"This cool, grey-laddered girl,
these jewels, this bowl of quivering silver pearls."

#TodaysPoem #poetry #NationalPoetryMonth @poetry
The Short-toed Eagle and the Ladder Snake consider each other, unseen by James Mcconachie (2025 Bad Lilies) https://www.badlilies.uk/james-mcconachie

I loathed you, Spoon River.
I tried to rise above you,
I was ashamed of you.
I despised you
As the place of my nativity.
And there in Rome, among the artists,
Speaking Italian, speaking French,
I seemed to myself at times to be free
Of every trace of my origin.
I seemed to be reaching the heights of art
And to breathe the air that the masters breathed
And to see the world with their eyes.
But still they’d pass my work and say:
“What are you driving at, my friend?
Sometimes the face looks like Apollo’s
At others it has a trace of Lincoln’s.”
There was no culture, you know, in Spoon River
And I burned with shame and held my peace.
And what could I do, all covered over
And weighted down with western soil
Except aspire, and pray for another
Birth in the world, with all of Spoon River
Rooted out of my soul?

---
From Edgar Lee Masters, *Spoon River Anthology*

Spending some time with Masters, Sandburg, and early 20th c. midwestern writers in my Illinois History class today!

#EdgarLeeMasters #TodaysPoem #Poetry

"Whatever it was that failed,
its echo haunts us
with a sound like shed skins
blown through abandoned corridors."

#TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry
Cycle by George Amabile from Seeing Things (2025 Signature Editions) https://www.theseaboardreview.ca/p/seeing-things-by-george-amabile

"You who care for the faceless
I who have lost my face
Bat grazes the moon

At night she woke. There was a bat in her room."

#TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry
from The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (2025 Knopf Canada) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loneliness_of_Sonia_and_Sunny

"I'll multiply and I'll increase
As I always have---by mere caprice;
For I am a queen and I am a bee,
I'm devil-may-care and I'm fancy-free"

#TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry
Song of the Queen Bee by E.B. White (1945 The @NewYorker) http://www.badbeekeeping.com/ebwhite.htm

"The dye lots were registered in memory:
appleskin, chocolate, porcelain pan,
the stitches remembered like faded rhymes:
pineapple, sunflower, window pane, shell."

#TodaysPoem #poetry
Crochet by Jan Mordenski from Quiet Music: A Plainsong Reader (1995 Plainsong Press) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53578/crochet

I love a wild daffodil,
the one that grows
where she’s planted—
along a wooded highway
left to her own abandon,
but not abandoned.
Her big yellow head
leaning toward or away
from the sun. Not excluded
but exclusive, her trumpet
heralds no one, not even
the Canada geese—
their long-necked honks
announcing their journey.
She’ll be here less
than a season, grace us
with green slender stems,
strong enough to withstand
rain and spring’s early chill.
And when she goes,
what remains she’ll bury
deep inside the bulb of her,
take a part of me with her
until she returns.
~~ 'For Ella' by January Gill O'Neil from 'The Wonder of Small Things'

#FridayPoem #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

"soon she will find
the Garden of Eden
where she will pluck
the thornless roses to
offer a god who will
not shame her for
her desire to know"

#TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry
Not made of rib, but ocean by @AmandaEarl (2026 League of Canadian Poets) https://poets.ca/not-made-of-rib-but-ocean-by-amanda-earl/

"Come friend, neighbor,
you, come set the garden on fire
with all our hard-earned years, tender labor
of being here, ceaseless & volcanic
making of being here, together."

#TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry
Set the Garden on Fire by Chen Chen (2014 Split This Rock) https://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/set-the-garden-on-fire

"Did
the world exist before I was born?
Or am I just a character
in your imagination, you whose
birthday marks the beginning
of the world?"

#TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry
Delmore Schwartz by Stuart Ross (2026 Newpoetry.ca) https://newpoetry.ca/2026/03/23/delmore-schwartz/