For erasures of Shakespeare’s sonnets, from Nets.
from 97 / by Jen Bervin
the very birds are mute
Or, if they sing
leaves look pale
Author: Michele Pizarro Harman
DPF / Tranströmer
For music, from The Half-Finished Heaven, translated by Robert Bly.
from Allegro / by Tomas Tranströmer
The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.
The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.
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.
Daily Poetry Fragments {Semi-Daily} 