On His Seventy-fifth Birthday By Walter Savage Landor I strove with none; for none was worth my strife, Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art; I warmed both hands before the fire of life, It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

My Dear Bibliophiles by Gary Margolis My dear bibliophiles, no one in the world better than you to appreciate how a lifetime reader feels (read me) choosing which books to save, which to box. Carry to the curb, to be trucked away. Donated. Burned. Buried in the library of a landfill. For time to turn […]

You Reading This, Be Ready by William Stafford “Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air? Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever […]

THE COLD by Wendell Berry How exactly good it is to know myself in the solitude of winter, my body containing its own warmth, divided from all by the cold; and to go separate and sure among the trees cleanly divided, thinking of you perfect too in your solitude, your life withdrawn into your own […]

Good Bones BY MAGGIE SMITH Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this […]

The Mower BY PHILIP LARKIN The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found A hedgehog jammed up against the blades, Killed. It had been in the long grass. I had seen it before, and even fed it, once. Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world Unmendably. Burial was no help: Next morning I got up and […]

Prayer by Carol Ann Duffy ​Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer utters itself. So, a woman will lift her head from the sieve of her hands and stare at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift. ​ Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth enters our hearts, that small familiar […]

In Passing BY LISEL MUELLER How swiftly the strained honey of afternoon light flows into darkness and the closed bud shrugs off its special mystery in order to break into blossom as if what exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious

Any Common Desolation By Ellen Bass can be enough to make you look up at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few that survived the rains and frost, shot with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird would rip it like silk. You may […]

A Postcard from the Volcano BY WALLACE STEVENS Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill; And that in autumn, when the grapes Made sharp air sharper by their smell These had a being, breathing frost; And least will guess that with our bones […]