Arrow through the bellybutton poem
In days of youth, when life was new, A boy so dear, a tale to do, With his eyes bright, and spirits bold, He captured hearts, young and old. His belly button, round and deep, Inviting fingers to seep, And in it secret pure and true, A treasure kept, for me and you. One day, […]
In shadows of night
In shadows of night, a venomous snake, Slithering silently, its lethal fate. With eyes that gleam like emerald fire, Its poison desire, deadly and dire. Coiled and ready to strike with might, In darkness it lurks, out of sight. Beware the serpent, cunning and sly, Its fangs filled with venom, none deny. A creature of […]
The Snake
In twists of fate, a serpentine shape Slithers in the grass, a stealthy escape Bites its prey, a venomous sting Poison courses through the victim’s wing A deadly dance, a wicked spin As life drains out, a sorrowful din Echoes of screams, a haunting refrain As death claims another soul in vain The snake’s embrace, […]
Water Strider by Aaron Baker
Water-Strider A Poem by Aaron Baker Though winged, he walks on water. Skates between elements, skitters like thought through the cattails. A snake slips unseen through the underbrush. The forest shifts and sighs, once again won’t speak its secret. Between the trees, my father glides through sunlight, then shadow. Surface tension: the strider rows […]
the-infernal-regions.html
!DOCTYPE html> html> head lang=”en-US”> title>The Infernal Regions by Aaron Baker/title> /div> h1 class=”pageTitle”>The Infernal Regions/h1> div class=”entry-content clearfix”> h2 class=”author”>by Aaron Baker/h2> div id=”content”> p>Relax. No more the thinness of ceremony./p> p>Largemouth bass at the bottom of Kapowsin Lake/p> p>grow still as his thoughts. No swish and silt,/p> p>no father and flail. And once […]
honeycomb.html
!DOCTYPE html> html> head lang=”en-US”> title>Honeycomb by Aaron Baker/title> /div> h1 class=”pageTitle”>Honeycomb/h1> div class=”entry-content clearfix”> h2 class=”author”>by Aaron Baker/h2> div id=”content”> p>Here is the dream where dust, gathered and blowing over the field,/p> p>turns suddenly against the wind and moves with the shape/p> p>of a body. Here the shape of a body forms and reforms […]
Dark Matter by Aaron Baker
We say the heart is sick, meaning something else. But when we say the body is broken, and it is, the poem, like a great engine long given up to the weather, begins to move. Outside, fireweed among the ruins. We’ve known the seed of failure in action, how the worm turns on […]
Year’s End by Weldon Kees
Year’s End by Weldon Kees The state cracked where they left your breath No longer instrument. Along the shore The sand ripped up, and the newer blood Streaked like a vein to every monument. The empty smoke that drifted near the guns Where the stiff motor pounded in the mud Had the smell of a […]
The Upstairs Room by Weldon Kees
The Upstairs Room by Weldon Kees It must have been in March the rug wore through. Now the day passes and I stare At warped pine boards my father’s father nailed, At the twisted grain. Exposed, where emptiness allows, Are the wormholes of eighty years; four generations’ shoes Stumble and scrape and fall To the […]
The Smiles Of The Bathers by Weldon Kees
The Smiles Of The Bathers by Weldon Kees The smiles of the bathers fade as they leave the water, And the lover feels sadness fall as it ends, as he leaves his love. The scholar, closing his book as the midnight clock strikes, is hollow and old: The pilot’s relief on landing is no release. […]
The Furies by Weldon Kees
The Furies by Weldon Kees Not a third that walks beside me, But five or six or more. Whether at dusk or daybreak Or at blinding noon, a retinue Of shadows that no door Excludes.–One like a kind of scrawl, Hands scrawled trembling and blue, A harelipped and hunchbacked dwarf With a smile like a […]
The Doctor Will Return by Weldon Kees
The Doctor Will Return by Weldon Kees The surgical mask, the rubber teat Are singed, give off an evil smell. You seem to weep more now that heat Spreads everywhere we look. It says here none of us is well. The warty spottings on the figurines Are nothing you would care to claim. You seem […]
The Bell From Europe by Weldon Kees
