Measurement
by May Miller

A thin repeated note
Strikes against
The tuning fork of time 
To mark man's encroachment
On the God-threatened way;
To set the hour
Of his uncertain final step. 
Choose an ancient scheme—
The fractional-lengthening shadow
On the unscarred dial;
The way is none the less short.
The tune begins again.

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First published in Poetry (December 1948).

Renascence
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I'd started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
 
Over these things I could not see;
These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.
 
But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;
So here upon my back I'll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And—sure enough!—I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I 'most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
 
I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest,
Bent back my arm upon my breast,
And, pressing of the Undefined
The definition on my mind,
Held up before my eyes a glass
Through which my shrinking sight did pass
Until it seemed I must behold
Immensity made manifold;
Whispered to me a word whose sound
Deafened the air for worlds around,
And brought unmuffled to my ears
The gossiping of friendly spheres,
The creaking of the tented sky,
The ticking of Eternity.
 
I saw and heard, and knew at last
The How and Why of all things, past,
And present, and forevermore.
The Universe, cleft to the core,
Lay open to my probing sense
That, sick'ning, I would fain pluck thence
But could not,—nay! But needs must suck
At the great wound, and could not pluck
My lips away till I had drawn
All venom out.—Ah, fearful pawn!
For my omniscience paid I toll
In infinite remorse of soul.
 
All sin was of my sinning, all
Atoning mine, and mine the gall
Of all regret. Mine was the weight
Of every brooded wrong, the hate
That stood behind each envious thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.
 
And all the while for every grief,
Each suffering, I craved relief
With individual desire,—
Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire
About a thousand people crawl;
Perished with each,—then mourned for all!
 
A man was starving in Capri;
He moved his eyes and looked at me;
I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,
And knew his hunger as my own.
I saw at sea a great fog bank
Between two ships that struck and sank;
A thousand screams the heavens smote;
And every scream tore through my throat.
 
No hurt I did not feel, no death
That was not mine; mine each last breath
That, crying, met an answering cry
From the compassion that was I.
All suffering mine, and mine its rod;
Mine, pity like the pity of God.
 
Ah, awful weight! Infinity
Pressed down upon the finite Me!
My anguished spirit, like a bird,
Beating against my lips I heard;
Yet lay the weight so close about
There was no room for it without.
And so beneath the weight lay I
And suffered death, but could not die.
 
Long had I lain thus, craving death,
When quietly the earth beneath
Gave way, and inch by inch, so great
At last had grown the crushing weight,
Into the earth I sank till I
Full six feet under ground did lie,
And sank no more,—there is no weight
Can follow here, however great.
From off my breast I felt it roll,
And as it went my tortured soul
Burst forth and fled in such a gust
That all about me swirled the dust.
 
Deep in the earth I rested now;
Cool is its hand upon the brow
And soft its breast beneath the head
Of one who is so gladly dead.
And all at once, and over all
The pitying rain began to fall;
I lay and heard each pattering hoof
Upon my lowly, thatched roof,
And seemed to love the sound far more
Than ever I had done before.
For rain it hath a friendly sound
To one who's six feet underground;
And scarce the friendly voice or face:
A grave is such a quiet place.
 
The rain, I said, is kind to come
And speak to me in my new home.
I would I were alive again
To kiss the fingers of the rain,
To drink into my eyes the shine
Of every slanting silver line,
To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze
From drenched and dripping apple-trees.
For soon the shower will be done,
And then the broad face of the sun
Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth
Until the world with answering mirth
Shakes joyously, and each round drop
Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top.
 
How can I bear it; buried here,
While overhead the sky grows clear
And blue again after the storm?
O, multi-colored, multiform,
Beloved beauty over me,
That I shall never, never see
Again! Spring-silver, autumn-gold,
That I shall never more behold!
Sleeping your myriad magics through,
Close-sepulchred away from you!
O God, I cried, give me new birth,
And put me back upon the earth!
Upset each cloud's gigantic gourd
And let the heavy rain, down-poured
In one big torrent, set me free,
Washing my grave away from me!
 
