Poem of The Day
By Linda Pastan
It is more onerous
than the rites of beauty
or housework, harder than love.
But you expect it of me casually,
the way you expect the sun
to come up, not in spite of rain
or clouds but because of them.

And so I smile, as if...
Poem of The Day

poetry-magazineFragments of Light

By Jalen Skye Smallcanyon
i.

Blue luster radiates under Divine Darkness’s blanket.
Golden light glares from brightened hallways…
Poem of The Day

poetry-magazineThe Sound of Water

By Milton Bluehouse II
The night recedes as I prepare to journey toward dawn, towarddreamscapes of memory. Flashes of light across time and place illuminating a run to the ocean and the sound of waves crashing and the tidal repetition of my name being called. Here, before the sound of people racing to an uncertain life, I hear moments in the darkness…

Browse All Poems

Featured This Month

Featured Poetic Term

Glossary Terms
An eight-line stanza having just two rhymes and repeating the first line as the fourth and seventh lines, and the second line as the eighth. See Sandra McPherson’s “Triolet” or “Triolets in the Argolid” by Rachel Hadas.

Poem Guides

From the Poetry Magazine Archive

  • Poem

    poetry-magazineScreaming

    By Carmen Giménez
    In Lima, my mother screams from her bed and from a garden
    and in the parlor of her nursing home, and…
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Bay Leaves

    By Nikki Giovanni
    I watched Mommy
    Cook
    Though I cooked
    With Grandmother

    With Grandmother I learned
    To pluck chickens
    Peel carrots
    Turn chittlins inside out
    Scrub pig feet

    With Mommy I watched
    leftovers for stew
    Or vegetable soup
    Great northern beans
    Mixed collards turnips and mustard greens
    Garlic cloves Bay Leaves
    Very beautifully green
    Stiff   so fresh
    With just a...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Lil Mermaidz

    By Tayi Tibble
    Rinsing the sea salt out of our bikinis
    with the drinking water and getting a slap
    upside the head from your mother with her
    House & Garden magazine reserved especially
    for fanning away mosquitoes and sighing
    because we know that this is how
    it’s always going...

Schools and Movements