can’t find my memory of xxxxxxxxxx                        
       
        xxxxxxxxxx they xxxxxxxxxx can’t xxxxxxxx    

[RiverNotch]

    In the Village       -     Derek Walcott, 1930 - 2017

I

I came up out of the subway and there were
people standing on the steps as if they knew
something I didn’t. This was in the Cold War,
and nuclear fallout. I looked and the whole avenue
was empty, I mean utterly, and I thought,
The birds have abandoned our cities and the plague
of silence multiplies through their arteries, they fought
the war and they lost and there’s nothing subtle or vague
in this horrifying vacuum that is New York. I caught
the blare of a loudspeaker repeatedly warning
the last few people, maybe strolling lovers in their walk,
that the world was about to end that morning
on Sixth or Seventh Avenue with no people going to work
in that uncontradicted, horrifying perspective.
It was no way to die, but it’s also no way to live.
Well, if we burnt, it was at least New York.

II

Everybody in New York is in a sitcom.
I’m in a Latin American novel, one
in which an egret-haired viejo shakes with some
invisible sorrow, some obscene affliction,
and chronicles it secretly, till it shows in his face,
the parenthetical wrinkles confirming his fiction
to his deep embarrassment. Look, it’s
just the old story of a heart that won’t call it quits
whatever the odds, quixotic. It’s just one that’ll
break nobody’s heart, even if the grizzled colonel
pitches from his steed in a cavalry charge, in a battle
that won’t make him a statue. It is the hell
of ordinary, unrequited love. Watch these egrets
trudging the lawn in a dishevelled troop, white banners
trailing forlornly; they are the bleached regrets
of an old man’s memoirs, printed stanzas.
showing their hinged wings like wide open secrets.

III

Who has removed the typewriter from my desk,
so that I am a musician without his piano
with emptiness ahead as clear and grotesque
as another spring? My veins bud, and I am so
full of poems, a wastebasket of black wire.
The notes outside are visible; sparrows will
line antennae like staves, the way springs were,
but the roofs are cold and the great grey river
where a liner glides, huge as a winter hill,
moves imperceptibly like the accumulating
years. I have no reason to forgive her
for what I brought on myself. I am past hating,
past the longing for Italy where blowing snow
absolves and whitens a kneeling mountain range
outside Milan. Through glass, I am waiting
for the sound of a bird to unhinge the beginning
of spring, but my hands, my work, feel strange
without the rusty music of my machine. No words
for the Arctic liner moving down the Hudson, for the mange
of old snow molting from the roofs. No poems. No birds.

IV

The Sweet Life Café

If I fall into a grizzled stillness
sometimes, over the red-chequered tablecloth
outdoors of the Sweet Life Café, when the noise
of Sunday traffic in the Village is soft as a moth
working in storage, it is because of age
which I rarely admit to, or, honestly, even think of.
I have kept the same furies, though my domestic rage
is illogical, diabetic, with no lessening of love
though my hand trembles wildly, but not over this page.
My lust is in great health, but, if it happens
that all my towers shrivel to dribbling sand,
joy will still bend the cane-reeds with my pen’s
elation on the road to Vieuxfort with fever-grass
white in the sun, and, as for the sea breaking
in the gap at Praslin, they add up to the grace
I have known and which death will be taking
from my hand on this checkered tablecloth in this good place.

                - - -

starts out genius and ends up golden -- say, the four ages? and then something something something gentrification, or maybe refugees, or maybe nuclear war -- i don't know, i just read this. just read this and already deeply, deeply loving it. thanks, Ray! will digest more later.

[Lizzie]

Introduction To Poetry----Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Feels particularly relevant with NaPM just around the corner....

[Lizzie]

Sharon Olds, The Language of the Brag

I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw,
I have wanted to use my exceptionally strong and accurate arms
and my straight posture and quick electric muscles
to achieve something at the centre of a crowd,
the blade piercing the bark deep,
the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the cock.

I have wanted some epic use for my excellent body,
some heroism, some American achievement
beyond the ordinary for my extraordinary self,
magnetic and tensile, I have stood by the sandlot
and watched the boys play.

I have wanted courage, I have thought about fire
and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around

my belly big with cowardice and safely,
my stool black with iron pills,
my huge breasts oozing mucus,
my legs swelling, my hands swelling,
my face swelling and darkening, my hair
falling out, my inner sex
stabbed again and again with terrible pain like a knife.
I have lain down.