I ceased; and through the breathless hush
That answered me, the far-off rush
Of herald wings came whispering
Like music down the vibrant string
Of my ascending prayer, and—crash!
Before the wild wind's whistling lash
The startled storm-clouds reared on high
And plunged in terror down the sky,
And the big rain in one black wave
Fell from the sky and struck my grave.
 
I know not how such things can be;
I only know there came to me
A fragrance such as never clings
To aught save happy living things;
A sound as of some joyous elf
Singing sweet songs to please himself,
And, through and over everything,
A sense of glad awakening.
The grass, a-tiptoe at my ear,
Whispering to me I could hear;
I felt the rain's cool finger-tips
Brushed tenderly across my lips,
Laid gently on my sealed sight,
And all at once the heavy night
Fell from my eyes and I could see,—
A drenched and dripping apple-tree,
A last long line of silver rain,
A sky grown clear and blue again.
And as I looked a quickening gust
Of wind blew up to me and thrust
Into my face a miracle
Of orchard-breath, and with the smell,—
I know not how such things can be!—
I breathed my soul back into me.
 
Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I
And hailed the earth with such a cry
As is not heard save from a man
Who has been dead, and lives again.
About the trees my arms I wound;
 
Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;
I raised my quivering arms on high;
I laughed and laughed into the sky,
Till at my throat a strangling sob
Caught fiercely, and a great heart-throb
Sent instant tears into my eyes;
O God, I cried, no dark disguise
Can e'er hereafter hide from me
Thy radiant identity!
 
Thou canst not move across the grass
But my quick eyes will see Thee pass,
Nor speak, however silently,
But my hushed voice will answer Thee.
I know the path that tells Thy way
Through the cool eve of every day;
God, I can push the grass apart
And lay my finger on Thy heart!
 
The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,—
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.

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From Renascence and Other Poems (1917).

The Cold Green Element
by Irving Layton

At the end of the garden walk
the wind and its satellite wait for me;
their meaning I will not know
                until I go there,
but the black-hatted undertaker
 
who, passing, saw my heart beating in the grass,
is also going there. Hi, I tell him,
a great squall in the Pacific blew a dead poet
                out of the water,
who now hangs from the city’s gates.
 
Crowds depart daily to see it, and return
with grimaces and incomprehension;
if its limbs twitched in the air
                they would sit at its feet
peeling their oranges.
 
And turning over I embrace like a lover
the trunk of a tree, one of those
for whom the lightning was too much
                and grew a brilliant
hunchback with a crown of leaves.
 
The ailments escaped from the labels
of medicine bottles are all fled to the wind;
I’ve seen myself lately in the eyes
                of old women,
spent streams mourning my manhood,
 
in whose old pupils the sun became
a bloodsmear on broad catalpa leaves
and hanging from ancient twigs,
                my murdered selves
sparked the air like the muted collisions
 
of fruit. A black dog howls down my blood,
a black dog with yellow eyes;
he too by someone’s inadvertence
                saw the bloodsmear
on the broad catalpa leaves.
 
But the furies clear a path for me to the worm
who sang for an hour in the throat of a robin,
and misled by the cries of young boys
                I am again
a breathless swimmer in that cold green element.

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From A Wild Peculiar Joy: The Selected Poems by Irving Layton (McClelland & Stewart, 2004).

Theme in Yellow
by Carl Sandburg

I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o'-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.

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From Chicago Poems (Henry Holt and Company, 1916).

To Autumn
by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
    To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
  With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
    For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
  Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
  Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
  Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
    Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
  Steady thy laden head across a brook;
  Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
    Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
  And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
  Among the river sallows, borne aloft
    Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
  The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
    And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

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First published in 1820. This poem is in the public domain.

All Hallows
by Louise Glück

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

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First published in The First Four Books of Poems (The Ecco Press, 1995).

Wood Song
by Sara Teasdale

I heard a wood-thrush in the dusk
      Twirl three notes and make a star—
My heart that walked with bitterness
      Came back from very far. 

Three shining notes were all he had, 
      And yet they made a starry call— 
I caught life back against my breast
      And kissed it, scars and all.

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First published in Poetry (June 1917).

Apology
by Amy Lowell

Be not angry with me that I bear
    Your colors everywhere,
    All through each crowded street,
        And meet
    The wonder-light in every eye,
        As I go by.

