TREES by W. S. Merwin I am looking at trees they may be one of the things I will miss most from the earth though many of the ones I have seen already I cannot remember and though I seldom embrace the ones I see and have never been able to speak with one I […]

LATE SPRING by W. S. Merwin Coming into the high room again after years after oceans and shadows of hills and the sounds of lies after losses and feet on stairs after looking and mistakes and forgetting turning there thinking to find no one except those I knew finally I saw you sitting in white […]

Hall, Donald: Kicking the Leaves Hall, Donald Kicking the Leaves (English) 1. Kicking the leaves, October, as we walk home together from the game, in Ann Arbor, on a day the color of soot, rain in the air; I kick at the leaves of maples, reds of seventy different shades, yellow like old paper; and poplar […]

The One Thing in Life by Gerald Stern Wherever I go now I lie down on my own bed of straw and bury my face in my own pillow. I can stop in any city I want to and pull the stiff blanket up to my chin. It’s easy now, walking up a flight of […]

  A Summer Garden Launch Audio in a New Window BY LOUISE GLÜCK 1 Several weeks ago I discovered a photograph of my mother sitting in the sun, her face flushed as with achievement or triumph. The sun was shining. The dogs were sleeping at her feet where time was also sleeping, calm and unmoving as […]

I Am Waiting BY LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI I am waiting for my case to come up and I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder and I am waiting for someone to really discover America and wail and I am waiting for the discovery of a new symbolic western frontier and I am waiting for the American […]

Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks BY JANE KENYON I am the blossom pressed in a book, found again after two hundred years. . . . I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper…. When the young girl who starves sits down to a table she will sit beside me. . . . I am […]

“Miracles” by Walt Whitman Why, who makes much of a miracle? As to me I know of nothing else but miracles, Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water, […]

IN THE MIDDLE. . . by Barbara Crocker of a life that’s as complicated as everyone else’s, struggling for balance, juggling time. The mantle clock that was my grandfather’s has stopped at 9:20; we haven’t had time to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still, the chimes don’t ring. One day you look out […]

LIMITED by Carl Sandburg I AM riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains     of the nation. Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air     go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people. (All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men     and women laughing in the diners […]