Some Emily Dickinson - Poems of the Day

Not In Vain

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

I'm Nobody! Who Are You?

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us--don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Poem of the Day - April 20th

Transit of Venus

by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
The actors mill about the party saying rhubarb

because other words do not sound like conversation.

In the kitchen, always, one who's just discovered beauty,

his mouth full of whiskey and strawberries.

He practices the texture of her hair with his tongue;

in her, five billion electrons pop their atoms.

Rhubarb in electromagnetic loops, rhubarb, rhubarb, the din increases.

Poem of the Day - Shakespeare's Sonnet #29

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Poem of the Day - April 14th

Little Ending

by Charles Wright

Bowls will receive us,

and sprinkle black scratch in our eyes.

Later, at the great fork on the untouchable road,

It won't matter where we have become.
Unburdened by prayer, unburdened by any supplication,

Someone will take our hand,

someone will give us refuge,

Circling left or circling right.

Poem of the Day - April 13th

Yellow Bowl

by Rachel Contreni Flynn

If light pours like water

into the kitchen where I sway

with my tired children,

if the rug beneath us is

woven with tough flowers,

and the yellow bowl on the table

rests with the sweet heft of fruit,

the sun-warmed plums,

if my body curves over the babies,

and if I am singing,

then loneliness has lost its shape,

and this quiet is only quiet

Poem of the Day -April 10th

An Excuse For Not Returning the Visit of a Friend

by Mei-Yao Ch'en

translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Do not be offended because I am slow to go out.

You know

Me too well for that.

On my lap I hold my little girl.

At my

Knees stands my handsome little son.

One has just begun to talk.

The other chatters without Stopping.

They hang on my clothes

And follow my every step.

I can't get any farther

Than the door.

I am afraid I will never make it to your house.

Poem of the Day - April 8th

How to Read a Poem: Beginner's Manual

by Pamela Spiro Wagner

First, forget everything you have learned,

that poetry is difficult,

that it cannot be appreciated by the likes of you,

with your high school equivalency diploma,

your steel-tipped boots,

or your white-collar misunderstandings.

Do not assume meanings hidden from you:

the best poems mean what they say and say it.

To read poetry requires only courage

enough to leap from the edge

and trust.

Treat a poem like dirt,

humus rich and heavy from the garden.

Later it will become the fat tomatoes

and golden squash

piled high upon your kitchen table.

Poetry demands surrender,

language saying what is true,

doing holy things to the ordinary.

Read just one poem a day.

Someday a book of poems may open in your hands

like a daffodil offering its cup to the sun.

When you can name five poets without including Bob Dylan,

when you exceed your quota and don't even notice,

close this manual.

Poem of the Day - April 7th

Untitled [This is what was bequeathed us]

by Gregory Orr

An excerpt from How Beautiful the Beloved

This is what was bequeathed us:

This earth the beloved left

And, leaving,

Left to us.

No other world

But this one:

Willows and the river

And the factory

With its black smokestacks.

No other shore, only this bank

On which the living gather.

No meaning but what we find here.

No purpose but what we make.

That, and the beloved's clear instructions:

Turn me into song; sing me awake.

Poem of the Day - April 6th

Ludwig Van Beethoven's Return to Viennaby

by Rita Dove
Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me.... The Heiligenstadt Testament

Three miles from my adopted city lies a village where I came to peace. The world there was a calm place, even the great Danube no more than a pale ribbon tossed onto the landscape by a girl's careless hand. Into this stillness

I had been ordered to recover. The hills were gold with late summer; my rooms were two, plus a small kitchen, situated upstairs in the back of a cottage at the end of the Herrengasse. From my window I could see onto the courtyard where a linden tree twined skyward — leafy umbilicus canted toward light, warped in the very act of yearning — and I would feed on the sun as if that alone would dismantle the silence around me.

At first I raged. Then music raged in me, rising so swiftly I could not write quickly enough to ease the roiling. I would stop to light a lamp, and whatever I'd missed — larks flying to nest, church bells, the shepherd's home-toward-evening song — rushed in, and I would rage again.
I am by nature a conflagration; I would rather leap than sit and be looked at. So when my proud city spread her gypsy skirts, I reentered, burning towards her greater, constant light.

