So Much Happiness by Naomi Shihab Nye It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. With sadness there is something to rub against,
 a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
 When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
 something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change. But happiness floats.
 It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
 It doesn’t need anything.
 Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
 and disappears when i

Prayer for those who run by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha I wish you swift wind. I wish you a changed phone number that stays changed. I wish you throwing away the cell the parents bought to track you with. I wish you the Greyhound, PATH train, whatever transit you're waiting for coming on time and taking you away express with no stops. I wish you a city with affordable housing. An apartment where you smear blood above the door so their angel of death will pass you by. I

Visitation by Mark Doty When I heard he had entered the harbor, and circled the wharf for days, I expected the worst: shallow water, confusion, some accident to bring the young humpback to grief. Don't they depend on a compass lodged in the salt-flooded folds of the brain, some delicate musical mechanism to navigate their true course? How many ways, in our century's late iron hours, might we have led him to disaster? That, in those days, was how I'd come to see the world: da

Tuesday by Gwen Benaway the hard point, estrogen high tide- when the patch releases the most of what makes me a girl. breasts ache, swell with change as my emotions descend in currents to a dark heart at the lake bottom. float on driftwood, grip this life like an anchor as I drift further from the shore I call myself. there is no hope in the deep water, no dream lifts under me, just bracken, plastic litter. I survive because I know how to swim, I survive because I kn

Advice from a Raindrop by Kim Stafford You think you’re too small to make a difference? Tell me about it. You think you’re helpless, at the mercy of forces beyond your control? Been there. Think you’re doomed to disappear, just one small voice among millions? That’s no weakness, trust me. That’s your wild card, your trick, your implement. They won’t see you coming until you’re there, in their faces, shining, festive, expendable, eternal. Sure you’re small, just one small par

Epitaph on a Tyrant by W.H. Auden Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets. Lots of folks are turning to, and sharing, Shelley's "Ozymandias" these days--the famous poem of a king who has had built a colossal s

The Portrait by Stanley Kunitz My mother never forgave my father for killing himself, especially at such an awkward time and in a public park, that spring when I was waiting to be born. She locked his name in her deepest cabinet and would not let him out, though I could hear him thumping. When I came down from the attic with the pastel portrait in my hand of a long-lipped stranger with a brave moustache and deep brown level eyes, she ripped it into shreds without a single wo