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 […]

I sat in the sun BY JANE HIRSHFIELD I moved my chair into sun I sat in the sun the way hunger is moved when called fasting.

A Chair in Snow BY JANE HIRSHFIELD A chair in snow should be like any other object whited & rounded and yet a chair in snow is always sad more than a bed more than a hat or house a chair is shaped for just one thing to hold a soul its quick and few […]

The Problem BY JANE HIRSHFIELD You are trying to solve a problem. You’re almost certainly halfway done, maybe more. You take some salt, some alum, and put it into the problem. Its color goes from yellow to royal blue. You tie a knot of royal blue into the problem, as into a Peruvian quipu of […]

(No Wind, No Rain) BY JANE HIRSHFIELD No wind, no rain, the tree just fell, as a piece of fruit does. But no, not fruit. Not ripe. Not fell. It broke. It shattered. One cone’s addition of resinous cell-sap, one small-bodied bird arriving to tap for a beetle. It shattered. What word, what act, was […]

Green-Striped Melons BY JANE HIRSHFIELD They lie under stars in a field. They lie under rain in a field. Under sun. Some people are like this as well— like a painting hidden beneath another painting. An unexpected weight the sign of their ripeness.