Category

Time & Brevity

Showing 1-20 of 1,976 results
  • Poem
    By Li-Young Lee
    Li-Young, don’t feel lonely
    when you look up
    into great night and find
    yourself the far face peering
    hugely…
  • Poem
    By William Butler Yeats
    The light of evening, Lissadell,
    Great windows open to the south,
    Two girls in silk kimonos, both
    Beautiful, one a gazelle.
    But a raving autumn shears
    Blossom from the summer's wreath;
    The older is condemned to death,
    Pardoned, drags out lonely years
    Conspiring among the ignorant.
    I know not...
  • Poem
    By William Butler Yeats
    The unpurged images of day recede;
    The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
    Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song
    After great cathedral gong;
    A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
    All that man is,
    All mere complexities,
    The fury and the mire of human veins.

    Before me floats an image,...
  • Poem
    By William Butler Yeats
    I

    I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
    A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
    The children learn to cipher and to sing,
    To study reading-books and history,
    To cut and sew, be neat in everything
    In the best modern way—the children's eyes
    In momentary...
  • Poem
    By Brenda Hillman
    Having stopped using dolphins to locate explosives in the Cold War
    they had 30 leftover dolphins.
    An officer…
  • Poem
    By W. S. Merwin
    Late in May as the light lengthens
    toward summer the young goldfinches
    flutter down through the day for…
  • Poem
    By Julia Fiedorczuk
    Translated By Bill Johnston
    From within my bodily singularity
    I play at sending out gentle sunbeams.
    I don't believe in myself, but…
  • Poem
    By Ada Limón
    I pass the feeder and yell, Grackle party! And then an hour later I yell, Mourning dove afterparty! (I call the feeder the party and the seed on the ground the afterparty.) I am getting so good at watching that...
  • Poem
    By Tilsa Otta
    Translated By Farid Matuk
    A star fell to the ground and bounced in the shadow of the sun
    I think of this scene when I’m taken by…
  • Poem
    By CAConrad
    Frank’s sister grew long blue feathers

    she said it was worse than cutting teeth

    she spent a month screaming in the cave
    pushing them out

    Frank would lie in bed at night
    touching his own back

    crying

    praying it wouldn’t
    come to him

    but the day his sister flew...
  • Poem
    By Cole Swensen
    a river slips
                            in shifting leaves
    sifting. a river sifts
                            and falls to pieces
    in which not seen
         ...
  • Poem
    By Paisley Rekdal
    How horrible it is, how horrible
    that Cronenberg film where Goldblum’s trapped

    with a fly inside his Material
    Transformer: bits of the man emerging

    gooey, many-eyed; bits of the fly
    worrying that his agent’s screwed him—

    I almost flinch to see the body later
    that’s left its...
  • Poem
    By Richard Blanco
    Que será, el café of this holy, incorporated place,
    the wild steam of scorched espresso cakes rising
    like mirages from the aromatic waste, waving
    over the coffee-glossed lips of these faces
     
    assembled for a standing breakfast of nostalgia,
    of tastes that swirl with the delicacy...
  • Poem
    By Jean Valentine
    The hornet holds on to the curtain, winter
    sleep. Rubs her legs. Climbs the curtain.
    Behind her the cedars sleep lightly,

    like guests. But I am the guest.
    The ghost cars climb the ghost highway. Even my hand
    over the page       adds to the ‘room...
  • Poem
    By Sally Wen Mao
    In Santa Monica, the sunrise has this way of emptying
    everything inside you. I visit my future deathbed.
    It’s February 1961, and I watch myself sleep.

    Dawn: outside my window, date palms sway and lovers
    in blue Corvettes make their morning getaways.

    There will never...
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