Poetry

The Poet with His Face in His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need anymore of that sound.

So if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

Night Snow
Bai Juyi

I was surprised my quilt and pillow were cold,
I see that now the window's bright again.
Deep in the night, I know the snow is thick,
I sometimes hear the sound as bamboo snaps.

Read more about The Sound of Cold

from The Courtship of Miles Standish
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The scene: John Alden, having totally screwed up proposing to Priscilla in the name of Miles Standish, is standing around feeling sorry for himself when Priscilla confronts him and asks why he is angry with her for being so blunt. For asking, Why don't you speak for yourself, John?" Read more about Tell it, Priscilla!

A November Night

How cold it is! Even the lights are cold;
They have put shawls of fog around them, see!
What if the air should grow so dimly white
That we would lose our way along the paths
Made new by walls of moving mist receding
The more we follow. . . . What a silver night!
That was our bench the time you said to me
The long new poem -- but how different now,
How eerie with the curtain of the fog

In Flanders Fields

By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD
(1872-1918) Canadian Army

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

The Edmund Fitzgerald went down in Lake Superior in November of 1975. The Third Assistant Engineer hailed from Sturgeon Bay. I had recently moved to Door County, just south of Sturgeon Bay. I never knew him, but later on I came to know people who knew people, so to speak. Sturgeon Bay is a ship building town. Read more about The Gales of November

Night Visitors

The Love for October
W. S. Merwin

A child looking at ruins grows younger
but cold
and wants to wake to a new name
I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring
walnut and may leaves the color
of shoulders at the end of summer
a month that has been to the mountain
and become light there
the long grass lies pointing uphill
even in death for a reason
that none of us knows
and the wren laughs in the early shade now

Clear and Colder - Boston Common

As I went down through the common,
It was bright with the light of day,
For the wind and rain had swept the leaves
And the shadow of summer away.
The walks were all fresh-blacked with rain
As I went briskly down -
I felt my own quick step begin
The pace of the winter town.

As I went down through the common,
The sky was wild and pale;
I saw one tree with a jib of leaves
In the stress of the aftergale;

Tasting the Wild Grapes
Mary Oliver

The red beast
who lives in the side of these hills
won’t come out for anything you have:
money or music. Still, there are moments
heavy with light and good luck. Walk
quietly under these tangled vines
and pay attention, and one morning
something will explode underfoot
like a branch of fire; one afternoon
something will flow down the hill