The Poetry Playground

Imaginary Conversation
You tell me to live each day
as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen
where before coffee I complain
of the day ahead – that obstacle race
of minutes and hours,
grocery stores and doctors.

But why the last? I ask. Why not
live each day as if it were the first –
all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing
her eyes awake that first morning,
the sun coming up
like an ingenue in the east?

You grind the coffee
with the small roar of a mind
trying to clear itself. I set
the table, glance out the window
where dew has baptized every
living surface.

~ Linda Pastan

Regenerate

Don’t be afraid of the process
The nights you kept yourself awake
Tossing and turning and shedding
Fifteen gallons of saltwater
Was only a way of exfoliating
Executing old skin cells
In preparation for a birth

After a few years you will be new
To walk the earth untouched
By the ghosts you thought
Would never let go

~ John Qeuor

April

The roofs are shining from the rain,
The sparrows twitter as they fly,
And with a windy April grace
The little clouds go by.

Yet the back-yards are bare and brown
With only one unchanging tree–
I could not be sure of Spring
Save that it sings in me.

~ Sara Teasdale

A Broken View
Newcomers on the hill have cut the trees
That broke their view. Now they have all the west
From north in an unbroken sweep to south.
Outdoors or out of windows looking westward
Anywhere there is the west, the view,
An afternoon ago we stood with them
And saw their view. Hills beyond hills shading
From green to blue and clouds from white to blue.
Open places of pasture on the hills
And sky among the clouds. It was enough
For anyone to love for all a lifetime.

Yet we were thinking (though we didn’t say so
And wouldn’t of course have said so ever to them
Or even wished to) how we loved a broken
View better, a view broken by trees,
Under and over and through the branches of trees.
A view that didn’t give you everything
At once or anything too easily.
One that changed as you went from window to window
And changed again as you went from month to month,
Closing in in spring and opening
In fall.

~ Robert Francis

Rain
Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

~ Raymond Carver

How could I have known I would need to remember your laughter,
the way it ricocheted — a boomerang flung
from your throat, stilling the breathless air.

How you were luminous in it. Your smile. Your hair
tossed back, flaming. Everyone around you aglow.

How I wanted to live in it those times it ignited us
into giggles, doubling us over aching and unmoored

for precious minutes from our twin scars–
the thorned secrets our tongues learned too well

to carry. It is impossible to imagine you gone,
dear one, your laugh lost to some silence I can’t breach,

from which you will not return.

~ Lauren K. Alleyne

Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

~ William Ernest Henley

Why I Wake Early

 
Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety–

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light–
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

~ Mary Oliver

Sowing
It was a perfect day
For sowing; just
As sweet and dry was the ground
As tobacco-dust.
I tasted deep the hour
Between the far
Owl’s chuckling first soft cry
And the first star.
A long stretched hour it was;
Nothing undone
Remained; the early seeds
All safely sown.
And now, hark at the rain,
Windless and light,
Half a kiss, half a tear.
Saying good-night.
~ Edward Thomas