Before Quiet
by Hazel Hall

I will think of water-lilies
Growing in a darkened pool,
And my breath shall move like water,
And my hands be limp and cool.

It shall be as though I waited
In a wooden place alone;
I will learn the peace of lilies
And will take it for my own.

If a twinge of thought, if yearning
Come like wind into this place,
I will bear it like the shadow
Of a leaf across my face.

Ten Thousand Texas Rangers

by Alice Corbin (Henderson) from Songs of the Cowboys, 1921

Ten thousand Texas Rangers are laughin’ fit to kill
At the joke of the German Kaiser, an’ his fierce, imperious will —
For he sez, sez he, to the Mexican boob, hidin’ behind his beard,
“Old Uncle Sam is an easy mark, or so I’ve always heerd —

“Go up and take his cattle, and take a state or two, —
Texas, New Mexico, Arizone — don’t stop before you’re through;
For we shall make war together, and together make peace,” he said,
Now ain’t it a joke — so easy-like — as easy as makin’ bread!

Now if he had wanted a gun-man, he could n’t have chose a worse,
For Pancho Villa has gor more knack in fixin’ a man for the hearse,
And if he had though that a gun-man could swipe that piece of earth,
He should ‘a’ remembered we got the trick of handlin’ a gun from birth!

Ten thousand Texas Rangers are shakin’ with wicked glee
At the joke of the German Kaiser in his fierce perplexity;
They are bustin’ their buttins with laughin’, they are laughin’ fit to kill —
“By Gawd,” sez they, “But that’s one on him, by Gawd, that’s one on Bill!”

Written in March, 1917, at the time when Germany proposed to Mexico that they retake the “lost provinces” of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

Trees
Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

The Wound Before the Tomb of Walt Whitman

Fernando Valverde
Translated by Carolyn Forché

You who saw the vast oceans
and the peaks of the mountains,
who communed with all the sailors of the world
and you who saw Christ eat the bread of his last supper among the
young
and the elders,
you who saw the executioner of Europe
with his ax soaked with blood,
You stepped on the scaffold
and the fields in which mothers cried to their dead children.

Tell me if it is still
possible to announce triumphant justice
and deliver the lessons of the new world.

I’m going to kiss your lips,
they are cold and taste like the word America.

About This Poem

“Great Again. How to recover the greatness. Adjectives are circumstantial, but the nouns are chests that keep safe the essence of things, their moral dimension. What is America? This is the big question. What is the America that we want? Does a unique America like the one Whitman imagined exist? What is the great America that the slogans refer to? Is it the America of Walt Whitman or Charles Whitman? Is it the America of the person who shot a rifle from the sixth floor of the Book Depository in Dallas or the America of the one who received the bullet?”
—Fernando Valverde

Fernando Valverde

Fernando Valverde is author of several poetry collections, including The Insistence of Harm (University Press of Florida, 2019) and Poesia (1997-2017) (Visor, 2017). His work has been translated into several languages, and he is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia. He lives in Charlottesville, North Carolina.

Carolyn Forche

Carolyn Forché is the author of What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press, 2019). She is a University Professor at Georgetown University.

Why I Love Thee?
by Sadakichi Hartmann

Why I love thee?
Ask why the seawind wanders,
Why the shore is aflush with the tide,
Why the moon through heaven meanders
Like seafaring ships that ride
On a sullen, motionless deep;
Why the seabirds are fluttering the strand
Where the waves sing themselves to sleep
And starshine lives in the curves of the sand!

Edgar Allan Poe
byTimothy Thomas Fortune

I know not why, but it is true—it may,
In some way, be because he was a child
Of the fierce sun where I first wept and smiled—
I love the dark-browed Poe. His feverish day
Was spent in dreams inspired, that him beguiled,
When not along his path shone forth one ray
Of light, of hope, to guide him on the way,
That to earth’s cares he might be reconciled.
Not one of all Columbia’s tuneful choir
Has pitched his notes to such a matchless key
As Poe—the wizard of the Orphic lyre!
Not one has dreamed, has sung, such songs as he,
Who, like an echo came, an echo went,
Singing, back to his mother element.

Lifted
by Craig Morgan Teicher

Well, I guess no one can have everything.
I must learn to celebrate when I fail.
Inner growth and fortitude follow the sting,
right? Won’t I rise with holy wind in my sails?
Yet they always seem to get what I want,
door after door flung open. Why are
the keepers of doors, who haunt
the hopeful halls of fate and desire
so partial to them, but not to me?
Yes, I do feel sorry for myself—don’t, brother,
pretend the bitter blanket of self-pity,
hasn’t warmed your bones. It’s not lovers
or fame I crave, nor even happiness, particularly.
Only to be lifted, just once, above all others.

About This Poem

“Poetry is, among other things, a place to let my demons graze. This, alas, is one of them: the voice of someone not inured to the regular wrist slaps of rejection that are part of the writer’s life. It’s also one of many sonnets I wrote during a period of time when I became a bit addicted to them. Beware of sonnets; they can be habit-forming.”
—Craig Morgan Teicher

Craig Morgan Teicher

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of three books of poems, most recently The Trembling Answers (BOA Editions, 2017), winner of the 2018 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress (Graywolf, 2018), his first book of essays. He works in publishing, teaches at NYU, and lives in New Jersey.

Nothing To Do
by James Ephraim McGire

The fields are white,
The laborers are few;
Yet say the idle,
There’s nothing to do.

Jails are crowded,
In Sunday Schools few;
We still complain
There’s nothing to do.

Drunkards are dying,
Your sons, it is true;
Mothers’ arms folded,
With nothing to do.

Heathens are dying,
Their blood falls on you;
How can you people
Find nothing to do?

My Son Wants to Know Who His Biological Father Is
by Blas Falconer

My son wants to know
his name. What does he look like? What does
he like? My son swims
four days a week. When my son swims
underwater, he glides
between strokes. When he glides underwater, he is
an arrow aimed
at a wall. Four days a week, his coach says,
Count—1…2…—before
coming up for air.
My father had blue eyes, blonde hair,
though mine are brown.
My father could not speak
Spanish and wondered, How can you love
another man? We rarely touched.
When my son
is counting, I count
with him. I say, I am
your father, too. 1…2…

About this Poem