But these maneuverings to avoid
The touching of hands,
These shifts to keep the eyes employed
On objects more or less neutral
(As honor, for time being, commands)
Will hardly prevent their downfall.

A Birthday Candle

© Donald Justice

Thirty today, I saw
The trees flare briefly like
The candles on a cake,
As the sun went down the sky,
A momentary flash,
Yet there was time to wish

Pantoum Of The Great Depression

© Donald Justice

Our lives avoided tragedy
Simply by going on and on,
Without end and with little apparent meaning.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.

Closed Gentian Distances

© James Schuyler

A nothing day full of
wild beauty and the
timer pings. Roll up
the silver off the bay

Dohas II (with translation)

© Kabir

Jab Tun Aaya Jagat Mein, Log Hanse Tu Roye
Aise Karni Na Kari, Pache Hanse Sab Koye
[When you were born in this world
Everyone laughed while you cried

The Princess (The Conclusion)

© Alfred Tennyson

Last little Lilia, rising quietly,
Disrobed the glimmering statue of Sir Ralph
From those rich silks, and home well-pleased we went.

To An Aged Cut-Up, II

© Franklin Pierce Adams

Chloris lay off the flapper stuff;
What's fit for Pholoë, a fluff,
Is not for Ibycus's wife-
A woman at your time of life!

In Memory of John Lothrop Motley

© William Cullen Bryant

SLEEP, Motley, with the great of ancient days,

Who wrote for all the years that yet shall be!

Dream Song 265: I don't know one damned butterfly from another

I don't know one damned butterfly from another
my ignorance of the stars is formidable,
also of dogs & ferns
except that around my house one destroys the other
When I reckon up my real ignorance, pal,
I mumble "many returns"-

Earlier Poems : An April Day

When the warm sun, that brings
Seed-time and harvest, has returned again,
'T is sweet to visit the still wood, where springs
The first flower of the plain.

Christmas-Eve

I.

OUT of the little chapel I burst

The Ah Goo Tongue

The queerest languages known to man,
Sanscrit, Hebrew, Hindoostan,
Are all translated and made as free
And comprehensive as A B C.

The Transfiguration

© Edwin Muir

So from the ground we felt that virtue branch

Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists

The Seven Of Pentacles

© Marge Piercy

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.