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 [...]

Frank O’Hara

Meditations in an Emergency

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?
   Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which [...]

William Blake

The Tiger
TIGER, tiger, burning bright 
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?  
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?  
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews [...]

Lorna Dee Cervantes

Valentine Cherry plums suck a week’s soak, overnight they explode into the scenery of before your touch. The curtains open on the end of our past. Pink trumpets on the vines bare to the hummingbirds. Butterflies unclasp from the purse of their couplings, they light and open on the doubled hands of eucalyptus fronds. They [...]

Yusef Komunyakaa

My Father’s Love Letters 
On Fridays he’d open a can of Jax
After coming home from the mill,
& ask me to write a letter to my mother
Who sent postcards of desert flowers
Taller than men. He would beg,
Promising to never beat her
Again. Somehow I was happy
She had gone, & sometimes wanted
To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou
Williams’ [...]

Gerald Manley Hopkins

Pied Beauty 
Glory be to God for dappled things
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
        Landscapes plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
                And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; [...]