Lessons from the Garden
Richard Newman

This morning little mushroom heads,
like rusted dimes on toothpick stalks,
sprang up in our flower box.
An hour later they were dead,

withered in the summer heat.
Each spore stretched out its mortal coil
through dried-up peat and city soil
to die upon a slab of concrete.

With mouthless moths and butterflies,
the male flies free, no need for food,
and mates to spawn a hungry brood
then lives another hour and dies,

unable even to watch its spawn
chew my tomatoes to the ground.
If they had mouths their song would sound
pointless, pointless over the lawn.

Inside, my daughter’s forced to practice.
Her fingers blunder down the keys,
ignoring accidentals. She’s
thirteen, more prickly than a cactus.

Outside the yard is newly mown—
I hear the chirps of brazen birds,
wrong notes accented by swear words,
and realize lately how she’s grown

almost as moody as my ex-wife.
A year ago she loved to play.
She hates it now and pounds away
a stubborn song of loss and life.

Available online via Poetry Daily

The Back Yard by Twilight
Doug Van Gundy
These are the hours I love the best:
when the golden light of summer has climbed
to the top of the abandoned building next door

and all of the neighborhood
cats have slinked from inside
the woodpile beneath the back porch

and the cicadas and katydids
and grey tree frogs begin advertising
in the cacophonous personals section of the woodlot

and the dog can no longer
find his ball in the tall grass
at the edge of the darkening oaks

and citronella wafts across the crabgrass and mingles
with the lingering smell from the deep fryer
at the diner at the bottom of the hill

and the air grows heavy and moist
and the sound of the traffic on the
four-lane takes on a veiled quality

and the blue-white of the sun
is reflected in a satellite’s
long aching arc across the sky

and the windows open
and the box fan comes on

and the neighbor’s coon hound catches
the scent of something toothy & wild
and sounds his dutiful alarm

and the faint bruised smell of a skunk comes on
with the throw of the same switch
that turns on all of the fireflies

and the early windfall apples
fall without any wind at all.

“The Back Yard by Twilight” first appeared in Ecotone, Volume 3, Number 2, 2008. Available online via the Fishouse.

“The Color of Jazz” in Mike Bitzenhofer’s Flickr stream.
Licensed via the Creative Commons.

Like a Girl Saying Yes
Sebastian Matthews

‘like a girl saying yes’

is the way Condon
put it

hearing Bix’s coronet
for the first time

a mellow tone
lofted gently from the bell

of the horn

like a girl saying yes

or as Louis said
followed (no doubt)
by his cackle laugh

“I’m tellin’ you

those pretty notes
went right thru me”

Poem, copyright © 2005 by Sebastian Matthews.  Available online via From the Fishouse.

In Harvest
by Sophie Jewett

Mown meadows skirt the standing wheat;
I linger, for the hay is sweet,
New-cut and curing in the sun.
Like furrows, straight, the windrows run,
Fallen, gallant ranks that tossed and bent
When, yesterday, the west wind went
A-rioting through grass and grain.
To-day no least breath stirs the plain;
Only the hot air, quivering, yields
Illusive motion to the fields
Where not the slenderest tassel swings.
Across the wheat flash sky-blue wings;
A goldfinch dangles from a tall,
Full-flowered yellow mullein; all
The world seems turning blue and gold.
Unstartled, since, even from of old,
Beauty has brought keen sense of her,
I feel the withering grasses stir;
Along the edges of the wheat,
I hear the rustle of her feet:
And yet I know the whole sea lies,
And half the earth, between our eyes.

Source: The Poems of Sophie Jewett (1910).  Available online via the Poetry Foundation.

Startled by Summer
Wind Lin

The klaxon warns of the first typhoon,
and I think
how last night’s booming
thunder was already too late for spring.

The fog outside the shutter
no longer hurries us into jackets
and we suddenly discover
it’s ok to go out in short sleeves.

However,
the one thing I can’t remember:
this moment last year
was it the frog’s
or the cicada’s song
that sprung me from my spring dreams.

Translated by Paul Welch and available online at From The Fishouse.  “Startled by Summer” is from Selected Poems of Wind Lynn (The Milky Way Publishing Co., 2004).

Tell Me a Story
Robert Penn Warren

[ A ]

Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood
By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard
The great geese hoot northward.

I could not see them, there being no moon
And the stars sparse.  I heard them.

I did not know what was happening in my heart.

It was the season before the elderberry blooms,
Therefore they were going north.

The sound was passing northward.

[ B ]

Tell me a story.

In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.

Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

Available online via Poets.org

Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey
by Hayden Carruth

Scrambled eggs and whiskey
in the false-dawn light. Chicago,
a sweet town, bleak, God knows,
but sweet. Sometimes. And
weren’t we fine tonight?
When Hank set up that limping
treble roll behind me
my horn just growled and I
thought my heart would burst.
And Brad M. pressing with the
soft stick and Joe-Anne
singing low. Here we are now
in the White Tower, leaning
on one another, too tired
to go home. But don’t say a word,
don’t tell a soul, they wouldn’t
understand, they couldn’t, never
in a million years, how fine,
how magnificent we were
in that old club tonight.

Available online at Poets.org
From Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, Poems 1991-1995, published by Copper Canyon Press, 1996.

To My Mother
by Wendell Berry

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.

Available online at the Poetry Foundation.  Wendell Berry, “To My Mother” from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1998.

The History of Now
David SmithWhite

The recording of culture is history;
but our culture is more than that.
It’s the world of human action,
and the myths we make of the fact.

The recording of history is culture,
but our history is more than that.
It informs a hidden agenda.
Unconscious of motive we act.

It’s the history of now, the history of now.
It’s only the present that exists as endowed.
It’s the history of now. The moment – KAPOW!
That knocks you right over and muddies your brow.

Through the prism of language, we know what we know.
We carry our baggage and stories of woe.
Victor and vanquished pride cannot budge,
the dead weight of hatred and ancestral grudge.

We fight our good fights with our hand on our heart;
the music is swelling as loved ones depart.
As sheep to the slaughter, the script cannot chart,
a course more ignoble: the propagandist’s art.

The recording of history is culture,
but our culture is more than that.
More than the great individuals,
the scholars so love in their tracts.

The recording of culture is history;
but our history is more than that.
Not simple dates or statistics,
the full horror and gore still attracts.

It’s the history of now, the history of now.
A strange contradiction that makes sense somehow.
It’s the history of now, a mystery and shroud.
The past and the future: best fiction allowed.

Available online at PoemHunter.com

To Make a Dadist Poem
Tristan Tzara

Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are–an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

Available online via PoemHunter.com