The Poetry Playground

To My Seventeen-Year-Old Self

Your friends are sniffing glue
from a paper bag
in the back of an Impala
tooling around Niles
and Morton Grove
looking for something 
to escape 
whatever boredom
or childhood damage
everyone suffers,
but don’t get high 
with them
in a sputtering car
that your girlfriend
refuses to enter,
don’t lie to her 
after she moves away 
and lie down with her friend,
don’t sob in the locker room
after the game
or lose your mind
from repeated blows 
to the head
on the football field
at Niles West High School,
I mean whatever locker 
you hit or don’t hit 
in desperation
born of the suburbs,
just stand and wait
for the unexpected night
when poetry climbs through
the unlocked window
in the basement 
of the split-level house 
on Sherwin Avenue 
and sits down at your desk.

~ Edward Hirsch

Leaving and Leaving You

When I leave your postcode and your commuting station,
When I leave undone the things that we planned to do
You may feel you have been left by association
But there is leaving and there is leaving you.

When i leave your town and the club that you belong to, 
When I leave without much warning or much regret
Remember, there’s doing wrong and there’s doing wrong to
You, which I’ll never do and I haven’t yet,

And when I a have gone, remember that in weighing
Everything up, from love to a cheaper rent,
You were all the reasons I thought of staying
And you were none of the reasons why I went

And although I leave your sight and I leave your setting
And our separation is soon to be a fact,
Though you stand beside what I’m leaving and forgetting, 
I’m not leaving you, not if motive makes the act.

~ Sophie Hannah

The thirsty earth soaks up the rain,
And drinks and gapes for drink again;
The plants suck in the earth, and are
With constant drinking fresh and fair;
The sea itself (which one would think
Should have but little need of drink)
Drinks ten thousand rivers up,
So filled that they o’erflow the cup.
The busy Sun (and one would guess
By ‘s drunken fiery face no less)
Drinks up the sea, and when he’s done,
The Moon and Stars drink up the Sun:
They drink and dance by their own light,
They drink and revel all the night:
Nothing in Nature’s sober found,
But an eternal health goes round,
Fill up the bowl then, fill it high,
Fill all the glasses there — for why
Should every creature drink but I?
Why, man of morals, tell me why?

~ Abraham Cowley

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all 
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

~ Gary Snyder

The Guests

Our house was strewn with 
people whom no on claimed 
to know, people who had

been there for thirty years
or more. One might show
himself at dinner, cobwebbed

and thinner than the dead.
No one would speak of it,
unless the guest became

unpleasant, and then it was 
in gestures, because our
voices were saved for something

better. Our dry lips flecked
with foam, our hammering hearts
out-waited our guests, and 

now, at last, we are alone.

~ James Tate

Search Party

By now I know most of the faces
that will appear beside me as
long as there are still images
I know at last what I would choose
the next time if there ever was 
a time again I know the days 
that open in the dark like this
I do not know where Maoli is

I know the summer surfaces
of bodies and the tips of voices
like stars out of their distances
and where the music turns to noise
I know the bargains in the news
rules whole languages formulas
wisdom that I will never use
I do not know where Maoli is

I know whatever one may lose
somebody will be there who says
what it will be all right to miss
and what is verging on excess
I know the shadows of the house
routes that lead out to no traces
many of his empty places
I do not know where Maoli is

You that see now with your own eyes
all that there is as you suppose
though I could stare through broken glass
and show you where the morning goes
though I could follow to their close
the sparks of an exploding species
and see where the world ends in ice
I would not know where Maoli is

~ W.S. Merwin

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.

~ Linda Pastan

Up on the Roof

You wonder why it is they write of it, sing of it,
till suddenly you’re there, nearest you can get
to flying for jumping and you’re alone, at last,
the air bright. Remembering this, I go 
with my too-light jacket up to the sixth floor,
out onto the roof and I freeze under the stars
till he comes with my too-heavy jacket, heavier
and heavier, as he tries to muffle my foolishness.
A blanket on a fire (he says) and it’s true
I am left black, bruised a little, smouldering.

You can sit with a book up there and reel in
life with someone else’s bait. You can let your eyes
skim the river, bridges, banks, a seagull’s parabola.
At night you can watch the sky, those strange galaxies
like so many cracks in the ceiling spilling secrets
from the flat above. You can breathe. You can dream.

But he turns to me, as you’d coax a child
in the back of a stuffy car: we could play I-Spy?
I look at the black and blue above and the only 
letter I find is ‘S’. I cannot name
the dust of starlight, the pinheaded planets,
but I can join the dots to make a farming tool,
the belt of a god: all any of us needs is work,
mystery, a little time alone up on the roof.

~ Maura Dooley