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Gratitude & Apologies

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  • Poem

    won’t you celebrate with me

    By Lucille Clifton
    won't you celebrate with me
    what i have shaped into
    a kind of life? i had no model.
    born in babylon
    both nonwhite and woman
    what did i see to be except myself?
  • Poem

    In Celebration of My Uterus

    By Anne Sexton
    Everyone in me is a bird.
    I am beating all my wings.   
    They wanted to cut you out   
    but they will not.
    They said you were immeasurably empty   
    but you are not.
    They said you were sick unto dying   
    but they were wrong.
    You are singing like a...
  • Poem

    'My own heart let me more have pity on'

    By Gerard Manley Hopkins
    My own heart let me more have pity on; let
    Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
    Charitable; not live this tormented mind
    With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
    I cast for comfort I can no more get
    By groping round my comfortless, than...
  • Poem

    Those Winter Sundays

    By Robert Hayden
    Sundays too my father got up early
    and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
    then with cracked hands that ached
    from labor in the weekday weather made
    banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

    I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.breaking....
  • Poem

    Slant

    By Suji Kwock Kim
    If the angle of an eye is all,   
    the slant of hope, the slant of dreaming, according to each life,
    what is the light of this city,
    light of Lady Liberty, possessor of the most famous armpit in the world,
    light of the lovers...
  • Poem

    Passing Through

    By Stanley Kunitz
    Nobody in the widow’s household   
    ever celebrated anniversaries.   
    In the secrecy of my room
    I would not admit I cared
    that my friends were given parties.   
    Before I left town for school
    my birthday went up in smoke   
    in a fire at City Hall that gutted   
    the Department...
  • Poem

    p1

    To My Mother

    By Wendell Berry
    I was your rebellious son,
    do you remember? Sometimes
    I wonder if you do remember,
    so complete has your forgiveness been.

    So complete has your forgiveness been
    I wonder sometimes if it did not
    precede my wrong, and I erred,
    safe found, within your love,

    prepared ahead of...
  • Poem

    To My Dear and Loving Husband

    By Anne Bradstreet
    If ever two were one, then surely we.
    If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
    If ever wife was happy in a man,
    Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
    I prizeprize Value thy love more than whole mines of gold,
    Or...
  • Poem

    On Distinction

    By A. F. Moritz
    We won’t pretend we’re not hungry for distinction
    but what can ever distinguish us enough?
    This country, this language won’t last long, the race
    will die, later the cockroach, earth itself,

    and last this beer bottle: silicon fused by man,
    almost indestructible, like a soul:
    it...
  • Poem

    Love Like Salt

    By Lisel Mueller
    It lies in our hands in crystals
    too intricate to decipher

    It goes into the skillet
    without being given a second thought

    It spills on the floor so fine
    we step all over it

    We carry a...
  • Poem

    The Arrow and the Song

    By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
    I shot an arrow into the air,
    It fell to earth, I knew not where;
    For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
    Could not follow it in its flight.

    I breathed a song into the air,
    It fell to...
  • Poem

    Sleep Cycle

    By Dean Young
    We cannot push ourselves away
    from this quiet, even in our sprees
    of inattention, the departing passengers
    stubbing out their smokes, arrivees in tears,
    lots of cellophane, the rumpus over parking.

    Wind scrapes leaves across the road,
    first flashes of snow, it is dark then
    it’s really...
  • Poem

    Dear John, Dear Coltrane

    By Michael S. Harper
    Sex fingers toes
    in the marketplace
    near your father's church
    in Hamlet, North Carolina—
    witness to this love
    in this calm fallow
    of these minds,
    there is no substitute for pain:
    genitals gone or going,
    seed burned out,
    you tuck the roots in the earth,
    turn back, and move
    by river through...
  • Poem

    My mother’s body

    By Marge Piercy
    1.

    The dark socket of the year
    the pit, the cave where the sun lies down
    and threatens never to rise,
    when despair descends softly as the snow
    covering all paths and choking roads:

    then hawkfaced pain seized you
    threw you so you fell with a sharp
    cry,...
  • Poem

    p1

    Worms

    By Carl Dennis
    Aren't you glad at least that the earthworms
    Under the grass are ignorant, as they eat the earth,
    Of the good they confer on us, that their silence
    Isn't a silent reproof for our bad manners, ...
  • Poem

    A Happy Childhood

    By William Matthews
    My mother stands at the screen door, laughing.   
    “Out out damn Spot,” she commands our silly dog.   
    I wonder what this means. I rise into adult air

    like a hollyhock, I’m so proud to be loved   
    like this. The air is tight to my...
  • Poem

    On Shakespeare. 1630

    By John Milton
    What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
    The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
    Or that his hallowed relics should be hid   
    Under a star-ypointing pyramid?
    Dear son of Memory, great heir of fame,
    What need’st thou such weak witness of...
  • Poem

    Song

    By Brenda Cárdenas
    You shout my name
    from beyond my dreams,
    beyond the picture window
    of this Rosarito beach house.
    Rushing from bed to shore
    I glimpse their backs—
    volcanoes rising out of the sea.
    Your back, a blue-black silhouette,
    feet wet with the wash of morning waves.
    Fountains spring from mammal...
  • Poem

    My Triumph

    By John Greenleaf Whittier
    The autumn-time has come;
    On woods that dream of bloom,
    And over purpling vines,
    The low sun fainter shines.

    The aster-flower is failing,
    The hazel’s gold is paling;
    Yet overhead more near
    The eternal stars appear!

    And present gratitude
    Insures the future’s good,
    And for the things I see
    I trust...
  • Poem

    Sonnet: I Thank You

    By Henry Timrod
    I thank you, kind and best beloved friend,
    With the same thanks one murmurs to a sister,
    When, for some gentle favor, he hath kissed her,
    Less for the gifts than for the love you send,
    Less for the flowers, than...
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