DPF / Sharp

For fairy tales, from Copper Nickel, Issue 24.

from Bear Skins / by Ryan Sharp

Three brothers have draped pelts
Over their shoulders, pretending
To be bears.

DPF / Loughlin

For the rain, which makes an appearance at the end of this poem, from Copper Nickel, Issue 24. 

from The News / by John Loughlin

The dead knock at the door.
They arrive with big news.
The future as they imagined it,
The being dead part, hasn’t turned out
As they expected. Both the idealists
And the realists had it wrong.
You will too, they tell you.

DPF / Milosz

For rains, reverence, and Visions of Eternity, from Bells in Winter, translated by the author and Lillian Vallee.

from Bells in Winter / by Czeslaw Milosz

What year is this? It’s easy to remember.
This is the year when eucalyptus forests froze in the hills
And everyone could provide himself with free wood for his fireplace
In preparation for the rains and storms from the sea.

DPF / Milosz

For creation, chaos, and unreason, from Bells in Winter, translated by the author and Lillian Vallee.

from Calling to Order / by Czeslaw Milosz

Out of what thin sand
And mud and slime
Out of what dogged splinters
Did you fashion your castle against the test of the sea,
And now it is touched by a wave.

DPF / Valentine

For Valentine’s Day, from Ordinary Things.

from Outside the Frame / by Jean Valentine

It is enough, now, anywhere,
with everyone you love there to talk to.

DPF / Rilke

For Valentine’s Day, from Sonnets to Orpheus, translated by M.D. Herter Norton.

from First Part, 1 / by Rainer Maria Rilke

There rose a tree. O pure transcendency!
O Orpheus singing! O tall tree in the ear!
And all was silent. Yet even in the silence
new beginning, beckoning, change went on.

Creatures of stillness thronged out of the clear
released wood from lair and nesting-place;
and it turned out that not from cunning and not
from fear were they so hushed within themselves,

but from harkening.

DPF / Harvey

For science fiction, too, in all its nonfiction foreshadows, from Modern Life.

from The Future of Terror / 7 / by Matthea Harvey

We spun the glob to forget
our grievances. Greenland: gone.
The Gulf, a blurry gouache.
We went on hayrides and watched
the gulls glide overhead, though
our health insurance no longer covered
hayrides, only icewater, aspirin
and iris inspections, which the individualists
outside the gate said infringed on their inalienable
rights.

DPF / Glück

For the children, from Faithful and Virtuous Night.

from Utopia / by Louise Glück

When the train stops, the woman said, you must get on it. But how will I know, the child asked, it is the right train? It will be the right train, said the woman, because it is the right time.

DPF / Heaney

For a different perspective, from Station Island.

from Drifting Off / by Seamus Heaney

The guttersnipe and the albatross
gliding for days without a single wingbeat
were equally beyond me.

DPF / Bauer

For Dorothy and Glenda and the many shades of green, from Fairy Tale Review: The Emerald Issue.

from The Rhetoric of Oz / by Grace Bauer

Language is the wizard
and the curtain that he hides behind,
conjuring names for all our longings
and helping us spell our way home.