The Poetry Playground

Up-Hill

 Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
  Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
  From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?
  A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
  You cannot miss that inn. 

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
  Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
  They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
  Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
  Yea, beds for all who come.

~ Christina Rossetti 

What We Want

What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names-
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don’t remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
Is is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.

~ Linda Pastan 

The Thinker

My wife’s new pink slippers 
have gay pom-poms.
There is not a spot or a stain
on their satin toes or their sides.
All night they lie together
under the bed’s edge.
Shivering I catch sight of them
and smile, in the morning.
Later I watch them
descending the stair,
hurrying through doors
and round the table,
moving stiffly
with a shake of their gay pom-poms!
And I talk to them
in my secret mind
out of pure happiness.

~ William Carlos Williams 

Another Poem About My Father

I don’t get poetry either. Mostly I get cavities,
ad mail. Once, I got eleven hundred dollars
in small change from my father for Christmas.
He said, you’ve got to work for your money-
meaning you’ve got to haul it through six feet 
of snow to the bank, good luck, here’s a bag.
My father is more like a poem than most poems
are. He once tucked a living loon into his coat
and brought it home to amuse my mother who
loves birds, especially surprised-sounding birds,
especially owls. My nostalgia receptors zigzag
wildly through me when I think of my father
pushing his metal detector across all the parks,
school yards, and riverbanks of this great nation,
waving it back and forth – like some sort of
yaywho, my mother would say – until it beeps
solemnly above a nickel. With a butterknife
he cuts such slender metaphors from the earth.

~ Kayla Czaga 

I take your T-shirt to bed again . . . 
 
and by now it has almost lost its scent-
your scent, as when you were here and turned
towards the wall while I pressed my body
into your body and sighed, “You smell like candy”
into your T-shirted back. Yes, the smell is yours
the shirt warmed by your lean torso, tufted
and delicious. I’ve washed my clothes in your soap,
but that wasn’t it – there must be something sweet your pores
pour forth. In three days you will be here and we will drink
from and with each other, sleep in close quarters,
naked, awake to heat and singing cells and slickness. But now,
too tired even to please myself, I breathe the shirt that covers
my pillow and dream – our yes and yes and yes opening and opening –

~ Amy Lemmon 

 Elevator Music

A tune with no more substance than the air,
performed on underwater instruments,
is proper to this short lift from the earth.
It hovers as we draw into ourselves
and turn our reverent eyes toward the lights
that count us to our various destinies.
We’re all in this toghether, the song says,
and later we’ll descend. The melody
is like a name we don’t recall just now
that still keeps on insisting it is there

~ Henry Taylor

From you have I been absent in the spring (Sonnet 98)

From you have I been absent in the spring,

When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,

Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,

That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him,

Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell

Of different flowers in odor and in hue,

Could make me any summer’s story tell,

Or from the proud lap pluck them where they grew.

Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,

Nor praise the deep vermillion in the rose;

They were but sweet, but figures of delight,

Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.

   Yet seemed it winter still, and, you away,

   As with your shadow I with these did play.

~ William Shakespeare