The Bell From Europe by Weldon Kees The tower bell in the Tenth Street Church Rang out nostalgia for the refugee Who knew the source of bells by sound. We liked it, but in ignorance. One meets authorities on bells infrequently. Europe alone made bells with such a tone, Herr Mannheim said. The bell Struck […]
The Beach by Weldon Kees
The Beach by Weldon Kees Squat, unshaven, full of gas, Joseph Samuels, former clerk in four large cities, out of work, waits in the darkened underpass. In sanctuary, out of reach, he stares at the fading light outside: the rain beginning: hears the tide that drums along the empty beach. When drops first fell at […]
Round by Weldon Kees
Round by Weldon Kees “Wondrous life!” cried Marvell at Appleton House. Renan admired Jesus Christ “wholeheartedly.” But here dried ferns keep falling to the floor, And something inside my head Flaps like a worn-out blind. Royal Cortssoz is dead. A blow to the Herald-Tribune. A closet mouse Rattles the wrapper on the breakfast food. Renan […]
Robinson by Weldon Kees
Robinson by Weldon Kees The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone. His act is over. The world is a gray world, Not without violence, and he kicks under the grand piano, The nightmare chase well under way. The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall, Reflects nothing at all. The glass is black. Robinson […]
The End Of The Library by Weldon Kees
The End Of The Library by Weldon Kees When the coal Gave out, we began Burning the books, one by one; First the set Of Bulwer-Lytton And then the Walter Scott. They gave a lot of warmth. Toward the end, in February, flames Consumed the Greek Tragedians and Baudelaire, Proust, Robert Burton And the Po-Chu-i. […]
Late Evening Song by Weldon Kees
Late Evening Song by Weldon Kees For a while Let it be enough: The responsive smile, Though effort goes into it. Across the warm room Shared in candlelight, This look beyond shame, Possible now, at night, Goes out to yours. Hidden by day And shaped by fires Grown dead, gone gray, That burned in other […]
La Vita Nuova by Weldon Kees
La Vita Nuova by Weldon Kees Last summer, in the blue heat, Over the beach, in the burning air, A legless beggar lurched on calloused fists To where I waited with the sun-dazed birds. He said, “The summer boils away. My life Joins to another life; this parched skin Dries and dies and flakes away, […]
Interregnum by Weldon Kees
Interregnum by Weldon Kees Butcher the evil millionaire, peasant, And leave him stinking in the square. Torture the chancellor. Leave the ambassador Strung by his thumbs from the pleasant Embassy wall, where the vines were. Then drill your hogs and sons for another war. Fire on the screaming crowd, ambassador, Sick chancellor, brave millionaire, And […]
Dead March by Weldon Kees
Dead March by Weldon Kees Under the bunker, where the reek of kerosene Prepared the marriage rite, leader and whore, Imperfect kindling even in this wind, burn on. Someone in uniform hums Brahms. Servants prepare Eyewitness stories as the night comes down, as smoking coals await Boots on the stone, the occupying troops. Howl ministers. […]
Covering Two Years by Weldon Kees
Covering Two Years by Weldon Kees This nothingness that feeds upon itself: Pencils that turn to water in the hand, Parts of a sentence, hanging in the air, Thoughts breaking in the mind like glass, Blank sheets of paper that reflect the world Whitened the world that I was silenced by. There were two years […]
Colloquy by Weldon Kees
Colloquy by Weldon Kees In the broken light, in owl weather, Webs on the lawn where the leaves end, I took the thin moon and the sky for cover To pick the cat’s brains and descend A weedy hill. I found him groveling Inside the summerhouse, a shadowed bulge, Furred and somnolent.—”I bring,” I said, […]
A Pastiche For Eve by Weldon Kees
A Pastiche For Eve by Weldon Kees Unmanageable as history: these Followers of Tammuz to the land That offered no return, where dust Grew thick on every bolt and door. And so the world Chilled, and the women wept, tore at their hair. Yet, in the skies, a goddess governed Sirius, the Dog, Who shines […]
A Musician’s Wife by Weldon Kees
A Musician’s Wife by Weldon Kees Between the visits to the shock ward The doctors used to let you play On the old upright Baldwin Donated by a former patient Who is said to be quite stable now. And all day long you played Chopin, Badly and hauntingly, when you weren’t Screaming on the porch […]
