DPF / Milosz

For things happening all around us which we can sometimes see, and sometimes cannot, but still they happen, from The Collected Poems.

from The Parable of the Poppy / by Czeslaw Milosz

On a poppy seed is a tiny house,
Dogs bark at the poppy-seed moon,
And never, never do those poppy-seed dogs
Imagine that somewhere there is a world much larger.

DPF / Hawley

For may your muse be kinder and gentler than Ms. Hawley’s, from The Collected Poems.

from The Muse / by Beatrice Hawley

or she stands with her face
pressed against my window

trying to shatter glass
by turns with ice, with fire.

DPF / Strand

For if we can save them, we may only be able to save them one at a time, from Reasons for Moving.

from The Babies / by Mark Strand

Let us hurry.
Let us save the babies.
Let us try to save the babies.

DPF / Kelly

For gardens and all their blooming, from Song.

from The Pear Tree / by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

        Leave off

Your weeping. The rain will keep falling. The crows
Will keep flying. Sit on the ground and wait. Sit
On the ground and wait. Perhaps the bird you planted
Beneath the pear tree…will become…another pear tree.

DPF / Eliot

For the end of a long, many-win, cloud-cover, track-&-field day, from The Waste Land.
from The Waste Land: A Game of Chess / by T.S. Eliot
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.

DPF / Collins

For no longer needing to follow one’s horoscope, if one does, when the days have passed for doing so, from horoscopes for the dead. 
from Horoscopes for the Dead / by Billy Collins
But you will be relieved to learn 

that you no longer need to reflect carefully before acting, 

nor do you have to think more of others, 

and never again will creative work take a back seat 

to the business responsibilities that you never really had.

DPF / Akhmatova

For marriage, from Poems of Akhmatova.
from ‘Three Things Enchanted Him’ / by Anna Akhmatova, translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward
Three things enchanted him:

white peacocks, evensong,

and faded maps of America.

DPF / Heaney

For mothers, from North.

from Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication: for Mary Heaney / by Seamus Heaney

So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove

sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.

DPF / Levis

For time and its non-linearity, from The Widening Spell of the Leaves.
from The Spell of the Leaves / by Larry Levis 
Each morning she would watch her son, a boy of seven,

Yawn before mounting the steps, glinting like a sea,

When the doors of the school bus opened.

DPF / Long

For whatever you celebrate and cherish, from poetryfoundation.org.

from Easter 1933 / by Haniel Long

Anyway, it’s good to stretch out
in the warm white sands,
one’s head in the shade of a dwarf tree,
and look at the Enchanted Mesa —