For the day, from poetryfoundation.org.
from March / by Richard Kenney
Sky a shook poncho.
Roof wrung. Mind a luna moth
Caught in a banjo.
20th-Century Poetry
DPF / Schnackenberg
For the story of Oedipus, from The Throne of Labdacus.
from One: The God Tunes the Strings / by Gjertrud Schnackenberg
Then the god begins tuning the strings
With the squeak of the wooden pegs
Rotating in their holes,
As if he were setting the tragic text
To the music of houseflies.
DPF / Glück
For gathering against silence, from The House on Marshland.
from The School Children / Louise Glück
The children go forward with their little satchels.
And all morning the mothers have labored
to gather the late apples, red and gold,
like words of another language.
DPF / Öijer
For walking alone, from The Star by My Head: Poets from Sweden.
from Visitor / by Bruno K. Öijer
and my head spanned the night
where a star continually fell
out of my mouth rain emerged
like a brittle and deserted ringing from
a little clock made of brass
DPF / Kumin
For sometimes it does seem that night dreams have lives of their own, from Up Country: Poems of New England. For this book, Kumin shared illustrator Barbara Swan with her friend, Anne Sexton.
from The Dreamer, The Dream / by Maxine Kumin
and all this they do in secret
climbing behind his back
lumbering from their dark fissure
going up like a dream going on
DPF / Šalamun
For every animal, place, color, and weather is poetry if you look for it, from There’s the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair.
from The Suns / by Tomaž Šalamun
Lie down, little doe!
Rest in peace and mew.
It’s warm in the snow.
Where is my voice?
DPF / Faulkner
For when it’s your birthday, you get to choose a favorite moment of poetic prose and call it, not “purple prose,” but poetry, from The Sound and the Fury.
from The Sound and the Fury: April Eighth 1928 / by William Faulkner
She wore a stiff black straw hat perched upon her turban, and a maroon velvet cape with a border of mangy and anonymous fur above a dress of purple silk, and she stood in the door for awhile with her myriad and sunken face lifted to the weather, and one gaunt hand flac-soled as the belly of a fish, then she moved the cape aside and examined the bosom of her gown.
DPF / Frank
For someone who must have done a perfect rain dance this month, from poetryfoundation.org.
from February Rain / by Florence Kiper Frank
We shall be forever in this room held tight
By the wind and the endless fall of the rain upon snow.
There are tulips upon the window-sill, there is the bright
Gnawing of fire on shadow
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 / 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.
Daily Poetry Fragments {Semi-Daily} 