Each plodding wayfarer looks up to gaze,
    Blinded by rainbow-haze,
    The stuff of happiness,
        No less,
    Which wraps me in its glad-hued folds
        Of peacock golds. 

Before my feet the dusty, rough-paved way
    Flushes beneath its gray.
    My steps fall ringed with light,
        So bright
    It seems a myriad suns are strown
        About the town. 

Around me is the sound of steepled bells, 
    And rich perfumed smells 
    Hang like a wind-forgotten cloud,
        And shroud
    Me from close contact with the world.
        I dwell, impearled. 

You blazon me with jewelled insignia.
    A flaming nebula
    Rims in my life.    And yet
        You set
    The word upon me, unconfessed,
        To go unguessed.

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First published in Poetry (July 1913).

Hawks
by James Stephens

And as we walked the grass was faintly stirred;
        We did not speak—there was no need to speak.
Above our heads there flew a little bird,
        A silent one who feared that we might seek
Her hard-hid nest.

Poor little frightened one!
        If we had found your nest that sunny day
We would have passed it by; we would have gone
        And never looked or frightened you away.

O little bird! there's many have a nest,
        A hard-found, open place, with many a foe;
And hunger and despair and little rest,
        And more to fear than you can know.

            Shield the nests where'er they be,
            On the ground or on the tree;
            Guard the poor from treachery.

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First published in Poetry (August 1914).

Afterimages
by Audre Lorde

      I
However the image enters
its force remains within
my eyes
rockstrewn caves where dragonfish evolve   
wild for life, relentless and acquisitive   
learning to survive
where there is no food
my eyes are always hungry
and remembering
however the image enters
its force remains.
A white woman stands bereft and empty
a black boy hacked into a murderous lesson   
recalled in me forever
like a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep   
etched into my visions
food for dragonfish that learn
to live upon whatever they must eat
fused images beneath my pain.

      II
The Pearl River floods through the streets of Jackson   
A Mississippi summer televised.
Trapped houses kneel like sinners in the rain
a white woman climbs from her roof to a passing boat   
her fingers tarry for a moment on the chimney   
now awash
tearless and no longer young, she holds   
a tattered baby's blanket in her arms.
In a flickering afterimage of the nightmare rain   
a microphone
thrust up against her flat bewildered words
          “we jest come from the bank yestiddy   
                   borrowing money to pay the income tax   
                   now everything's gone. I never knew   
                   it could be so hard.”
Despair weighs down her voice like Pearl River mud   
caked around the edges
her pale eyes scanning the camera for help or explanation
unanswered
she shifts her search across the watered street, dry-eyed   
                   “hard, but not this hard.”
Two tow-headed children hurl themselves against her   
hanging upon her coat like mirrors
until a man with ham-like hands pulls her aside   
snarling “She ain't got nothing more to say!”
and that lie hangs in his mouth
like a shred of rotting meat.

      III
I inherited Jackson, Mississippi.
For my majority it gave me Emmett Till   
his 15 years puffed out like bruises   
on plump boy-cheeks
his only Mississippi summer
whistling a 21 gun salute to Dixie
as a white girl passed him in the street   
and he was baptized my son forever   
in the midnight waters of the Pearl.

His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st year
when I walked through a northern summer
my eyes averted
from each corner's photographies   
newspapers protest posters magazines   
Police Story, Confidential, True   
the avid insistence of detail
pretending insight or information
the length of gash across the dead boy's loins
his grieving mother's lamentation   
the severed lips, how many burns   
his gouged out eyes
sewed shut upon the screaming covers   
louder than life
all over
the veiled warning, the secret relish   
of a black child's mutilated body   
fingered by street-corner eyes   
bruise upon livid bruise
and wherever I looked that summer
I learned to be at home with children's blood
with savored violence
with pictures of black broken flesh   
used, crumpled, and discarded   
lying amid the sidewalk refuse   
like a raped woman's face.

A black boy from Chicago
whistled on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi
testing what he'd been taught was a manly thing to do
his teachers
ripped his eyes out his sex his tongue
and flung him to the Pearl weighted with stone
in the name of white womanhood
they took their aroused honor
back to Jackson
and celebrated in a whorehouse
the double ritual of white manhood
confirmed.

