Life poems

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Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl

© John Greenleaf Whittier

To the Memory of the Household It Describes

This Poem is Dedicated by the Author

The Waste Carpet

© William Matthews

O California, sportswear
and defense contracts, gasses that induce
deference, high school girls
with their own cars, we wanted
to love you without pain.

I know that He exists. (365)

© Emily Dickinson

I know that He exists.
Somewhere – in silence –
He has hid his rare life
From our gross eyes.

Ellen West

© Frank Bidart

I love sweets,—
heaven
would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream ...
But my true self

September Notebook: Stories

© Robert Hass

Driving up 80 in the haze, they talked and talked.
(Smoke in the air shimmering from wildfires.)
His story was sad and hers was roiled, troubled.

What can a yellow glove mean in a world of motorcars and governments?
I was small, like everyone. Life was a string of precautions: Don’t kiss the squirrel before you bury him, don’t suck candy, pop balloons, drop watermelons, watch TV. When the new gloves appeared one Christmas, tucked in soft tissue, I heard it trailing me: Don’t lose the yellow gloves.
I was small, there was too much to remember. One day, waving at a stream—the ice had cracked, winter chipping down, soon we would sail boats and roll into ditches—I let a glove go. Into the stream, sucked under the street. Since when did streets have mouths? I walked home on a desperate road. Gloves cost money. We didn’t have much. I would tell no one. I would wear the yellow glove that was left and keep the other hand in a pocket. I knew my mother’s eyes had tears they had not cried yet, I didn’t want to be the one to make them flow. It was the prayer I spoke secretly, folding socks, lining up donkeys in windowsills. To be good, a promise made to the roaches who scouted my closet at night. If you don’t get in my bed, I will be good. And they listened. I had a lot to fulfill.
The months rolled down like towels out of a machine. I sang and drew and fattened the cat. Don’t scream, don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fight—you could hear it anywhere. A pebble could show you how to be smooth, tell the truth. A field could show how to sleep without walls. A stream could remember how to drift and change—next June I was stirring the stream like a soup, telling my brother dinner would be ready if he’d only hurry up with the bread, when I saw it. The yellow glove draped on a twig. A muddy survivor. A quiet flag.

The Third Hour of the Night

© Frank Bidart

When the eye

The Geranium

© Roger McGough

In the close covert of a grove

By nature formed for scenes of love,

The Princess: Tears, Idle Tears

© Alfred Tennyson

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

The Flurry

© Sharon Olds

When we talk about when to tell the kids,

we are so together, so concentrated.

Normalization

© Czeslaw Milosz

They had a saying then: “Even monsters
have their mates.” So perhaps they learned to tolerate their partners’
flaws, trusting that theirs would be forgiven in turn.

Delia Rexroth

© Kenneth Rexroth

died June 1916

Under your illkempt yellow roses,

['Joy of my life, full oft for loving you']

Joy of my life, full oft for loving you

I bless my lot, that was so lucky placed:

Sun and Moon

© Jane Kenyon

For Donald Clark
Drugged and drowsy but not asleep
I heard my blind roommate's daughter
helping her with her meal:
“What's that? Squash?”
“No. It's spinach.”