Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fiy
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:—
So this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.

The Yellow Bowl by Rachel Contreni Flynn : American Life in Poetry #266 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laurea

© Ted Kooser

The great American poet William Carlos Williams taught us that if a poem can capture a moment in life, and bathe it in the light of the poet’s close attention, and make it feel fresh and new, that’s enough, that’s adequate, that’s good. Here is a poem like that by Rachel Contreni Flynn, who lives in Illinois.

The Sisters' Tragedy

© Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Both were young, in life's rich summer yet;
And one was dark, with tints of violet
In hair and eyes, and one was blond as she
Who rose-a second daybreak-from the sea,
Gold-tressed and azure-eyed. In that lone place,
Like dusk and dawn, they sat there face to face.

The Lawyers' Ways

© Paul Laurence Dunbar

I've been list'nin' to them lawyers

In the court house up the street,

The Life of Lincoln West

© Gwendolyn Brooks

Ugliest little boy
that everyone ever saw.
That is what everyone said.

To James H.

© Sydney Thompson Dobell

Without Life's toil to win Life's earthly prize

What was thy mystery, oh, early Dead?

There was an Old Man of Thermopylæ

© Edward Lear

There was an old man of Thermopylæ,
Who never did anything properly;
But they said, "If you choose, To boil eggs in your shoes,
You shall never remain in Thermopylæ."

The Layers

© Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

To The Clouds

© George MacDonald

Through the unchanging heaven, as ye have sped,

Speed onward still, a strange wild company,

The Valley Of Fear

When close to that Valley your footsteps shall fare,
Turn, turn to the Roadway of Prayer-
The beautiful Roadway of Prayer.

"Those must be masts of ships the gazer sees"

Those must be masts of ships the gazer sees
On through the little gap in the park trees
So far away that seeing almost fails.
Those must be masts, the lovely masts of ships

The Painter

© John Ashbery

Sitting between the sea and the buildings
He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait.
But just as children imagine a prayer
Is merely silence, he expected his subject
To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,
Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.

The Modern Mother

Oh what a kiss
With filial passion overcharged is this!
To this misgiving breast
The child runs, as a child ne'er ran to rest
Upon the light heart and the unoppressed.

To Whistler, American

© Ezra Pound

On the loan exhibit of his paintings at the Tate Gallery.
You also, our first great,
Had tried all ways;
Tested and pried and worked in many fashions,
And this much gives me heart to play the game.