Judy Brown: "Trough"

There is a trough in waves,
A low spot
Where horizon disappears
And only sky
And water
Are our company.

And there we lose our way
Unless
We rest, knowing the wave will bring us
To its crest again.

There we may drown
If we let fear
Hold us within its grip and shake us
Side to side,
And leave us flailing, torn, disoriented.

But if we rest there
In the trough,
Are silent,
Being with
The low part of the wave,
Keeping
Our energy and
Noticing the shape of things,
The flow,
Then time alone
Will bring us to another
Place
Where we can see
Horizon, see the land again,
Regain our sense
Of where
We are,
And where we need to swim.

"Trough" by Judy Sorum Brown, from The Sea Accepts All Rivers & Other Poems. © Miles River Press, 2000.

Image credit: Unknown (originally color).



 

Marilyn Krysl: "Summer Solstice, Batticaloa, Sri Lanka"

The war had turned inward until it resembled
suicide. The only soothing thing was water.
I passed the sentries, followed the surf out of sight.
I would sink into the elements, become simple.

Surf sounds like erasure, over and over.
I lay down and let go, the way you trust an animal.
When I opened my eyes, all down the strand
small crabs, the bright yellow of a crayon,

had come out onto the sand. Their numbers, scattered,
resembled the galactic spill and volume of the stars.
I, who had lain down alone, emptied,
waked at the center of ten thousand prayers.

Who would refuse such attention. I let it sweeten me
back into the universe. I was alive, in the midst
of great loving, which is all I've ever wanted.
The soldiers of both sides probably wanted just this.

"Summer Solstice, Batticaloa, Sri Lanka" by Marilyn Krysl, from War-Scape with Lovers. © Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1997.  

Photography credit: "Ghost Crab, Urucuca, Bahia, Brazil," by unknown photographer (originally color).

Wendell Berry: "I Dream of a Quiet Man"

I dream of a quiet man

who explains nothing and defends

nothing, but only knows
where the rarest wildflowers
are blooming, and who goes,
and finds that he is smiling
not by his own will.

"I Dream of a Quiet Man" by Wendell Berry, from Given. © HarperCollins Publishers, 1995.

Photography credit: by JHDT Stock Images LLC (originally color).

Jane Hirshfield: "The Task"

It is a simple garment, this slipped-on world.
We wake into it daily⎯⎯open eyes, braid hair⎯⎯
a robe unfurled
in rose-silk flowering, then laid bare.

And yes, it is a simple enough task
we've taken on,
though also vast:
from dusk to dawn,

from dawn to dusk, to praise, and not
be blinded by the praising.
To lie like a cat in hot
sun, fur fully blazing,

and dream the mouse;
and to keep too the mouse's patient, waking watch
within the deep rooms of the house,
where the leaf-flocked

sunlight never reaches, but the earth still blooms.

"The Task" by Jane Hirshfield, from The October Palace. © Harper Perennial, 1994.

Photography credit: Unknown (originally color).



 

Paulann Petersen: "Appetite"

Pale gold and crumbling with crust
mottled dark, almost bronze,
pieces of honeycomb lie on a plate.
Flecked with the pale paper
of hive, their hexagonal cells
leak into the deepening pool
of amber. On your lips,
against palate, tooth and tongue,
the viscous sugar squeezes
from its chambers, sears sweetness
into your throat until you chew
pulp and wax from a blue city
of bees. Between your teeth
is the blown flower and the flower's
seed. Passport pages stamped
and turning. Death's officious hum.
Both the candle and its anther
of flame. Your own yellow hunger.
Never say you can't take
this world into your mouth.

"Appetite" by Paulann Petersen, from The Wild Awake. © Confluence Press, 2002.

Photography credit: Sabina Samiee (originally color).



