POETRY

BLACK RIDERS CAME FROM THE SEA > Black riders came from the sea. There was clang and clang of spear and shield, and clash and clash of hoof and heel, wild shouts and the wave of hair, in the rush upon the wind. Thus the ride of sin. http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Poems-Stephen-Crane/dp/0801491304

DEATH > Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me. The carriage held but just ourselves, and Immortality. We slowly drove, he knew no haste, and I had put away my labor, and my leisure too, for his civility. We passed the school, where children strove at recess, in the ring. We passed the fields of …

ONE ART > 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, …

DADDY – You do not do, you do not do any more, black shoe in which I have lived like a foot for thirty years, poor and white, barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time. Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, ghastly statue with one gray toe, big …

THE PEOPLE, YES – The people yes, 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 …

STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING – Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though. He will not see me stopping here, to watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer, to stop without a farmhouse near, between the woods and frozen lake, the darkest evening …

THE FISHERMAN, by William Butler Yeats > Although I can see him still, the freckled man who goes to a gray place on a hill, in gray Connemara clothes, at dawn to cast his flies. It’s long since I began to call up to the eyes, this wise and simple man. All day I’d looked in the face what I …

Among the Roman dialect poets, Trilussa (1871/1950), is by far the most well-known and appreciated outside his own hometown. His mature work falls broadly into two types (sonnets and fables), however, it wasat the poetic fable that Trilussa truly excelled, developing a distinctly cynical Roman version (of the genre of Aesop and La Fontaine). Among his many artistic merits, he …

THINGS GET REARRANGED – The world changes subtly as it goes around. The morning coffee aroma feels like the glow from a honeycomb, while outside the window the olive grove still soaks in the twilight mist. Tiny footsteps follow faint sounds to distant places, but the fisherman has returned and is sitting in the courtyard, watching a bird foraging in …

LETTER TO A FRIEND – Let me tell you about these sheep. In many ways they are like the ocean creatures you know so well: in the benevolence of the creator, they bear children, each has a face of a lad or an old man. These days they are on the hills, a tight flock, a warm flock, with a …