The Poetry Playground

Any Morning

Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t 
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won’t even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.

~ William Stafford 

What goes faster every time I turn around

How odd that as I age
I move slower
and time runs twice as fast.

When I was little, school
took three years to pass,
ring upon ring of hours.

When I was young, summer
vacation was as long
as seabirds can fly.

High school classes froze
my brain and sawdust words
took eons to filter down.

In my twenties, a month 
long love affair could hurt 
to vanishing like train tracks.

Death belonged to other 
people. Every promise was
forever and several days.

Now time runs through 
the sieve of my veined hands
and is gone, is gone, is gone.

Marge Piercy

My Heart

I’m not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I  don’t prefer one “strain” to another.
I’d have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be 
at least as alive  as the vulgar. And if 
some aficionado of my my mess says “That’s
not like Frank!”, all to the good! I 
don’t wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart–
you can’t plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

~ Frank O’Hara

Today

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw 
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary’s cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths 
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants 
from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

~ Billy Collins

Sea Sonnet

A field, a sea-flower, three stones, a stile.
Not one thing close to another 
throughout air. The cliffs’ uplifted lawns.
You and I walk light as wicker in virtual contact.

Prepositions lie exposed. All along
the swimmer is deeper than the water.
I have looked under the wave,
I saw your body floating on the darkness.

But time and water cannot touch.
Not once. Only a blob far out,
your singularity and the sea’s
inalienable currents flow at angles . . .

and if I love you this is incidental
as on the sand one blue towel, one white towel.

~ Alice Oswald

Here by the Sea

Here by the prodigal and ever-pouring sea
The watcher has enough to watch, the sea being wide
Enough for the eye and wide and deep enough for the mind.
Between this coast and Spain is room for any ship
To be alone and long, whether in view or after,
And how far longer after. Surf for the shore-bound bather
Still renews, renews, and far as he would swim
The swimmer swims and back again. Here by the sea
The watcher walks or stands or lies bathed in clear space
While the white seabird forever skims the white-curled wave.

~ Robert Francis

To My Seventeen-Year-Old Self

Your friends are sniffing glue
from a paper bag
in the back of an Impala
tooling around Niles
and Morton Grove
looking for something 
to escape 
whatever boredom
or childhood damage
everyone suffers,
but don’t get high 
with them
in a sputtering car
that your girlfriend
refuses to enter,
don’t lie to her 
after she moves away 
and lie down with her friend,
don’t sob in the locker room
after the game
or lose your mind
from repeated blows 
to the head
on the football field
at Niles West High School,
I mean whatever locker 
you hit or don’t hit 
in desperation
born of the suburbs,
just stand and wait
for the unexpected night
when poetry climbs through
the unlocked window
in the basement 
of the split-level house 
on Sherwin Avenue 
and sits down at your desk.

~ Edward Hirsch

Leaving and Leaving You

When I leave your postcode and your commuting station,
When I leave undone the things that we planned to do
You may feel you have been left by association
But there is leaving and there is leaving you.

When i leave your town and the club that you belong to, 
When I leave without much warning or much regret
Remember, there’s doing wrong and there’s doing wrong to
You, which I’ll never do and I haven’t yet,

And when I a have gone, remember that in weighing
Everything up, from love to a cheaper rent,
You were all the reasons I thought of staying
And you were none of the reasons why I went

And although I leave your sight and I leave your setting
And our separation is soon to be a fact,
Though you stand beside what I’m leaving and forgetting, 
I’m not leaving you, not if motive makes the act.

~ Sophie Hannah

The thirsty earth soaks up the rain,
And drinks and gapes for drink again;
The plants suck in the earth, and are
With constant drinking fresh and fair;
The sea itself (which one would think
Should have but little need of drink)
Drinks ten thousand rivers up,
So filled that they o’erflow the cup.
The busy Sun (and one would guess
By ‘s drunken fiery face no less)
Drinks up the sea, and when he’s done,
The Moon and Stars drink up the Sun:
They drink and dance by their own light,
They drink and revel all the night:
Nothing in Nature’s sober found,
But an eternal health goes round,
Fill up the bowl then, fill it high,
Fill all the glasses there — for why
Should every creature drink but I?
Why, man of morals, tell me why?

~ Abraham Cowley