A loaf of poetry…

A Loaf of Poetry
by Naoshi Koriyama
you mix
the dough
of experience
with
the yeast
of inspiration
and knead it well
with love
and pound it
with all your might
and then
leave it
until
it puffs out big
with its own inner force
and then
knead it again
and
shape it
into a round form
and bake it
in the oven
of your heart

…on the experience of a teacher letting go, or of students on graduation [...]

The Poet’s Occasional Alternative

The Poet’s Occasional Alternative
I was going to write a poem 
I made a pie instead     it took
about the same amount of time 
of course the pie was a final
draft     a poem would have had some
distance to go     days and weeks and
much crumpled paper
the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine [...]

Grace Paley

This Life
 
My friend tells me
a man in my house jumped off the roof
the roof is the eighth floor of this building
the roof door was locked how did he manage?
his girlfriend had said goodbye I’m leaving
he was 22
his mother and father were hurrying
at that very moment
from upstate to help him move out of Brooklyn
they had heard [...]

Adrienne Rich

Shattered Head
 
A life hauls itself uphill

through hoar-mist steaming
the sun’s tongue licking
leaf upon leaf into stricken liquid
When? When? cry the soothseekers
but time is a bloodshot eye
seeing its last of beauty its own
foreclosure
a bloodshot mind
finding itself unspeakable
What is the last thought?
Now I will let you know?
or, Now I know?
(porridge of skull-splinters, brain tissue
mouth and throat membrane, cranial [...]

Elizabeth Bishop

One Art
Elizabeth Bishop
 
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
 
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
 
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it [...]