The Poetry Playground

So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore —
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
~ Langston Hughes

There Will Come Soft Rains

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

~ Sara Teasdale

Another Spring Poem

The lawn is filling with tiny flowers, almost
invisible like the night’s first dozen stars:
violet and sorrel, clover and strawberry,
and the white corollas no bigger than commas
I have never been able to name.
I don’t know why it’s taken so long to notice them
or how many days they might have been here.
Spring has surprised me once again,
as if an orchestra had assembled in the living room
while I fiddled with bills or read the news.
Even the mushrooms — squirrel-bitten,
glistening with slime, like eggs
half-risen in the maple duff — insist
on a kind of awe if I’m still enough to listen.
Soon the yard will be crowded with lilac and dogwood,
the fat half-dollars of the dandelions,
and there will be no more mistaking
something for nothing. Beauty and the need
for beauty will be full-blown, insistemt
as the sun rising right now
in this glory of pink and parting clouds.

~ Charles Rafferty

Good and Bad Luck

Good luck is the gayest of all gay girls;
Long in one place she will not stay:
Back from your brow she strokes the curls,
Kisses you quick and flies away.

But Madame Bad Luck soberly comes
And stays – no fancy has she for flitting;
Snatches of true-love songs she hums,
And sits by your bed, and brings her knitting.

~ John Hay

Crows in a Strong Wind

Off go the crows from the roof.
The crows can’t hold on.
They might as well
Be perched on an oil slick.

Such an awkward dance,
These gentlemen
In their spottled-black coats.
Such a tipsy dance,

As if they didn’t know where they were.
Such a humorous dance,
As they try to set things right,
As the wind reduces them.

Such a sorrowful dance.
How embarrassing is love
When it goes wrong

In front of everyone.

~ Cornelius Eady

(Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, NY and attended Monroe Community College and Empire State College. He has taught at many fine institutions including Sarah Lawrence College and Notre Dame).

Imported Days

some days, like birthdays, are imported
from france, honolulu and bangkok.
you stretch them out by minutes
and enjoy every piece
while buildings bury themselves in the ground.
you row in and out of a mailman,
a cosmic mailman
from the african or indian market of birthdays.
the sky of this has a hole in the middle,
it pours feasts!
never again beyond into the banal

~ Andrei Cordescu