Mount Kearsarge by Donald Hall Great blue mountain! Ghost. I look at you from the porch of the farmhouse where I watched you all summer as a boy. Steep sides, narrow flat patch on top – you are clear to me like the memory of one day. Blue! Blue! The top of the mountain floats […]

Thinking about the Past by Donald Justice Certain moments will never change, nor stop being— My mother’s face all smiles, all wrinkles soon; The rock wall building, built, collapsed then, fallen; Our upright loosening downward slowly out of tune— All fixed into place now, all rhyming with each other. That red-haired girl with wide mouth—Eleanor— […]

Richard Cory BY EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean favored, and imperially slim. And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said, […]

Iowa City: Early April BY ROBERT HASS This morning a cat—bright orange—pawing at the one patch of new grass in the sand-and tanbark-colored leaves. And last night the sapphire of the raccoon’s eyes in the beam of the flashlight. He was climbing a tree beside the house, trying to get onto the porch, I think, […]

From A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / Is hung with bloom along the bough, / And stands about the woodland ride / Wearing white for Eastertide.”

A Prayer in Spring by Robert Frost Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today; And give us not to think so far away As the uncertain harvest; keep us here All simply in the springing of the year. Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white, Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by […]

Their Beauty Has More Meaning by Robinson Jeffers Yesterday morning enormous the moon hung low on the ocean, Round and yellow-rose in the glow of dawn; The night-herons flapping home wore dawn on their wings. Today Black is the ocean, black and sulphur the sky, And white seas leap. I honestly do not know which […]

Winter Poem Frederick Morgan We made love on a winter afternoon and when we woke, hours had turned and changed, the moon was shining, and the earth was new. The city, with its lines and squares, was gone: our room had placed itself on a small hill surrounded by dark woods frosted in snow and […]

A Difference of Fifty-Three Years by Noel Peattie Here is a magazine called Seventeen. It comes out on the stands every month. The girl on each cover is welcome as cherry pie; she’s tubbed, pure, her hair is up, or ribboned. Her life is all dresses, parties, and little pink wishes. She says to the […]

Among His Effects We Found a Photograph by Ed Ochester My mother is beautiful as a flapper. She is so in love that she has been gazing secretly at my father for forty years. He’s in uniform, with puttees and swagger stick, a tiny cork mustache bobbing above a shoreline of teeth. They are “poor […]