This Is Just To Say BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

The Red Wheelbarrow William Carlos Williams so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chicken

Nantucket William Carlos Williams Flowers through the window lavender and yellow changed by white curtains – Smell of cleanliness – Sunshine of late afternoon – On the glass tray a glass pitcher, the tumbler turned down, by which a key is lying – And the immaculate white bed

The Writer by Richard Wilbur In her room at the prow of the house Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden, My daughter is writing a story. I pause in the stairwell, hearing From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys Like a chain hauled over a gunwale. Young as she is, […]

Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes Billy Collins First, her tippet made of tulle, easily lifted off her shoulders and laid on the back of a wooden chair. And her bonnet, the bow undone with a light forward pull. Then the long white dress, a more complicated matter with mother-of-pearl buttons down the back, so tiny […]

The Couple Next Door by Kim Dower The couple next door reads all day long. I can see them from our adjoining hotel patios high above the sea. The couple next door sits at a round white plastic table on hard chairs, their books touching as they turn their pages at the same time. I […]

For What Binds Us BY JANE HIRSHFIELD There are names for what binds us: strong forces, weak forces. Look around, you can see them: the skin that forms in a half-empty cup, nails rusting into the places they join, joints dovetailed on their own weight. The way things stay so solidly wherever they’ve been set […]

Imaginary Conversation Linda Pastan You tell me to live each day as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen where before coffee I complain of the day ahead—that obstacle race of minutes and hours, grocery stores and doctors. But why the last? I ask. Why not live each day as if it […]

Pokeberries Ruth Stone I started out in the Virginia mountains with my grandma’s pansy bed and my Aunt Maud’s dandelion wine. We lived on greens and back-fat and biscuits. My Aunt Maud scrubbed right through the linoleum. My daddy was a Northerner who played drums and chewed tobacco and gambled. He married my mama on […]

The Vantage Point Robert Frost If tired of trees I seek again mankind, Well I know where to hie me—in the dawn, To a slope where the cattle keep the lawn. There amid lolling juniper reclined, Myself unseen, I see in white defined Far off the homes of men, and farther still The graves of […]