No longer at home in the world
and I imagine
never again at home in the world.

Not in cemeteries or bogs
churning with bullfrogs.
Or outside the old pickle shop.
I once made myself
at home on that street,

and the street after that,
and the boulevard. The avenue.
I don’t need to explain it to you.

It seems wrong
to curl now within the confines
of a poem. You can’t hide
from what you made
inside what you made

or so I’m told.

~~ 'Curl' by Diane Seuss from 'Modern Poetry'
#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry #books

If i can't do
what i want to do
then my job is to not
do what i don't want
to do
It's not the same thing
but it's the best i can
do

If i can't have
what i want...then
my job is to want
what i've got
and be satisfied
that at least there
is something more to want

Since i can't go
where i need
to go... then i must... go
where the signs point
though always understanding
parallel movement
isn't lateral

When i can't express
what i really feel
i practice feeling
what i can express
and none of it is equal
I know
but that's why mankind
alone among the animals
learns to cry
-- 'Choices' by Nikki Giovanni

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

(Art credit: Natalia Esanu)

—Early September

scatters beneath
the box elder

like a spilled
alphabet

-- by Robin Walter from 'Little Mercy'
#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

They have carried the mahogany chair and the cane rocker
out under the lilac bush,
and my father and mother darkly sit there, in black clothes.
Our clapboard house stands fast on its hill,
my doll lies in her wicker pram
gazing at western Massachusetts.
This was our world.
I could remake each shaft of grass
feeling its rasp on my fingers,
draw out the map of every lilac leaf
or the net of veins on my father's 
grief-tranced hand. 

Out of my head, half-bursting,
still filling, the dream condenses--
shadows, crystals, ceilings, meadows, globes of dew.
Under the dull green of the lilacs, out in the light
carving each spoke of the pram, the turned porch-pillars,
under high early-summer clouds,
I am Effie, visible and invisible,
remembering and remembered.

-- 'Mourning Picture' by Adrienne Rich (written in response to Elmer's painting)
#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

(Art credit: Edwin Romanzo Elmer)

I read your poetry once more,
poems written by a rich man, knowing all,
and by a beggar, homeless,
an emigrant, alone.

You always wanted to go
beyond poetry, above it, soaring,
and also lower, to where our region
begins, modest and timid.

Sometimes your tone
transforms us or a moment,
we believe—truly—
that every day is sacred,

that poetry—how to put it?—
makes life rounder,
fuller, prouder, unashamed
of perfect formulation.

But evening arrives,
I lay my book aside,
and the city’s ordinary din resumes—
somebody coughs, someone cries and curses.

-- 'Reading Milosz' by Adam Zagajewski, trans. Clare Cavanagh from 'The FSG Poetry Anthology' edit. by Jonathan Galassi, Robyn Creswell
#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

(Art credit: Giancario Manneschi)

Rain has eaten 1/4 of me

yet I believe
against all evidence

these raindrops
are my letters of recommendation

here is a man worth falling on.
-- 'Letters' by Ilya Kaminsky from 'You Are Here', edit. by Ada Limón

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air--
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat--
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.
-- 'Heat' by H.D.

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @bookstodon

(Art credit: Twyla Gettert)

At thirty-six
I finally stopped wanting to shower—
a caricature,
convinced I couldn’t do that right,
either.

#VerseThursday

I expect you’ve seen the footage: elephants,
finding the bones of one of their own kind
dropped by the wayside, picked clean by scavengers
and the sun, then untidily left there,
decide to do something about it.

But what, exactly? They can’t, of course,
reassemble the old elephant magnificence;
they can’t even make a tidier heap. But they can
hook up bones with their trunks and chuck them
this way and that way. So they do.

And their scattering has an air
of deliberate ritual, ancient and necessary.
Their great size, too, makes them the very
embodiment of grief, while the play of their trunks
lends sprezzatura.

Elephants puzzling out
the anagram of their own anatomy,
elephants at their abstracted lamentations—
may their spirit guide me as I place
my own sad thoughts in new, hopeful arrangements.
-- 'A Scattering' by Christopher Reid from 'The FSG Poetry Anthology'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry