Kraj Majales (King Of May) poem – Allen Ginsberg
And the Communists have nothing to offer but fat cheeks and eyeglasses and lying policemen and the Capitalists proffer Napalm and money in green suitcases to the Naked, and the Communists create heavy industry but the heart is also heavy and the beautiful engineers are all dead, the secret technicians conspire for their own […]
Kraj Majales (King Of May) poem – Allen Ginsberg
And the Communists have nothing to offer but fat cheeks and eyeglasses and lying policemen and the Capitalists proffer Napalm and money in green suitcases to the Naked, and the Communists create heavy industry but the heart is also heavy and the beautiful engineers are all dead, the secret technicians conspire for their own […]
Traveling Dream by Marge Piercy
I am packing to go to the airport but somehow I am never packed. I keep remembering more things I keep forgetting. Secretly the clock is bolting forward ten minutes at a click instead of one. Each time I look away, it jumps. Now I remember I have to find the cats. I have four […]
To the Pay Toilet by Marge Piercy
You strop my anger, especially when I find you in restaurant or bar and pay for the same liquid, coming and going. In bus depots and airports and turnpike plazas some woman is dragging in with three kids hung off her shrieking their simple urgency like gulls. She’s supposed to pay for each of them […]
Passport by Mahmoud Darwish
They did not recognize me in the shadows That suck away my color in this Passport And to them my wound was an exhibit For a tourist Who loves to collect photographs They did not recognize me, Ah . . . Don’t leave The palm of my hand without the sun Because the trees recognize […]
As He Walks Away by Mahmoud Darwish
The enemy who drinks tea in our hovel has a horse in smoke, a daughter with thick eyebrow, brown eyes and long hair braided over her shoulders like a night of songs. He’s never without her picture when he comes to drink our tea but he forgets to tell us about her nightly chores about […]
Temporary City by Nijole Miliauskaite
walking in the evening along the banks of the creek, as the sky is lighted by the glow from the hothouses, farther on the dump, the street, the pond, the hospital, farther still garages and the dried tops of pine trees here in the spring a nurse was raped as she walked to work one […]
The Deeper Shadow by Pierre Reverdy
The Deeper Shadow by Pierre Reverdy Not they not anything not even He Stairs in the branches climbing the clouds You can’t find the number or the street or the name of the blue roads traced by roof corners and by straight lines of balconies But the wall stretches from the door to the ramp […]
little teddy bear lost by Raj Arumugam
little teddy bear lost by Raj Arumugam Little Teddy bear pink and cuddly lying on the kerb with the lights of the cafes bouncing off you Oh who’s missing you tonight crying for her teddy bear? maybe it’s little Amy asleep who dropped you while her mum carried her into the car? and maybe now […]
The Daughter Goes To Camp by Sharon Olds
The Daughter Goes To Camp by Sharon Olds In the taxi alone, home from the airport, I could not believe you were gone. My palm kept creeping over the smooth plastic to find your strong meaty little hand and squeeze it, find your narrow thigh in the noble ribbing of the corduroy, straight and regular […]
The Perfect High by Shel Silverstein
There once was a boy named Gimmesome Roy. He was nothing like me or you. ‘Cause laying back and getting high was all he cared to do. As a kid, he sat in the cellar, sniffing airplane glue. And then he smoked bananas — which was then the thing to do. He tried aspirin in […]
Hector The Collector by Shel Silverstein
Hector the Collector Collected bits of string, Collected dolls with broken heads And rusty bells that would not ring. Bent-up nails and ice-cream sticks, Twists of wires, worn-out tires, Paper bags and broken bricks. Old chipped vases, half shoelaces, Gatlin’ guns that wouldn’t shoot, Leaky boasts that wouldn’t float And stopped-up horns that wouldn’t toot. […]
Green Rock, Winthrop Bay by Sylvia Plath
No lame excuses can gloss over Barge-tar clotted at the tide-line, the wrecked pier. I should have known better. Fifteen years between me and the bay Profited memory, but did away with the old scenery And patched this shoddy Makeshift of a view to quit My promise of an idyll. The blue’s worn out: It’s […]
Meeting at an Airport by Taha Muhammad Ali
You asked me once, on our way back from the midmorning trip to the spring: “What do you hate, and who do you love?” And I answered, from behind the eyelashes of my surprise, my blood rushing like the shadow cast by a cloud of starlings: “I hate departure . . . I love the […]
Abd el-Hadi Fights a Superpower by Taha Muhammad Ali
In his life he neither wrote nor read. In his life he didn’t cut down a single tree, didn’t slit the throat of a single calf. In his life he did not speak of the New York Times behind its back, didn’t raise his voice to a soul except in his saying: “Come in, please, […]
Coming and Going by Tony Hoagland
My marriage ended in an airport long ago. I was not wise enough to cry while looking for my car, walking through the underground garage; jets were roaring overhead, and if I had been wise I would have looked up at those heavy-bellied cylinders and seen the wheelchairs and the frightened dogs inside; the kidneys […]
In Memory of W. B. Yeats by W. H. Auden
I He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. Far from his illness The wolves ran on […]
At The San Francisco Airport by Yvor Winters
To my daughter, 1954 This is the terminal: the light Gives perfect vision, false and hard; The metal glitters, deep and bright. Great planes are waiting in the yard— They are already in the night. And you are here beside me, small, Contained and fragile, and intent On things that I but half recall— Yet […]