Call me rough, ill-tempered, slovenly— I tell you, every tenderness I have ever known has been nothing but thwarted violence, an ache so permanent and deep, the lightest touch awakens it. . . . It is impossible to care enough. I have returned with a second Symphony and 15 Piano Variations which I've named Prometheus, after the rogue Titan, the half-a-god who knew the worst sin is to take what cannot be given back.

I smile and bow, and the world is loud. And though I dare not lean in to shout Can't you see that I'm deaf? — I also cannot stop listening.

Poem of the Day - April 5th

Goldfish Are Ordinary
by Stacie Cassarino
At the pet store on Court Street,
I search for the perfect fish.
The black moor, the blue damsel,
cichlids and neons. Something
to distract your sadness, something
you don't need to love you back.
Maybe a goldfish, the flaring tail,
orange, red-capped, pearled body,
the darting translucence? Goldfish
are ordinary, the boy selling fish
says to me. I turn back to the tank,
all of this grace and brilliance,
such simplicity the self could fail
to see. In three months I'll leave
this city. Today, a chill in the air,
you're reading Beckett fifty blocks
away, I'm looking at the orphaned
bodies of fish, undulant and gold fervor.
Do you want to see aggression?
the boy asks, holding a purple beta fish
to the light while dropping handfuls
of minnows into the bowl. He says,
I know you're a girl and all
but sometimes it's good to see.
Outside, in the rain, we love
with our hands tied,
while things tear away at us.

Poem of the Day - April 4th

Elegy for Sol LeWitt
by Ann Lauterbach

The weather map today is pale. The lines on the map
are like the casts of fishing lines
looping and curved briefly across air.
The sky now, also, toward evening, is pale.
On Sunday, in Beacon, there were lines
drawn on walls and also lines
drawn across the canvases of the last paintings
of Agnes Martin. One of them has two pale squares
on a blackened field.

The lines on your walls
follows directions
as if

as if there were a kind of logic
charged with motion
at the end of winter: the pale blue northern cold
almost merged with the pale green
at Hartford, and then the blank newsprint of the sea.

Poem of the Day - April 3rd

corydon & alexis, redux

by D. A. Powell
and yet we think that song outlasts us all: wrecked devotion

the wept face of desire, a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself

and grows in clusters

oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges

itself

how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as

god's own ribs

what else but to linger in the slight shade of those sapling branches

yearning for that vernal beau. for don't birds covet the seeds of

the honey locust

and doesn't the ewe have a nose for wet filaree and slender oats

foraged in the meadow

kit foxes crave the blacktailed hare: how this longing grabs me by

the nape

guess I figured to be done with desire, if I could write it out

dispense with any evidence, the way one burns a pile of twigs

and brush

what was his name? I'd ask myself, that guy with the sideburns

and charming smile

the one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, I'd expire with him

on my tongue

silly poet, silly man: thought I could master nature like a misguided

preacher

as if banishing love is a fix. as if the stars go out when we shut

our sleepy eyes

Poem of the day - April 2nd

Unbidden
by Rae Armantrout

The ghosts swarm.
They speak as one person.
Each loves you.
Each has left something undone.
•
Did the palo verde blush yellow all at once?
Today's edges are so sharp
they might cut anything that moved.
•
The way a lost word
will come back unbidden.
You're not interested in it now,
only in knowing where it's been.

Poem of the Day - April 1st

Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina
by Jack Gilbert

There was no water at my grandfather's
when I was a kid and would go for it
with two zinc buckets. Down the path,
past the cow by the foundation where
the fine people's house was before
they arranged to have it burned down.
To the neighbor's cool well. Would
come back with pails too heavy,
so my mouth pulled out of shape.
I see myself, but from the outside.
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot. Hear clearly the sound
the bucket made hitting the sides
of the stone well going down,
but never the sound of me.