I have lain down and sweated and shaken
and passed blood and feces and water and
slowly alone in the centre of a circle I have
passed the new person out
and they have lifted the new person free of the act
and wiped the new person free of that
language of blood like praise all over the body.

I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,

I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.

[Keith]

As a child I would try to read poems from a small blue book that my mother had bought it was a collection of poems written in Lancashire dialect, This one was my favourite poem in that book.

"ONLY A POET." (1894) Samuel Laycock)

ONLY a poet," a schemer o' schemes;
A weaver o' fancies, a dreamer o' dreams;
Insanely eccentric, wi' long flowin' hair,
An' eyes strangely bright, wi' a meanin'less stare!
"Only a poet"—that's all, nowt no moor;
An', as every one knows, often needy an' poor;
Tho' that little fault may be remedied soon,
If th' minstrel could allis get paid for his tune.
Then look what a lot their strange yarns often cost!
Just fancy five sov'rins for "Paradise Lost"!
Why, for much less than that, there are theawsands o' men
Who would not only lose it, but find it ogen!

Neaw supposin' yo bowt some good clooas to yo'r back,
Some beef-steaks an' onions, or owt o' that mak';
These would bring yo some comfort, an' help yo to live,
But yo'll dee if yo'n newt but what poets con give.
"Only a poet"—a gazer at th' moon,
Or soarin' aloft i' some mental baloon;
Ah, some of 'em wingin' their flight to God's throne,
An' seemin' t' forget they'n a whom o' their own,
Wheer a wife may be ceaw'red in an owd tattered geawn,
Very patiently waitin' till th' husband comes deawn.
"Only a poet," a spinner o' rhymes,
An' never caught worshippin' "dollars an' dimes."

"Only a poet"—a star-gazin' bard
'At met tell yo th' earth's distance fro' th' sun to a yard;
But question him closely on trade, or bank shares,
An' he'll soon show his ignorance bi th' way 'at he stares.
Wanderin' throo' country lanes all the day long,
Gabblin' strange jargon, or croonin' some song;
Pennin' grand thowts 'at may mak' a world stare,
Then die in a mad-heawse, like poor John Clare!
"Only a poet "—ah! but what does that mean?
Bein' passed bi a naybur witheawt bein' seen;
Becose just across there comes Alderman Stott,
An' he get's th' warm greetin' th' poor bard should ha' got!
"Only a poet"—he's newt he con spare;
If his feelin's are hurt a bit, what need yo care?

For a poet is noan a much use as a friend,
Since he's newt he con give one, nor nowt he con lend.
"Only a poet," so let him alone,
Or, if yo think fit, yo may fling him a bone;
He lives o' sich stuff—bones an' owd meawldy books,
At least one would think soa, to judge by his looks.
Yo keep eawt o' th' way on him, foalks, for he's sure
To speak abeawt summat yo'n ne'er yeard befoor;
He's likely to tell yo yo'n brains i' yo'r yead,
An' a soul that'll live when yo'r body's gone dead;
He'll talk about spirit friends hoverin' areawnd,
When yo know they're asleep, fast asleep, deawn i'th' greawnd.

He'll offer to lead yo through nature's sweet beawers,
An' bid yo admire her grand fruitage an' fleawers.
Very grand an' poetical; nice food for kings,
Or bein's 'at flutter abeawt us wi' wings;
But one couldn't weel offer to clothe a bare back,
Or feed hungry bellies wi' stuff o' that mak'.
"Only a poet," like Bloomfield or Burns,
'At may happen amuse yo an' vex yo i' turns;
Neaw charmin' his readers wi' th' thowts fro' his pen,
Thus winnin' their heartiest plaudits, an' then,
It may be th' next minute yo'r filled wi disgust
At some sarcastic hit, or some pointed home-thrust!

"Only a poet"! What moor do yo want?
Some narrow-souled parson to rave an' to rant
Abeawt th' heat an' th' dimensions, an' th' people i' hell,
Till yo fancy 'at th' chap must ha' bin' theer hissel.
Yet there are foalk i' th, world 'at don't think it amiss
To pay hundreds a year for sich twaddle as this;
While others, entitled to love an' respect,
Are treated too often wi' scorn an' neglect!
"Only a Poet," what moor do yo crave,
To sweeten life's journey fro' th' cradle to th' grave?
Which is th' likeliest—think yo—to help us along,—
An owd musty creed, or a good hearty song?

