The Poetry Playground

Inventory
Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.

Four be the things I’d been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.

Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.

Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.

~ Dorothy Parker

Male Beauty
I bought a bag of hard green pears today.
I came home and sat in our room
listening to music for hours,
solo piano, things from France, from the beginning
of the century.
When we were very young, your forgiveness
humiliated me. I knew
you would be asleep when I got back.
It is night outside
and raining. It is the same night
that fills the ruins.
You are naked, drowsy, lost. Stay like that.
In my favorite recordings,
you can hear the pianist breathing.

~ Richie Hofmann

Thinking of Work
A brief storm
blew the earth clean.

There was much
to do: sun to put up,
clouds to put out,
blue to install,
limbs to remove,
grass to implant.

(The grass failed.
We ordered new grass.)

A limb had cracked
in half in the short storm,
short with its feeling.

We saw its innards,
all the hollow places.

Something flew out of
the window and then
the window flew out of the window.

~ James Shea

little prayer
let ruin end here

let him find honey
where there was once a slaughter

let him enter the lion’s cage
& find a field of lilacs

let this be the healing
& if not      let it be

~ Danez Smith

Make Me Rain
make me rain
turn me into a snowflake

let me rest
on your tongue

make me a piece of ice
so I can cool you

let me be the cloud
that embraces you

or the quilt
that gets you dry

snuggle close
listen to me sing

on the windowsill

make me rain
on you

~ Nikki Giovanni

Risk

And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to blossom.

~ Anais Nin

The River Cannot Go Back

It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.

~ Kahlil Gibran

My Mama moved among the days
My Mama moved among the days
like a dreamwalker in a field;
seemed like what she touched was hers
seemed like what touched her couldn’t hold,
she got us almost through the high grass
then seemed like she turned around and ran
right back in
right back on in

~ Lucille Clifton