when the ghost begins to quicken

Van Gogh: Wheat Field with Rooks Flying   Here’s a poem by William Butler Yeats: The Cold Heaven Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice, And thereupon imagination and heart were driven So wild that every casual thought of that and this

The Center Cannot Hold

  When I see the word “center,” I think of this poem by William Butler Yeats. He wrote it in 1919, but it seems even more relevant now.     The Second Coming       by William Butler Yeats Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre

The Tall Camels of the spirit

I have loved the poetry of Richard Wilbur for about thirty years, and this poem was one of the first ones I encountered.  I had the delight of meeting him, even standing in the lunch line with him! at the West Chester Poetry Conference about 10 years ago. He takes a philosophical quotation and turns

Changing the Diaper

  My friend Kate Daniels is the mother of three. Those children are grown up now, but when one of  them was a baby, Kate wrote this “down and dirty” poem:   Funk   Opening the diaper, each morning becomes the third day, when God created the earth, late in the afternoon, mountains and continents

she slurs her words

painting: “Farewell”   Christian Schloe   Here is a heartbreaking poem by Susan Aizenberg:   The Nonself: Some Things She Said to Me   This is Hell, J. says from her hospital bed, and I don’t mean Hell, I mean Hell. Like a comic lush, she slurs her words, Atavan and morphine swelling her tongue. Pupils

the rhythmic jarring of brain tissue

  Here’s a poem by Marvin Bell:   Wednesday   Gray rainwater lay on the grass in the late afternoon. The carp lay on the bottom, resting,while dusk took shape in the form of the first stirrings of his hunger, and the trees, shorter and heavier, breathed heavily upward. Into this sodden, nourishing afternoon I

Hideout – now finished

not finished with this one yet…. had to stop and go to class!   Thanks for all the responses to that first line!   I wanted to post Irish poet  Desmond Egan’s poem “Hideout” and couldn’t find it online.  All I could find was a YouTube video of him reading it. So when I got

all that glisters is not gold

In the little poem inside the casket in the Merchant of Venice,  it’s “glisters” instead of “glitters”  but the meaning is the same: Act 2, Scene 7 of The Merchant of Venice: The Prince of Morocco opens the golden casket and finds this message inside: “All that glisters is not gold Often have you heard

It’s All a Blur

  It’s all a blur  when you’re nearsighted.  Here’s a poem of mine: Nearsighted   Although the eye doctor’s chart melted sadly into the wall , I can see this minute before me, like a snowbird in the feeder eighteen inches from my face. We stare at each other through the window. His black beady

juicy stem

Here’s a poem I wrote which contains the word “Juicy.”  I like to play with words, and this poem is full of wordplay.   Not so the Wicked, Not so:   This is how Sister Eleanora taught punctuation. The fifth grade chanted:   Not so the wicked comma Not so colon! Not so that they would