[rayheinrich]

THE LOVERS     -     Morten Søndergaard         Trans: Barbara Haveland and John Irons

I awake in a land where the lovers have seized power. They have introduced laws decreeing
that no one will ever again have to look away, and that orgasms need never come to an end.
Roses function as currency, the insane are worshipped as gods, and the gods are considered
insane. The postal service has been reinstated and the words ‘you’ and ‘I’ are now synonymous.
After the revolution it was decided that broken-hearted lovers should be eliminated for the safety
of those happy in love. When they track me down I immediately surrender. The executioner is a
woman and it is quickly done. It is winter and I have not met you yet.

[Lizzie]

Dulce et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen

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.

Notes:
Latin phrase is from the Roman poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”

[Lizzie]

The White Room
By Charles Simic

The obvious is difficult
To prove. Many prefer
The hidden. I did, too.
I listened to the trees.

They had a secret
Which they were about to
Make known to me,
And then didn’t.

Summer came. Each tree
On my street had its own
Scheherazade. My nights
Were a part of their wild

Storytelling. We were
Entering dark houses,
More and more dark houses
Hushed and abandoned.

There was someone with eyes closed
On the upper floors.
The thought of it, and the wonder,
Kept me sleepless.

The truth is bald and cold,
Said the woman
Who always wore white.
She didn’t leave her room much.

The sun pointed to one or two
Things that had survived
The long night intact,
The simplest things,

Difficult in their obviousness.
They made no noise.
It was the kind of day
People describe as “perfect.”

Gods disguising themselves
As black hairpins? A hand-mirror?
A comb with a tooth missing?
No! That wasn’t it.

Just things as they are,
Unblinking, lying mute
In that bright light,
And the trees waiting for the night.

Great stuff. Thanks for the share.

---

Why Are Your Poems So Dark?

Isn't the moon dark too,  
most of the time?  

And doesn't the white page  
seem unfinished  

without the dark stain  
of alphabets?  

When God demanded light,  
he didn't banish darkness.  

Instead he invented  
ebony and crows  

and that small mole  
on your left cheekbone.  

Or did you mean to ask  
"Why are you sad so often?"  

Ask the moon.  
Ask what it has witnessed.

BY LINDA PASTAN

Loved this one too.

[Lizzie]

Ways to Live


1. INDIA

In India in their lives they happen
again and again, being people or
animals. And if you live well
your next time could be even better.

That's why they often look into your eyes
and you know some far-off story
with them and you in it, and some
animal waiting over at the side.

Who would want to happen just once?
It's too abrupt that way, and
when you're wrong, it's too late
to go back – you've done it forever.

And you can't have that soft look when you
pass, the way they do it in India.


2. HAVING IT BE TOMORROW

Day, holding its lantern before it,
moves over the whole earth slowly
to brighten that edge and push it westward.
Shepherds on upland pastures begin fires
for breakfast, beads of light that extend
miles of horizon. Then it's noon and
coasting toward a new tomorrow.

If you're in on that secret, a new land
will come every time the sun goes
climbing over it, and the welcome of children
will remain every day new in your heart.
Those around you don't have it new,
and they shake their heads turning gray every
morning when the sun comes up. And you laugh.


3. BEING NICE AND OLD

After their jobs are done old people
cackle together. They look back and shiver,
all of that was so dizzying when it happened;
and now if there is any light at all it
knows how to rest on the faces of friends.
And any people you don't like, you just turn
the page a little more and wait while they
find out what time is and begin to bend
lower; or you can turn away
and let them drop off the edge of the world.


4. GOOD WAYS TO LIVE

At night outside it all moves or
almost moves – trees, grass,
touches of wind. The room you have
in the world is ready to change.
Clouds parade by, and stars in their
configurations. Birds from far
touch the fabric around them – you can
feel their wings move. Somewhere under
the earth it waits, that emanation
of all things. It breathes. It pulls you
slowly out through doors or windows
and you spread in the thin halo of night mist.


~William Stafford, one month before he died.

[ellajam]

Nice one, liz.
This one has a great title and says so much for a little poem. The breaks are so strong, it makes me think hard about
"by luck into a little pocket out of"

Interesting.  

After Arguing against the Contention That Art Must Come from Discontent
BY WILLIAM E. STAFFORD
Whispering to each handhold, “I'll be back,”  
I go up the cliff in the dark. One place  
I loosen a rock and listen a long time
till it hits, faint in the gulf, but the rush
of the torrent almost drowns it out, and the wind—
I almost forgot the wind: it tears at your side  
or it waits and then buffets; you sag outward. . . .