1926 by Weldon Kees
1926 by Weldon Kees The porchlight coming on again, Early November, the dead leaves Raked in piles, the wicker swing Creaking. Across the lots A phonograph is playing Ja-Da. An orange moon. I see the lives Of neighbors, mapped and marred Like all the wars ahead, and R. Insane, B. with his throat cut, Fifteen […]
Woods by Wendell Berry
Woods by Wendell Berry I part the out thrusting branches and come in beneath the blessed and the blessing trees. Though I am silent there is singing around me. Though I am dark there is vision around me. Though I am heavy there is flight around me. ————— The End And that’s the End of […]
What We Need Is Here by Wendell Berry
What We Need Is Here by Wendell Berry Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and […]
Water by Wendell Berry
Water by Wendell Berry I was born in a drouth year. That summer my mother waited in the house, enclosed in the sun and the dry ceaseless wind, for the men to come back in the evenings, bringing water from a distant spring. veins of leaves ran dry, roots shrank. And all my life I […]
The Wish to be Generous by Wendell Berry
The Wish to be Generous by Wendell Berry ALL that I serve will die, all my delights, the flesh kindled from my flesh, Garden and field, the silent lilies standing in the woods, the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all will burn in man’s evil, or dwindle in its own age. Let the world […]
The Silence by Wendell Berry
The Silence by Wendell Berry Though the air is full of singing my head is loud with the labor of words. Though the season is rich with fruit, my tongue hungers for the sweet of speech. Though the beech is golden I cannot stand beside it mute, but must say “It is golden,” while the […]
The Real Work by Wendell Berry
The Real Work by Wendell Berry It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is […]
The peace of wild things by Wendell Berry
The peace of wild things by Wendell Berry When despair grows in me and I wake in the middle of the Night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and […]
The Man Born to Farming by Wendell Berry
The Man Born to Farming by Wendell Berry The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap, […]
The Lilies by Wendell Berry
The Lilies by Wendell Berry Amid the gray trunks of ancient trees we found the gay woodland lilies nodding on their stems, frail and fair, so delicately balanced the air held or moved them as it stood or moved. The ground that slept beneath us woke in them and made a music of the light, […]
The Country Of Marriage by Wendell Berry
The Country Of Marriage by Wendell Berry I. I Dream of you walking at Night along the streams of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs of birds opening around you as you walk. You are holding in your Body the dark seed of my sleep. II. This comes after silence. Was […]
Testament by Wendell Berry
Testament by Wendell Berry 1. Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath Grows large and free in air, don’t call it death — A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire His surly art of imitating life; conspire Against him. Say that my Body cannot now Be improved upon; it has no fault to […]
Sabbaths 2001 by Wendell Berry
Sabbaths 2001 by Wendell Berry I He wakes in darkness. All around are sounds of stones shifting, locks unlocking. As if some one had lifted away a great weight, light falls on him. He has been asleep or simply gone. He has known a long suffering of himself, himself sharpen by the pain of his […]
Ripening by Wendell Berry
Ripening by Wendell Berry The longer we are together the larger death grows around us. How many we know by now who are dead! We, who were young, now count the cost of having been. And yet as we know the dead we grow familiar with the world. We, who were young and loved each […]
A Warning To My Readers by Wendell Berry
A Warning To My Readers by Wendell Berry Do not think me gentle because I speak in praise of gentleness, or elegant because I honor the grace that keeps this world. I am a man crude as any, gross of speech, intolerant, stubborn, angry, full of fits and furies. That I may have spoken well […]