 

Rabindranath Tagore: "Playthings"

Child, how happy you are sitting in the dust, playing with a broken twig
     all the morning.
I smile at your play with that little bit of a broken twig.
I am busy with my accounts, adding up figures by the hour.
Perhaps you glance at me and think, "What a stupid game to spoil
     your morning with!"
Child, I have forgotten the art of being absorbed in sticks and mud-pies.
I seek out costly playthings, and gather lumps of gold and silver.
With whatever you find you create your glad games, I spend both my time
     and my strength over things I never can obtain.
In my frail canoe I struggle to cross the sea of desire, and forget that I too
     am playing a game.

"Playthings" by Rabindranath Tagore, from Crescent Moon. © Forgotten Books, 2013.  

Photography credit: "Writing in Dirt," by Jonas Amaya, 2009 (originally color).

Jeanne Lohmann: "Rivertalk"

is whatever comes along,
practice always here while we

keep on shore, all the time
saying we want to get wet.

But the river has ways
of sound and light, ripples

and waves that tell us:
don't be so serious, rumble in

where nothing is finished or broken
and nothing asks to be fixed.

"Rivertalk" by Jeanne Lohmann, from The Light of Invisible Bodies: Poems. © Daniel & Daniel Publishing, 2003.  

Photography credit: "Ripples on the River," by unknown photographer.

Sheri Hostetler: "Instructions"

Give up the world; give up self; finally, give up God.
Find god in rhododendrons and rocks,
passers-by, your cat.
Pare your beliefs, your absolutes.
Make it simple; make it clean.
No carry-on luggage allowed.
Examine all you have
with a loving and critical eye, then
throw away some more.
Repeat. Repeat.
Keep this and only this:
what your heart beats loudly for
what feels heavy and full in your gut.
There will only be one or two
things you will keep,
and they will fit lightly
in your pocket.

"Instructions" by Sheri Hostetler, from A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry, edited by Ann Hostetler. © University of Iowa Press, 2003.  

Photography credit: Unknown (originally color).


 

Richard Schiffman: "Moth Koan"

You say that you are troubled
by your own thoughts. Listen,
even the moth casts a shadow
when it flies before the sun.
Do you think the sun is troubled,
or the ground, or the moth,
for that matter? No, what is
troubled is the shadow thinking
it’s the moth that has fallen
to the ground, where the sun
will never shine again. The moth
that understands this
flies straight to the sun.

"Moth Koan" by Richard Schiffman. Published in Rattle, Winter 2011.

Photography credit: Unknown (originally color).



 

Edward Hirsch: "The Widening Sky"

I am so small walking on the beach
at night under the widening sky.
The wet sand quickens beneath my feet
and the waves thunder against the shore.

I am moving away from the boardwalk
with its colorful streamers of people
and the hotels with their blinking lights.
The wind sighs for hundreds of miles.

I am disappearing so far into the dark
I have vanished from sight.
I am a tiny seashell
that has secretly drifted ashore

and carries the sound of the ocean
surging through its body.
I am so small now no one can see me.
How can I be filled with such a vast love?



"The Widening Sky" by Edward Hirsch, from Lay Back the Darkness. © Knopf, 2004.

Photography credit: Unknown (originally color).



 

Tere Sievers: "July Rain"

The sudden storm

flashes and rumbles

the ozone air a tonic

for the humid afternoon.

I stand waiting

at the screen door

as the hard rain digs

puddles in the dirt.

I remember young Julys,

the mud under my feet

thick, warm and soft.

The cloudburst passes.

I push open the door,

smell the air

and drop my shoes.

"July Rain" by Tere Sievers, from Summer: An Eclectic Anthology of Poetry and Prose, edited by Melanie Villines, Joan Jobe Smith and Eddie Woods. © Silver Birch Press, 2013.

Photography credit: Unknown (originally color).


 

Fady Joudah: "Mimesis"

My daughter
                    wouldn't hurt a spider
That had nested
Between her bicycle handles
For two weeks
She waited
Until it left of its own accord

If you tear down the web I said
It will simply know
This isn't a place to call home
And you'd get to go biking

She said that's how others
Become refugees isn't it?

"Mimesis" by Fady Joudah, from Alight. © Copper Canyon Press, 2013.