I remember they said it would be hard. I scramble  
by luck into a little pocket out of
the wind and begin to beat on the stones
with my scratched numb hands, rocking back and forth
in silent laughter there in the dark—
“Made it again!” Oh how I love this climb!
—the whispering to stones, the drag, the weight  
as your muscles crack and ease on, working  
right. They are back there, discontent,
waiting to be driven forth. I pound
on the earth, riding the earth past the stars:  
“Made it again! Made it again!”

[Todd]

Gorgeous poem, Lizzie!

[rayheinrich]

[Lizzie]

BIBLICAL ALSO-RANS


Hanoch, Pallu, Hezron, Carmi,
Jemuel, Ohad, Zohar, Shuni:
one Genesis mention's all you got.

Ziphion, Muppim, Arodi: lost
in a list even the most devout skip over
like small towns on the road to L.A.

How tall were you, Shillim?
What was your favorite color, Ard?
Did you love your wife, lob?

Not even her name survives.
Adam, Eve, Abel, Cain--
these are the stars crowds surge to see.

Each hour thousands of Josephs,
Jacobs, Benjamins are born.
How many Oholibamahs? How many

Mizzahs draw first breath today?
Gatam, Kenaz, Reuel? Sidemen
in the band. Waiters who bring

the Perignon and disappear.
Yet they loved dawn's garnet light
as much as Moses did. They drank

wine with as much delight.
I thought my life would line me up
with Samuel, Issac, Joshua.

Instead I stand with Basemath, Hoglah,
Ammihud. Theirs are the names
I honor; theirs, the deaths I feel,

their children's tears loud as any
on the corpse of Abraham, their smiles
as missed, the earth as desolate

without them: Pebbles on a hill.
Crumbs carried off by ants.
Jeush. Dishan. Nahath. Shammah.


~by Charles Harper Webb
from LIVER (University of Wisconsin Press)

[Todd]

At first, I didn't think I would like the poem because it reminded me of one of those genealogy lists. He sold me by the time we got to the waiter and dawn's garnet light. I absolutely loved the final strophe.

[Lizzie]

At first, I didn't think I would like the poem because it reminded me of one of those genealogy lists. He sold me by the time we got to the waiter and dawn's garnet light. I absolutely loved the final strophe.

I was skimming over the names in the list like it was one of those genealogy lists. It's neat to have that "aha" moment when you realize that this is part of what the poem's about, and then you have that "I see what you did there" moment.

The metaphors are my favorite parts, and I also love the two in the last strophe. I like how he includes full stops between the names in the last line to force the reader to slow down.

[Lizzie]

Lawrence


On two occasions in the past twelve months
I have failed, when someone at a party
spoke of him with a dismissive scorn
to stand up for D. H. Lawrence,

a man who burned like an acetylene torch
from one end to the other of his life.
These individuals, whose relationship to literature
is approximately that of a tree shredder

to stands of old-growth forest,
these people leaned back in their chairs,
bellies full of dry white wine and the ovum of some foreign fish,
and casually dropped his name

the way pygmies with their little poison spears
strut around the carcass of a fallen elephant.
"O Elephant," they say,
"you are not so big and brave today!"

It's a bad day when people speak of their superiors
with a contempt they haven't earned,
and it's a sorry thing when certain other people

don't defend the great dead ones
who have opened up the world before them.
And though, in the catalogue of my betrayals,
this is a fairly minor entry,

I resolve, if the occasion should recur,
to uncheck my tongue and say: "I love the spectacle
of maggots condescending to a corpse,"
or, "You should be so lucky in your brainy, bloodless life

as to deserve to lift
just one of D. H. Lawrence's urine samples
to your arid psychobiographic
theory-tainted lips."

Or maybe I'll just take the shortcut
between the spirit and the flesh,
and punch someone in the face,
because human beings haven't come that far

in their effort to subdue the body,
and we still walk around like zombies
in our dying, burning world,
able to do little more

than fight, and fuck, and crow,
something Lawrence wrote about
in such a manner
as to make us seem magnificent.


 ~Tony Hoagland, from Ploughshares

[Todd]

Lawrence


It's a bad day when people speak of their superiors
with a contempt they haven't earned,

That was a fun read all the way through. I haven't read enough of this poet.