DPF / Levine

For newborns, from What Work Is.

from Among Children / by Philip Levine

There was such wonder
in their sleep, such purpose in their eyes
closed against autumn, in their damp heads
blurred with the hair of ponds, and not one
turned against me or the light, not one
said, I am sick, I am tired, I will go home,
not one complained or drifted alone,
unloved, on the hardest day of their lives.

DPF / Williams

For the love of chicken wire and parts of boxes, from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I, 1909-1939. 

from Pastoral / by William Carlos Williams

No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.

DPF / Dietz

For dreams, from poetryfoundation.org.

from Lullaby / by Maggie Dietz

If I had a ginko tree
I’d climb it in the evening.

If I had a marmoset
He’d climb the tree with me.

DPF / Levine

For librarians and libraries, from What Work Is.

from Agnus Dei / by Philip Levine

There was weeping and gnashing. The lamb escaped
through an expensive, leaded windowpane
and entered the late afternoon flying low
over the houses

DPF / Wright

For the beauty of Chinese poetry, from Negative Blue.

from After Reading Wang Wei, I go Outside to the Full Moon  / by Charles Wright

Back here, old snow like lace cakes,
Candescent and brittle now and then through the tall grass.

DPF / Levine

For childhood and its many varieties, some endless ones and some too brief, from What Work Is.

from Growth / by Philip Levine

Then out to the open weedy yard
among the waiting and emptied drums
where I hammered and sawed, singing
my new life of working and earning,
outside in the fresh air of Detroit
in 1942, a year of growth.

DPF / Buchanan

For luck, from Must a Violence.

from The Cheshire Cat / by Oni Buchanan

‘I’ve never seen a real one!
If it bites me, that’s extremely
good luck,’ I remembered.

DPF / Wright

For Ohio, on a good night for Cleveland and the state, and for fathers on earth and beyond it, from poetryfoundation.org.

from Youth / by James Wright

I know his ghost will drift home 
To the Ohio River, and sit down, alone, 
Whittling a root. 
He will say nothing. 
The waters flow past, older, younger   
Than he is, or I am.

DPF / Lee

For fathers on their weekend, from poetryfoundation.org.

from Little Father / by Li-Young Lee

little clock spring newly wet
in the fire, little grape, parent to the future
wine, a son the fruit of his own son

DPF / Berryman

For a little snow in the summer, from Poetry, October/November 1963.

from II Snow Line / by John Berryman

It was wet & white & swift & where I am
I don’t know. It was dark and then
it isn’t.