      IV
    “If earth and air and water do not judge them who are
      we to refuse a crust of bread?”
      
Emmett Till rides the crest of the Pearl, whistling
24 years his ghost lay like the shade of a raped woman   
and a white girl has grown older in costly honor   
(what did she pay to never know its price?)
now the Pearl River speaks its muddy judgment   
and I can withhold my pity and my bread.

            “Hard, but not this hard.”
Her face is flat with resignation and despair   
with ancient and familiar sorrows
a woman surveying her crumpled future
as the white girl besmirched by Emmett's whistle   
never allowed her own tongue
without power or conclusion
unvoiced
she stands adrift in the ruins of her honor   
and a man with an executioner's face
pulls her away.

Within my eyes
the flickering afterimages of a nightmare rain
a woman wrings her hands
beneath the weight of agonies remembered
I wade through summer ghosts   
betrayed by vision
hers and my own
becoming dragonfish to survive   
the horrors we are living
with tortured lungs
adapting to breathe blood.

A woman measures her life's damage
my eyes are caves, chunks of etched rock
tied to the ghost of a black boy   
whistling
crying and frightened
her tow-headed children cluster   
like little mirrors of despair   
their father's hands upon them   
and soundlessly
a woman begins to weep.

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First published in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1997).

How to Be a Poet
by Wendell Berry

        (to remind myself)

i   

Make a place to sit down.   
Sit down. Be quiet.   
You must depend upon   
affection, reading, knowledge,   
skill—more of each   
than you have—inspiration,   
work, growing older, patience,   
for patience joins time   
to eternity. Any readers   
who like your poems,   
doubt their judgment.   

ii   

Breathe with unconditional breath   
the unconditioned air.   
Shun electric wire.   
Communicate slowly. Live   
a three-dimensioned life;   
stay away from screens.   
Stay away from anything   
that obscures the place it is in.   
There are no unsacred places;   
there are only sacred places   
and desecrated places.   

iii   

Accept what comes from silence.   
Make the best you can of it.   
Of the little words that come   
out of the silence, like prayers   
prayed back to the one who prays,   
make a poem that does not disturb   
the silence from which it came.

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First published in Poetry (January 2001).

To the Light of September
by W.S. Merwin

When you are already here
you appear to be only
a name that tells of you
whether you are present or not

and for now it seems as though
you are still summer
still the high familiar
endless summer
yet with a glint
of bronze in the chill mornings
and the late yellow petals
of the mullein fluttering
on the stalks that lean
over their broken
shadows across the cracked ground

but they all know
that you have come
the seed heads of the sage
the whispering birds
with nowhere to hide you
to keep you for later

you
who fly with them

you who are neither
before nor after
you who arrive
with blue plums
that have fallen through the night

perfect in the dew

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First published in Poetry (September 2003).

The Bee
by Emily Dickinson

Like trains of cars on tracks of plush
I hear the level bee:
A jar across the flowers goes,
Their velvet masonry
 
Withstands until the sweet assault
Their chivalry consumes,
While he, victorious, tilts away
To vanquish other blooms.
 
His feet are shod with gauze,
His helmet is of gold;
His breast, a single onyx
With chrysoprase, inlaid.
 
His labor is a chant,
His idleness a tune;
Oh, for a bee’s experience
Of clovers and of noon!

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From Poems, ed. by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson (Roberts Brothers, 1890).

A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky
by Lewis Carroll

A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July —

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear —

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream —
Lingering in the golden gleam —
Life, what is it but a dream?

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New Stanzas for Amazing Grace
by Allen Ginsberg

I dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place
Where I was lost alone
Folk looked right through me into space
And passed with eyes of stone

O homeless hand on many a street
Accept this change from me
A friendly smile or word is sweet
As fearless charity

Woe workingman who hears the cry
And cannot spare a dime
Nor look into a homeless eye
Afraid to give the time

So rich or poor no gold to talk
A smile on your face
The homeless ones where you may walk
Receive amazing grace

I dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place
Where I was lost alone
Folk looked right through me into space
And passed with eyes of stone
 

April 2, 1994

Composed at the request of Ed Sanders for his production of The New Amazing
Grace, performed November 20, 1994, at the Poetry Project in St. Mark’s Church
in-the-Bouwerie

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First published in Death & Fame: Last Poems 1993-1997 (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1999).

