DPF Glück

For the season, which is of course, track & field season, from The House on Marshland.

from The Shad-blow Tree / by Louise Glück

One year he focused on a tree
until, through sunlight pure as never afterward, he saw
the season, early spring, work upon those limbs
its white flower

DPF / Zucker

For another one for mothers and blooming lilac and happy first day of National Poetry Month, 2017, and for daughters who are like blooming lilac, from the pedestrians.

from pedestrian / by Rachel Zucker

            I
have an idea for a website where mothers shoot
home movies & I upload them as part of my ongoing
project to “accurately depict women’s lives”

DPF / Tufariello

For our poet-nurse, amazing Catherine, from Keeping My Name.

from Chemist’s Daughter / by Catherine Tufariello

Thumping the dinner table, Dad would say 

it too was atoms – massed in galaxies 

made mainly of empty space.

DPF / Ryan

For these best clouds ever, which we rarely see here, from poetryfoundation.org. And, this one’s for the magical Kay Ryan, who I met in Lancaster, California, when she read at her community college alma mater, and later in Key West, when she read and spoke and paneled at the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar.

from Cloud / by Kay Ryan

From inside the
forest it seems
like an interior
matter, something
wholly to do
with trees

 

DPF / Chakraborty

For caves at the bottom of lakes and grief as large as mountains, from Poetry, April 2017.

from Dear, Beloved / by Sumita Chakraborty

It would be winter, with a thin snow. An aged sunbeam
would fall on me, then on a nearby summit, until a mass
of ice would come upon me like a crown of master diamonds
in shades of gold and pink.

DPF / Collins

For poetry on St. Patrick’s Day, from a poet to whom I passed the handshake passed to me from a hand that shook Emily Dickinson’s, and from The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems.

from The Trouble with Poetry / by Billy Collins

But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.

DPF / Collins

For rules for everything, from The Trouble with Poetry.

from The Student / by Billy Collins

My poetry instruction book,
which I bought at an outdoor stall along the river,

contains many rules
about what to avoid and what to follow.

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 / Kocot

For finding any way to share one’s own opinion and to communicate, from Phantom Pains of Madness.

from The Stars / by Noelle Kocot

But
The
Only
Thing
I
Can
Do
Is
To
Wave
My
Purple
Scarf

DPF / Zavecz

For sometimes there’s sudden and unexplained light, from Fairy Tale Review: The Mauve Issue.

from Six: A / by Rachel Zavecz

{A} ntlers sprouted her head she was a child starlight caught in their translucent branches