Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.
The tall gall in the small seductive vial
will wait will wait:
will wait a week: will wait through April.
You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.

You need not die today.
Stay here—through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.

Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in what you your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye

You must rock your pain in your arms
until it’s asleep, then leave it

in a darkened room
and tiptoe out.

For a moment you will feel
the emptiness of peace.

But in the next room
your pain is already stirring.

Soon it will be
calling your name.

Linda Pastan

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”),
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

Elizabeth Alexander

I’m not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don’t prefer one “strain” to another.
I’d have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says “That’s
not like Frank!,” all to the good! I
don’t wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart–
you can’t plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

Frank O’Hara

I bought a bag of hard green pears today.
I came home and sat in our room
listening to music for hours,
solo piano, things from France, from the beginning
of the century.
When we were very young, your forgiveness
humiliated me. I knew
you would be asleep when I got back.
It is night outside
and raining. It is the same night
that fills the ruins.
You are naked, drowsy, lost. Stay like that.
In my favorite recordings,
you can hear the pianist breathing.

Richie Hofmann

It is so easy to imagine your absence.
Maybe it is night, we are still handsome.
All the young are.
It is so easy. Another thing to be beautiful.
How gently the curtain falls back down
and the room is dark again, the season
of in-betweenities,
my eyes heavy, my lips numb.
Fingerprints on the unjacketed books.
Inside the collars
of the shirts in the open closet—
An affluent night.
You’ve touched everything in my small room.

Richie Hofmann

Coming home early in the morning,
I heard withered cats

behind the sycamores, the canal rushing
from a different century. The alleys

so quiet in this city I never really liked.
The widow with an Hermès scarf tied around her head

walked her ugly-beautiful dogs.
I lived behind a Louis XV door

in a room that imprisoned winter
even as spring was rife outside—

I was not in love, there was nothing to experience.

Richie Hofmann

Who can say
what the tulips dream
in a hard frost,

the sky as cold
as it is clear
and still unreadable.

Or how pain
decides what stays
in memory, a gift

broken by the time
it reaches us,
silvered, gleaming with age.

Maya C. Popa

On the field outside my home, a field
hospital, in an actual field, the great American
Oak on one end, the Tupelo on the other.
They have laid white tarp over the boggy grass
and raised a series of insulated tents.
It has blossomed overnight like a dark circus,
machines to dehumidify the air,
cots like dollhouse furniture and intricate
machines to keep alive those whose bodies
are resigned to leaving. An orchestra
of discipline and calculated faith,
of power cords and outlets maneuvered
around trees, of hoping rain holds
and spring reads the room: the human beings
are desperate. They have built a hospital
where, in other days, I walked my dog,
counting no blessing but the one I chased,
who startled strangers on blankets
before stretching on the grass. How happy
I was not knowing how happy, walking
the path along the field’s perimeter,
watching the sky flare its oranges and pinks,
reflect a cool purple off the leaves.
Idling in goodness, letting the mind loose
over the life let it. I thought forever,
did not think, for so much of gladness
was thoughtlessness. Now I mourn
the hours from the safety of my health,
stand a little lost at what proceeds
the mourning. They are building a hospital—
the whir of engines stirs the animals,
a melody, a dirge the robins sing.

Maya C. Popa