Ocean of Earth
by Guillaume Apollinaire
translated by Ron Padgett

      To G. de Chirico

I have built a house in the middle of the Ocean
Its windows are the rivers flowing from my eyes
Octopi are crawling all over where the walls are
Hear their triple hearts beat and their beaks peck against the windowpanes

                        House of dampness
                        House of burning
                        Season’s fastness
                        Season singing
                  The airplanes are laying eggs
                  Watch out for the dropping of the anchor

Watch out for the shooting black ichor
It would be good if you were to come from the sky
The sky’s honeysuckle is climbing
The earthly octopi are throbbing
And so very many of us have become our own gravediggers
Pale octopi of the chalky waves O octopi with pale beaks
Around the house is this ocean that you know well
         And is never still

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First published in Poetry (October 2015). Translated by Ron Padgett.

The Applicant
by Sylvia Plath

First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed

To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit——

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they'll bury you in it.

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start

But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it’s a poultice.
You have an eye, it’s an image.
My boy, it’s your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

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First published in Ariel by Sylvia Plath (Faber and Faber, 1965).

The Ruins of Timoleague Abbey
by Seán Ó Coileáin
translated by Tony Hoagland and Martin Shaw

I am gut sad.

I am flirting
with the green waves,
wandering the sand,
feeding reflection
into the seaweed foam.

That Shaker’s moon
is up.
Crested by corn-colored stars
and traced by those witchy scribblers
who read the bone-smoke.

No wind at all — 
no flutter
for foxglove or elm.

There is a church door.

In the time
when the people
of  my hut lived,

there was eating and thinking
dished out to the poor
and the soul-sick in this place.

I am in my remembering.

By the frame of  the door
is a crooked black bench.

It is oily with history
of the rumps of sages,
and the foot-sore
who lingered in the storm.

I am bent with weeping.
This blue dream
chucks the salt
from me.

I remember
the walls god-bright
with the king’s theology,

the slow chorus
of  the low bell,
the full hymn
of  the byre and field.

Pathetic hut.
Rain-cracked and wind-straddled.
Your walls bare-nubbed
by chill flagons
of ocean spit.

The saints are scattered.
The high gable
is an ivy tangle.
The stink of fox
is the only swinging incense.

There is no stew
for this arriving prodigal,
no candled bed.

My kin
lie under the ground
of this place.

My shape
is sloughed with grief.
No more red tree
between my thighs.
My eyes are milk.
Rage my pony.

My face has earnt
the grim mask.
My heart a husky gore.

But my hand. My hand
reaches through this sour air
and touches
the splendid darkness
of my deliverer.

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First published in Poetry (November 2014). Translated by Tony Hoagland and Martin Shaw.

Portrait of an Old Woman on the College Tavern Wall
by Anne Sexton

    Oh down at the tavern
the children are singing
around their round table
and around me still.
Did you hear what it said?

                   I only said
how there is a pewter urn
pinned to the tavern wall,
as old as old is able
to be and be there still.
I said, the poets are there
I hear them singing and lying
around their round table
and around me still.
Across the room is a wreath
made of a corpse’s hair,
framed in glass on the wall,
as old as old is able
to be and be remembered still.
Did you hear what it said?

                  I only said
how I want to be there and I
would sing my songs with the liars
and my lies with all the singers.
And I would, and I would but
it’s my hair in the hair wreath,
my cup pinned to the tavern wall,
my dusty face they sing beneath.
Poets are sitting in my kitchen.
Why do these poets lie?
Why do children get children and
Did you hear what it said?

                  I only said
how I want to be there,
Oh, down at the tavern
where the prophets are singing
around their round table
until they are still.

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Published in The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (Houghton Mifflin, 1981).

Final Curve
by Langston Hughes

When you turn the corner
And you run into yourself
Then you know that you have turned
All the corners that are left.

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Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (1990, Vintage Books)