A poem I always return to is Derek Walcott's Love After Love.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.

"Stupid America" by Abelardo "Lalo" Delgado. As a Chicano writer, activist, and educator, this poem--a grito in our community--always demands a response. Positive and Negative. I feel it reminds me/us of the deep need for Voice among those who are often Silenced. Read poem at www.xispas.com/poetry/delgado.htm

R--thanks for this essay. Here are my necessary offerings, both from the Japanese:

If you have hearts, O cherries of Fukakusa,
This year alone send forth your flowers in black.
Kanzuke Mineo, KOKINSHU anthology #832; trans. Seidensticker
[translated as two lines]

So lonely am I
My body is a floating weed
Severed at the roots.
Were there water to entice me,
I would follow it, I think.
Ono no Komachi; KOKINSHU anthology; trans. Donald Keene
[translated as five lines]

I love this post because it reminds me of the connection between poetry and music, and these two art forms' connection to emotion. For me, necessary poems are generally those that, like cherished songs, I've internalized through repeated reading, sometimes memorizing.

What's funny, though, is that most of the time, it isn't a particular poem that come to mind in states of emotional intensity. Usually, for me, it is particular lines of poetry that emerge into consciousness.

One of these lines, depending on my (often dark!) mood:

"And the love, whatever it was, an infection." (Anne Sexton)

This is a sentiment I almost never feel free to express out loud, but sometimes the feeling hits me: some of my past loves have seemed like obsessions, or infections. This last line from one of Sexton's poems (I forget which one!) evokes the memories of many lovers come and gone, and many other types of helpless/hopeless love, as well.

i don't know if i have a necessary poem in my life but i do know that the work of martín espada as a poet, essayist, teacher, editor and orator have been invaluable to my personal education as a poet.

ps- good to see you blogging here, rigoberto.

A dear friend...a brother, I might say...gave this to me in the throes of my own heartbreak and I have returned to it at least every two months, ever since.

"Privilege of Being"
Robert Hass

Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy--
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed--
and then one woman, she is about to come,
peels back the man's shut eyelids and says,
look at me, and he does. Or is it the man
tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?
Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet
lubricious glue, stare at each other,
and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags
in the lewd alleys of the novel.
All of creation in offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks
of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of
coming, clutching each other with old, invented
forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
companionable like the couples on the summer beach
reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes
to themselves, and to each other,
and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.

There are many, many poems, but "Star Struck" by Andres Montoya is one that quickly comes to mind.

The Irish poet, John Montague, who was born in Ireland, but spent his childhood in Brooklyn, wrote a handful of poems about his mother that I return to. One is called "The Locket". I haven't read it in a while, but feel prompted to return to it.