20th-Century Poetry

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 / 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 / Eliot20

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For days like this, from The Waste Land and Other Poems.

from The Waste Land: II. A Game of Chess / by T.S. Eliot

“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”
“I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
“With my hair down, so. What shall we do
to-morrow?
“What shall we ever do?”

DPF / Plath

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For the season, from Ariel. I can’t believe she didn’t make it to the 21st-Century. What on Earth would have been next?

from The Moon and the Yew Tree / by Sylvia Plath

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

DPF / Rich

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For an Adrienne Rich kind of day, from The Fact of a Doorframe.

from Bears / by Adrienne Rich

Wonderful bears that walked my room all night,
Where are you gone, your sleek and fairy fur,
Your eyes’ veiled imperious light?

DPF / Doolittle

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For your voice, however small, from Helen in Egypt. If the daughter of a mute swan can speak, so can you.

from Helen in Egypt, Book 5: 7 / by H.D.

do you hear me? do I whisper?
there is a voice within me,
listen — let it speak for me.

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DPF / Levertov

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For flying cars, from Breathing the Water.

from Poet Power / by Denise Levertov

And he takes both hands
off the wheel and swings round,
glittering with joy: “Benedetti!
Mario Benedetti!”
There are
hallelujas in his voice —

DPF / Neruda

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For, as they say, the clouds cried today, finally, and that reminds me of the ocean. From The House in the Sand: Prose Poems by Pablo Neruda.

from The Sea / by Pablo Neruda, translated by Dennis Maloney and Clark M. Zlotchew

The salt of seven leagues, horizontal salt, crystalline salt of the rectangle, stormy salt, the salt of the seven seas, salt.

DPF / Hearne

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For the fathers, from nervous horses.

from My Father Rode Great, Silver Birds / by Vicki Hearne

He rode B-52’s. He went off
Into the blue yonder on

Silver birds that leaped
Plashless into the air, then

Carried him safely home.