Photography credit: "Spider Web on Bicycle Wheel & Handle," by unknown photographer (originally color).


 

Ellen Bass: "Pleasantville, New Jersey, 1955"

I'd never seen a rainbow or picked
a tomato off the vine. Never walked in an orchard
or a forest. The only tree I knew
grew in the square of dirt hacked
out of the asphalt, the mulberry
my father was killing slowly, pounding
copper nails into its trunk.
But one hot summer afternoon
my mother let me drag the cot onto the roof.
Bed sheets drying on the lines,
the cat's cardboard box of dirt in the corner,
I lay in an expanse of blueness. Sun rippled
over my skin like a breeze over water.
My eyelids closed. I could hear the ripe berries
splatting onto the alley, the footsteps
of customers tracking in the sticky, purple mash.
I heard the winos on the wooden crates,
brown bags rustling at the throats of Thunderbird.
Car engines stuttered, came to life and died
in the A&P parking lot and I smelled grease and coffee
from the diner where Stella, the dyke, washed dishes
with a pack of Camel's tucked
in the rolled-up sleeve of her t-shirt.
Next door, Helen Schmerling leaned on the glass case
slipping her fist into seamed and seamless stockings,
nails tucked in, to display the shade, while Sol
sucked the marrow from his stubby cigar,
smoke settling into the tweed skirts and mohair sweaters.
And under me something muscular swarmed
in the liquor store, something alive
in the stained wooden counter and the pungent dregs
of beer in the empties, my mother
greeting everyone, her frequent laughter,
the shorn pale necks of the delivery men,
their hairy forearms. The cash register ringing
as my parents pushed their way, crumpled dollar
by dollar, into the middle class.
The sun was delicious, lapping my skin.
I felt that newly arrived in a body.
The city wheeled around me—
the Rialto movie, Allen's shoe store, Stecher's Jewelry,
the whole downtown three blocks long.
And I was at the center of our tiny
solar system flung out on the edge
of a minor arm, a spur of one spiraling galaxy,
drenched in the light.

"Pleasantville, New Jersey, 1955" by Ellen Bass. Published in Poetry Northwest, Spring & Summer 2013. 

Photography credit: "Dappled Sunshine," by Natalie (originally color).


 

Neil Carpathios: "No More Same Old Silly Love Songs"

When the radio in my car broke I started to notice the
     trees.
I began to stop exaggerating the color of leaves,
how their reds and oranges needed no wordy
     embellishment.
I started to open the window and smell the wet
     pavement
after morning rain. Crows on the phone line,
their blackness and stubborn dignity. I even noticed my
     hands
gripping the wheel, the small dark hairs, the skin,
the knuckles and the perfect blue veins.

"No More Same Old Silly Love Songs" by Neil Carpathios, from Beyond the Bones. © FutureCycle Press, 2009.

Photography credit: Unknown (originally color).



 

Heather McHugh: "The Size of Spokane"

 













The baby isn't cute. In fact he's

a homely little pale and headlong

stumbler. Still, he's one

of us—the human beings

stuck on flight 295 (Chicago to Spokane);

and when he passes my seat twice

at full tilt this then that direction,

I look down from Lethal Weapon 3 to see

just why. He's

running back and forth

across a sunblazed circle on

the carpet-something brilliant, fallen

from a porthole. So! it's light

amazing him, it's only light, despite

some three and one

half hundred

people, propped in rows

for him to wonder at; it's light

he can't get over, light he can't

investigate enough, however many

zones he runs across it,

flickering himself.

The umpteenth time

I see him coming, I've had

just about enough; but then

he notices me noticing and stops—

one fat hand on my armrest—to

inspect the oddities of me.

*

Some people cannot hear.

Some people cannot walk.

But everyone was

sunstruck once, and set adrift.

Have we forgotten how

astonishing this is? so practiced all our senses

we cannot imagine them? foreseen instead of seeing

all the all there is? Each spectral port,

each human eye

is shot through with a hole, and everything we know

goes in there, where it feeds a blaze. In a flash

the baby's old; Mel Gibson's hundredth comeback seems

less clever; all his chases and embraces

narrow down, while we

fly on (in our

plain radiance of vehicle)

toward what cannot stay small forever.

