The Poetry Playground

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

Under Stars
The sleep of this night deepens
because I have walked coatless from the house
carrying the white envelope.
All night it will say one name
in its little tin house by the roadside.
I have raised the metal flag
so its shadow under the roadlamp
leaves an imprint on the rain-heavy bushes.
Now I will walk back
thinking of the few lights still on
in the town a mile away.
In the yellowed light of a kitchen
the millworker has finished his coffee,
his wife has laid out the white slices of bread
on the counter. Now while the bed they have left
is still warm, I will think of you, you
who are so far away
you have caused me to look up at the stars.
Tonight they have not moved
from childhood, those games played after dark.
Again I walk into the wet grass
toward the starry voices. Again, I
am the found one, intimate, returned
by all I touch on the way.
~ Tess Gallagher

Tree
It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

The great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books —

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

~ Jane Hirshfield