Help us to be the always hopeful gardeners of the spirit who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth as without light nothing flowers.
Prayer by Mary Oliver
May I never not be frisky, May I never not be risque. May my ashes, when you have them, friend, and give them to the ocean, leap in the froth of the waves, still loving movement, still ready, beyond all else, to dance for the world.
The Pasture by Robert Frost
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring; I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away (And wait to watch the water clear, I may): I sha’n’t be gone long. — You come too. I’m going out to fetch the little calf That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young, It totters when she licks […]
The People, Yes (excerpts) by Carl Sandburg
“So you want to divide all the money there is and give every man his share?” “that’s it. Put it all in one big pile and split it even for everybody.” “and the land, the gold, silver, oil, copper, you want that divided up?” “Sure — an even whack for all of us.” “Do you […]
The people will live on… excerpt from The People, Yes by Carl Sandburg
The people will live on. The learning and blundering people will live on. They will be tricked and sold and again sold And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds, The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback, You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it. The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas. […]
The Place I Want to Get Back To by Mary Oliver
The Place I want to get back to is where in the pinewoods in the moments between the darkness and first light two deer came walking down the hill and when they saw me they said to each other, okay, this one is okay, let’s see who she is and why she is sitting on […]
A Poem for Emily by Miller Williams
Small fact and fingers and farthest one from me, a hand’s width and two generations away, in this still present I am fifty-three. You are not yet a full day. When I am sixty-three, when you are ten, and you are neither closer nor as far, your arms will fill with what you know by […]
Poem for Flora by Nikki Giovanni
when she was little and colored and ugly with short straightened hair and a very pretty smile she went to Sunday school to hear ’bout nebuchadnezzar the king of the jews and she would listen shadrach, meshach and abednego in the fire and she would learn how god was neither north nor south east or […]
The Portrait by Stanley Kunitz
My mother never forgave my father for killing himself, especially at such an awkward time and in a public park, chat spring when I was waiting to be born. She locked his name in her deepest cabinet and would not let him out, though I could hear him thumping. When I came down from the […]
Praise Song for the Day by Elizabeth Alexander
Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each other’s eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in […]
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