"The Size of Spokane" by Heather McHugh, from Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993. © Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

Photography credit: Unknown (originally color).



 

Jared Carter: "Cutting Glass"

It takes a long, smooth stroke practiced carefully
over many years and made with one steady motion.

You do not really cut glass, you score its length
with a sharp, revolving wheel at the end of a tool

not much bigger than a pen-knife. Glass is liquid,
sleeping. The line you make goes through the sheet

like a wave through water, or a voice calling in a dream,
but calling only once. If the glazier knows how to work

without hesitation, glass begins to remember. Watch now
how he draws the line and taps the edge: the pieces

break apart like a book opened to a favorite passage.
Each time, what he finds is something already there.

In its waking state glass was fire once, and brightness;
all that becomes clear when you hold up the new pane.

 

 

"Cutting Glass" by Jared Carter. Published in Yarrow, 1987.

Photography credit: Fraunhofer (originally color).




 

Robyn Sarah: "Burning the Journals"

The past is useless

to me now:

an old suitcase

with mould in the lining,

heavy even when empty— 

heavy empty,

like the bronze bell

of the Russian church,

clapperless

in the grass;

so I shall have to go

on from here with less

to bank on. My peeled eye.

The way things

sing in the sun

"Burning the Journals" by Robyn Sarah, from The Touchstone: Poems New & Selected (Anansi, 1992). Copyright Robyn Sarah, reprinted with permission.

Photography credit: "The Christ Church Cathedral bell lies broken by the February quake," by Don Scott (originally color).


 

Marge Piercy: "Rising in Perilous Hope"

What can I hold in my hands this morning

that will not flow through my fingers?

What words can I say that will catch

in your mind like burrs, chiggers that burrow?

If my touch could heal, I would lay my hands

on your bent head and bellow prayers.

If my words could change the weather

or the government or the way the world

twists and guts us, fast or slow,

what could I do but what I do now?

I fit words together and say them;

it is a given like the color of my eyes.

I hope it makes a small difference, as

I hope the drought will break and the morning

come rising out of the ocean wearing

a cloak of clean sweet mist and swirling terns.

"Rising in Perilous Hope" by Marge Piercy, from Colors Passing Through Us. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

Image credit: "My Heart's in My Mouth," watercolor, by P. Maure Bausch (originally color).


 

Anna Akhmatova: "Everything is Plundered, Betrayed, Sold"

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,

Death's great black wing scrapes the air,

Misery gnaws to the bone.

Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,

cherries blow summer into town;

at night the deep transparent skies

glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close

to the ruined, dirty houses—

something not known to anyone at all,

but wild in our breast for centuries.

"Everything is Plundered, Betrayed, Sold," by Anna Akhmatova, from Poems of Akhmatova, edited and translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward. © Little, Brown & Company, 1973.

Image credit: "Cherry Blossoms," colored pencil, by Collin Kasyan.


 

Linda Back McKay: "On the Meaning of"

This is what life does.
It wakes you in the morning
before the morning
glories open and gives you
the sound of your mother’s voice.
Life spreads itself across
the ceiling to make you think
you are penned in, but that
is just another gift. Life takes
what you thought you couldn’t live
without and gives you a heron instead.
And a dragonfly, stitching its way
through the milkweed. Life contains all
of your tears in a vessel
shaped like hands in prayer.
Life is shape, sight, sound, bone.
It whispers and sings and holds
you and you almost never feel it.
You push your way from phase to phase.
You are a horse with blinders.
You think you are pulling, but you
are being driven.
While going about your solitary life,
one hoof in front of the other,
real life is turning the stars,
like mirrors, in your direction.



"On the Meaning of," by Linda Back McKay, from The Next Best Thing: Poems. © Nodin Press, 2011.

Image credit: "Horse with Blinders," charcoal on paper, by Tony Lawton (originally black and white).