Poetry Collection

W. B. Yeats

O WHERE is our Mother of Peace

Nodding her purple hood?

For the winds that awakened the stars

Are blowing through my blood.

I would that the death-pale deer

Had come through the mountain side,

And trampled the mountain away,

And drunk up the murmuring tide;

For the winds that awakened the stars

Are blowing through my blood,

And our Mother of Peace has forgot me

Anne Sexton

Sleepmonger, deathmonger, with capsules in my palms each night, eight at a time from sweet pharmaceutical bottles I make arrangements for a pint-sized journey. I'm the queen of this condition. I'm an expert on making the trip and now they say I'm an addict. Now they ask why. WHY!

Don't they know that I promised to die! I'm keeping in practice. I'm merely staying in shape. The pills are a mother, but better, every color and as good as sour balls. I'm on a diet from death.

Maya Angelou

The night has been long, The wound has been deep, The pit has been dark, And the walls have been steep.

Under a dead blue sky on a distant beach, I was dragged by my braids just beyond your reach. Your hands were tied, your mouth was bound, You couldn't even call out my name. You were helpless and so was I, But unfortunately throughout history You've worn a badge of shame.

I say, the night has been long, The wound has been deep, The pit has been dark And the walls have been steep.

But today, voices of old spirit sound Speak to us in words profound, Across the years, across the centuries, Across the oceans, and across the seas. They say, draw near to one another, Save your race. You have been paid for in a distant place, The old ones remind us that slavery's chains Have paid for our freedom again and again.

The night has been long, The pit has been deep, The night has been dark, And the walls have been steep.

The hells we have lived through and live through still, Have sharpened our senses and toughened our will. The night has been long. This morning I look through your anguish Right down to your soul. I know that with each other we can make ourselves whole. I look through the posture and past your disguise, And see your love for family in your big brown eyes.

I say, clap hands and let's come together in this meeting ground, I say, clap hands and let's deal with each other with love, I say, clap hands and let us get from the low road of indifference, Clap hands, let us come together and reveal our hearts, Let us come together and revise our spirits, Let us come together and cleanse our souls, Clap hands, let's leave the preening And stop impostering our own history. Clap hands, call the spirits back from the ledge, Clap hands, let us invite joy into our conversation, Courtesy into our bedrooms, Gentleness into our kitchen, Care into our nursery.

The ancestors remind us, despite the history of pain We are a going-on people who will rise again.

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou

I've got the children to tend The clothes to mend The floor to mop The food to shop Then the chicken to fry The baby to dry I got company to feed The garden to weed I've got shirts to press The tots to dress The can to be cut I gotta clean up this hut Then see about the sick And the cotton to pick.

Shine on me, sunshine Rain on me, rain Fall softly, dewdrops And cool my brow again.

Storm, blow me from here With your fiercest wind Let me float across the sky 'Til I can rest again.

Fall gently, snowflakes Cover me with white Cold icy kisses and Let me rest tonight.

Maya Angelou

Lying, thinking Last night How to find my soul a home Where water is not thirsty And bread loaf is not stone I came up with one thing And I don't believe I'm wrong That nobody, But nobody Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone Nobody, but nobody Can make it out here alone.

There are some millionaires With money they can't use Their wives run round like banshees Their children sing the blues They've got expensive doctors To cure their hearts of stone. But nobody No, nobody Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone Nobody, but nobody Can make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closely I'll tell you what I know Storm clouds are gathering The wind is gonna blow The race of man is suffering And I can hear the moan, 'Cause nobody, But nobody Can make it out here alone.

Anne Sexton

On the southwest side of Capri we found a little unknown grotto where no people were and we entered it completely and let our bodies lose all their loneliness.

All the fish in us had escaped for a minute. The real fish did not mind. We did not disturb their personal life. We calmly trailed over them and under them, shedding air bubbles, little white balloons that drifted up into the sun by the boat where the Italian boatman slept with his hat over his face.

Water so clear you could read a book through it. Water so buoyant you could float on your elbow. I lay on it as on a divan. I lay on it just like Matisse's Red Odalisque. Water was my strange flower, one must picture a woman without a toga or a scarf on a couch as deep as a tomb.

Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton

"Angels of the love affair, do you know that other, the dark one, that other me?"

1. ANGEL OF FIRE AND GENITALS

Angel of fire and genitals, do you know slime, that green mama who first forced me to sing, who put me first in the latrine, that pantomime of brown where I was beggar and she was king? I said, "The devil is down that festering hole." Then he bit me in the buttocks and took over my soul. Fire woman, you of the ancient flame, you of the Bunsen burner, you of the candle, you of the blast furnace, you of the barbecue, you of the fierce solar energy, Mademoiselle, take some ice, take come snow, take a month of rain and you would gutter in the dark, cracking up your brain.

Mother of fire, let me stand at your devouring gate as the sun dies in your arms and you loosen it's terrible weight.

2. ANGEL OF CLEAN SHEETS

Angel of clean sheets, do you know bedbugs? Once in the madhouse they came like specks of cinnamon as I lay in a choral cave of drugs, as old as a dog, as quiet as a skeleton. Little bits of dried blood. One hundred marks upon the sheet. One hundred kisses in the dark. White sheets smelling of soap and Clorox have nothing to do with this night of soil, nothing to do with barred windows and multiple locks and all the webbing in the bed, the ultimate recoil. I have slept in silk and in red and in black. I have slept on sand and, on fall night, a haystack.

I have known a crib. I have known the tuck-in of a child but inside my hair waits the night I was defiled.

3. ANGEL OF FLIGHT AND SLEIGH BELLS

Angel of flight and sleigh bells, do you know paralysis, that ether house where your arms and legs are cement? You are as still as a yardstick. You have a doll's kiss. The brain whirls in a fit. The brain is not evident. I have gone to that same place without a germ or a stroke. A little solo act—that lady with the brain that broke.

In this fashion I have become a tree. I have become a vase you can pick up or drop at will, inanimate at last. What unusual luck! My body passively resisting. Part of the leftovers. Part of the kill. Angels of flight, you soarer, you flapper, you floater, you gull that grows out of my back in the dreams I prefer,

stay near. But give me the totem. Give me the shut eye where I stand in stone shoes as the world's bicycle goes by.

4. ANGEL OF HOPE AND CALENDARS

Angel of hope and calendars, do you know despair? That hole I crawl into with a box of Kleenex, that hole where the fire woman is tied to her chair, that hole where leather men are wringing their necks, where the sea has turned into a pond of urine. There is no place to wash and no marine beings to stir in.

In this hole your mother is crying out each day. Your father is eating cake and digging her grave. In this hole your baby is strangling. Your mouth is clay. Your eyes are made of glass. They break. You are not brave. You are alone like a dog in a kennel. Your hands break out in boils. Your arms are cut and bound by bands

of wire. Your voice is out there. Your voice is strange. There are no prayers here. Here there is no change.

5. ANGEL OF BLIZZARDS AND BLACKOUTS

Angle of blizzards and blackouts, do you know raspberries, those rubies that sat in the green of my grandfather's garden? You of the snow tires, you of the sugary wings, you freeze me out. Let me crawl through the patch. Let me be ten. Let me pick those sweet kisses, thief that I was, as the sea on my left slapped its applause.

Only my grandfather was allowed there. Or the maid who came with a scullery pan to pick for breakfast. She of the rolls that floated in the air, she of the inlaid woodwork all greasy with lemon, she of the feather and dust, not I. Nonetheless I came sneaking across the salt lawn in bare feet and jumping-jack pajamas in the spongy dawn.

Oh Angel of the blizzard and blackout, Madam white face, take me back to that red mouth, that July 21st place.

6. ANGEL OF BEACH HOUSES AND PICNICS

Angel of beach houses and picnics, do you know solitaire? Fifty-two reds and blacks and only myslef to blame. My blood buzzes like a hornet's nest. I sit in a kitchen chair at a table set for one. The silverware is the same and the glass and the sugar bowl. I hear my lungs fill and expel as in an operation. But I have no one left to tell.

