Month: November 2016

DPF / Sassoon

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For our veterans, the one who lives in this house, the one who lives across the street, the many who live in the everywhere, and for those who run up and down the halls of Heaven looking down and seeking out, through the transparent floors under their feet, the most peaceful scenes, from poetryfoundation.org.

from Dreamers / by Siegfried Sassoon

…Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.

DPF / Ryan

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For art, which we are still so lucky to have, whoever wins or loses, still always have, from The Best of It.

from The Narrow Path /  by Kay Ryan

But for people who ascend
only by pleasure
there are no holding straps.

DPF / Harris

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For a tense election night, from poetryfoundation.org.

from My Mother Goes to Vote / by Judith Harris

I remember, in the classroom converted
into a voting place—
there were two mothers, conversing,
squeezed into the children’s desk chairs.

DPF / Saiser

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For the season, from poetryfoundation.org.

from Thanksgiving for Two / by Marjorie Saiser

We are the feast, plenty of years,
arguments. I’m thinking the whole bundle of it
rolls out like a white tablecloth. We wanted
to be good company for one another.
Little did we know that first picnic
how this would go.

DPF / Hale

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For running for time, for speed, for distance, for fun, or for one or any combination of the four, from The American Poetry Review, Nov/Dec 2016. 

from Waiting on the Time Machine / by Chasity Hale

I think
running is the closest thing to time travel
that I may ever experience in my lifetime–
somehow, I become younger than I am,
younger than I was.

DPF / Akhmatova

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For snow, from Poems of Akhmatova.

from Voronezh / by Anna Akhmatova, translated by Stanley Kunitz

And the town stands locked in ice:
a paperweight of trees, wall, snow.
Gingerly, I tread on glass;
the painted sleighs skid in their tracks.

DPF /Artaud

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For “the heights of inwardness,” from The Poetry of Surrealism: An Anthology, edited by Michael Benedikt.

from Address to the Dalai Lama / by Antonin Artaud, translated by Michael Benedikt

I, dust, idea, lips and levitation; dream, cry, renunciation of all fixed ideas, suspended among all forms, and longing for nothing but the wind.

DPF / Ochester

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For good and obsessive first lines and for the season, from poetryfoundation.org.

from Fall / by Ed Ochester

Crows, crows, crows, crows

DPF / Chen

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For the upcoming season, from The Best American Poetry 2015, guest editor Sherman Alexie, and series editor David Lehman.

from for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me / by Chen Chen

i pledge allegiance to the weather
report that promises more snow, plus freezing rain.
though i would minus the pluvial & plus the multitude

of messages pressed muddy into the perfectly
mutable snow

DPF / Dove

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For the first day of November, from poetryfoundation.org.

from November for Beginners / by Rita Dove

Snow would be the easy
way out—that softening
sky like a sigh of relief