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The Portraits: Wild Africa

Recently I found a photographer who’s photos of african animas or more like portraits than the usual pictures you see. The photographer is Nick Brandt and he says of his “. . . images are unashamedly idyllic and romantic, a kind of enchanted Africa. You can see a very nice collection of his photos at [...]

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The List

By Naomi Shihab Nye
A man told me he had calculated
the exact number of books
he would be able to read before he died
by figuring the average number
of books he read per month
and his probable earth span,
(averaging how long
his dad and grandpa had lived,
adding on a few years since he
exercised more than they did).
Then he made a [...]

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Poverty

By Pablo Neruda
Ah you don’t want to,
you’re scared
of poverty,
you don’t want
to go to the market with worn-out shoes
and come back with the same old dress.
My love, we are not fond
as the rich would like us to be,
of misery. We
shall extract it like an evil tooth
that up to now has bitten the heart of man.
But I [...]

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I Shall Be Released

by Kevin Young
What we love
will leave us
or is it
we leave
what we love,
I forget—
Today, belly
full enough
to walk the block
after all week
too cold
outside to smile—
I think of you, warm
in your underground room
reading the book
of bone. It’s hard going—
your body a dead
language—
I’ve begun
to feel, if not
hope then what
comes just after—
or before—
Let’s not call it
regret, but
this weight,
or weightlessness,
or just
plain [...]

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Amaryllis

by Ted Kooser
A flower needs to be this size
to conceal the winter window,
and this color, the red
of a Fiat with the top down,
to impress us, dull as we’ve grown.
Months ago the gigantic onion of a bulb
half above the soil
stuck out its green tongue
and slowly, day by day,
the flower itself entered our world,
closed, like hands that [...]

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Love In Black And White

by Bianca Rossini with photographs by Michael Kenna

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Children in a Field

by Angela Shaw
They don’t wade in so much as they are taken.
Deep in the day, in the deep of the field,
every current in the grasses whispers hurry
hurry, every yellow spreads its perfume
like a rumor, impelling them further on.
It is the way of girls. It is the sway
of their dresses in the summer trance-
light, their bare [...]

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Silent Music

by Floyd Skloot
My wife wears headphones as she plays
Chopin etudes in the winter light.
Singing random notes, she sways
in and out of shadow while night
settles. The keys she presses make a soft
clack, the bench creaks when her weight shifts,
golden cotton fabric ripples across
her shoulders, and the sustain pedal clicks.
This is the hidden melody I know
so well, [...]

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New Water

by Sharon Chmielarz
All those years–almost a hundred–
the farm had hard water.
Hard orange. Buckets lined in orange.
Sink and tub and toilet, too,
once they got running water.
And now, in less than a lifetime,
just by changing the well’s location,
in the same yard, mind you,
the water’s soft, clear, delicious to drink.
All those years to shake your head over.
Look how [...]

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They Sit Together on the Porch

by Wendell Berry
They sit together on the porch, the dark
Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.
Their supper done with, they have washed and dried
The dishes–only two plates now, two glasses,
Two knives, two forks, two spoons–small work for two.
She sits with her hands folded in her lap,
At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak,
And [...]

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Fifty People, One Question

It’s a simple question in London…

It’s a simple question in Brooklyn…

It’s a simple, but different question in New York…

Now go ahead and ask your self these same questions: they’re not always so simple…
Share your answers by leaving your answers in the comments.

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A Body Distant Brought Near

by Kathleen Adcock
Sitting on the moon’s rim
all that can be seen
is her mountains, flatland,
a pale asphalt.
Tonight
you pull me from my
poems.
We view a new crescent
from our roof.
You tweak the lens
of your telescope,
steer me into
the ocular
where in the black velvet void,
the moon’s inner arc
is a filigree
of bright white lace.

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Tell Yourself

by Mark Strand; read by Mary Louise Parker.
And when you done watching and listening take some time to browse all the nooks and crannys of PBS’s Poetry Everywhere.

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Flirtation

By Rita Dove – The first African-American woman to be named Poet Laureate of the United States
After all, there’s no need
to say anything
at first. An orange, peeled
and quartered, flares
like a tulip on a wedgewood plate
Anything can happen.
Outside the sun
has rolled up her rugs
and night strewn salt
across the sky. My heart
is humming a tune
I haven’t heard [...]

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“Since why to love I can allege no cause”

by Roger Mitchell
“Since why to love I can allege no cause,”
I will love instead, leaving reasons
to better minds than mine, those for whom laws
create allowance for the seasons
of feeling. I cannot create what creates
me, unless in loving, love begets love,
though in begetting that, what first mates
with love to get that which it wants more of?
And [...]

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A SONNET FOR NAPALM

by H. PALMER HALL
“Tell me something,” she says.  “Do any flowers look
just like that, those blossoms of black, orange, red?”
She points at the screen, napalm flowering in the dawn.
“Some strange beauty from far enough not to feel
or smell, riots of deep embers glowing like fierce clouds?”
He nods, cannot find the words, remembers that
one time. That [...]

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Word

by Madeleine L’Engle‏
I, who live by words, am wordless when
I try my words in prayer. All language turns
To Silence.
Prayer will take my words and then
Reveal their emptiness. The stilled voice learns
To hold its peace, listen with the heart
To silence that is joy, is adoration.
The self is shattered, all words torn apart
In this strange patterned time [...]

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Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward

by John Donne
Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,
The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other Spheares, by being growne
Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey:
Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit
For their first mover, and are whirld [...]

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Find Work

By Rhina P. Espaillat
I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—
Life’s little duties do—precisely
As the very least
Were infinite—to me—
—Emily Dickinson, #443
My mother’s mother, widowed very young
of her first love, and of that love’s first fruit,
moved through her father’s farm, her country tongue
and country heart anaesthetized and mute
with labor. So her kind was taught to do—
“Find work,” [...]

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e. e. cummings . . . now I know why!

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Poetry Out Loud

Worth the watch!  Poetry Out Loud

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Ox Cart Man

by Donald Hall
In October of the year,
he counts potatoes dug from the brown field,
counting the seed, counting
the cellar’s portion out,
and bags the rest on the cart’s floor.
He packs wool sheared in April, honey
in combs, linen, leather
tanned from deerhide,
and vinegar in a barrel
hoped by hand at the forge’s fire.
He walks by his ox’s head, ten days
to [...]

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Three Poems by Jane Kenyon

Jane Kenyon is another favorite poet of mine. Her poems are usually short often touching someplace personal within the reader’s own psyche: or at least this readers psyche. I love all three of these poems but the third poem presented here, titled Otherwise, strikes a melancholic tone that always resonates with me no mater how [...]

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My Sister, Who Died Young, Takes Up The Task

by Jon Pineda
A basket of apples brown in our kitchen,
their warm scent is the scent of ripening,
and my sister, entering the room quietly,
takes a seat at the table, takes up the task
of peeling slowly away the blemished skins,
even half-rotten ones are salvaged carefully.
She makes sure to carve out the mealy flesh.
For this, I am grateful. [...]

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