Once I was a couple. I was my own king and queen with cheese and bread and rosé on the rocks of Rockport. Once I sunbathed in the buff, all brown and lean, watching the toy sloops go by, holding court for busloads of tourists. Once I called breakfast the sexiest meal of the day. Once I invited arrest

Siegfried Sassoon

The anguish of the earth absolves our eyes  Till beauty shines in all that we can see.  War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise,  And, fighting for our freedom, we are free. 

Horror of wounds and anger at the foe, And loss of things desired; all these must pass.  We are the happy legion, for we know  Time’s but a golden wind that shakes the grass. 

W. B. Yeats

Anne Sexton

I.

After the sweet promise, the summer's mild retreat from mother's cancer, the winter months of her death, I come to this white office, its sterile sheet, its hard tablet, its stirrups, to hold my breath while I, who must allow the glove its oily rape, to hear the almost mighty doctor over me equate my ills with hers and decide to operate.

It grew in her as simply as a child would grow, as simply as she housed me once, fat and female. Always my most gentle house before that embryo of evil spread in her shelter and she grew frail. Frail, we say, remembering fear, that face we wear in the room of the special smells of dying, fear where the snoring mouth gapes and is not dear. There was snow everywhere. Each day I grueled through its sloppy peak, its blue struck days, my boots slapping into the hospital halls, past the retinue of nurses at the desk, to murmur in cahoots with hers outside her door, to enter with the outside air stuck on my skin, to enter smelling her pride, her upkeep, and to lie as all who love have lied.

No reason to be afraid, my almost mighty doctor reasons. I nod, thinking that woman's dying must come in seasons, thinking that living is worth buying. I walk out, scuffing a raw leaf, kicking the clumps of dead straw that were this summer's lawn. Automatically I get in my car, knowing the historic thief is loose in my house and must be set upon.

II.

Clean of the body's hair, I lie smooth from breast to leg. All that was special, all that was rare is common here. Fact: death too is in the egg. Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat. And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet.

The rooms down the hall are calling all night long, while the night outside sucks at the trees. I hear limbs falling and see yellow eyes flick in the rain. Wide eyed and still whole I turn in my bin like a shorn lamb. A nurse's flashlight blinds me to see who I am.

The walls color in a wash of daylight until the room takes its objects into itself again. I smoke furtively and squash the butt and hide it with my watch and other effects. The halls bustle with legs. I smile at the nurse who smiles for the morning shift. Day is worse.

Scheduled late, I cannot drink or eat, except for yellow pills and a jigger of water. I wait and think until she brings two mysterious needles: the skills she knows she knows, promising, soon you'll be out. But nothing is sure. No one. I wait in doubt.

I wait like a kennel of dogs jumping against their fence. At ten she returns, laughs and catalogues my resistance to drugs. On the stretcher, citizen and boss of my own body still, I glide down the halls and rise in the iron cage toward science and pitfalls.

The great green people stand over me; I roll on the table under a terrible sun, following their command to curl, head touching knee if I am able. Next, I am hung up like a saddle and they begin. Pale as an angel I float out over my own skin.

I soar in hostile air over the pure women in labor, over the crowning heads of babies being born. I plunge down the backstair calling mother at the dying door, to rush back to my own skin, tied where it was torn. Its nerves pull like wires snapping from the leg to the rib. Strangers, their faces rolling like hoops, require my arm. I am lifted into my aluminum crib.

III.

Skull flat, here in my harness, thick with shock, I call mother to help myself, call toe of frog, that wooly bat, that tongue of dog; call God help and all the rest. The soul that swam the furious water sinks now in flies and the brain flops like a docked fish and the eyes are flat boat docks riding out the pain.

My nurses, those starchy ghosts, hover over me for my lame hours and my lame days. The mechanics of the body pump for their tricks. I rest on their needles, am dosed and snoring amid the orange flowers and the eyes of visitors. I wear, like some senile woman, a scarlet candy package ribbon in my hair.

Four days from home I lurk on my mechanical parapet with two pillows at my elbows, as soft as praying cushions. My knees work with the bed that runs on power. I grumble to forget the lie I ought to hear, but don't. God knows I thought I'd die, but here I am, recalling mother, the sound of her good morning, the odor of orange and jam.

Anne Sexton

I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind.

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it.

Randall Jarrell