On Snow
Jonathan Swift, 1667 – 1745

A Riddle

From Heaven I fall, though from earth I begin.
No lady alive can show such a skin.
I’m bright as an angel, and light as a feather,
But heavy and dark, when you squeeze me together.
Though candor and truth in my aspect I bear,
Yet many poor creatures I help to insnare.
Though so much of Heaven appears in my make,
The foulest impressions I easily take.
My parent and I produce one another,
The mother the daughter, the daughter the mother.

The Garden
By Helen Hoyt

Do not fear.
The garden is yours
And it is yours to gather the fruits
And every flower of every kind,
And to set the high wall about it
And the closed gates.
The gates of your wall no hand shall open,
No feet shall pass,
Through all the days until your return.
Do not fear.

But soon,
Soon let it be, your coming!
For the pathways will grow desolate waiting,
The flowers say, “Our loveliness has no eyes to behold it!”
The leaves murmur all day with longing,
All night the boughs of the trees sway themselves with longing…

O Master of the Garden,
O my sun and rain and dew,
Come quickly.

Crude Lament
William Carlos Williams, 1883 – 1963

Mother of flames,
The men that went ahunting
Are asleep in the snow drifts.
You have kept the fire burning!
Crooked fingers that pull
Fuel from among the wet leaves,
Mother of flames
You have kept the fire burning!
The young wives have fallen asleep
With wet hair, weeping,
Mother of flames!
The young men raised the heavy spears
And are gone prowling in the darkness.
O mother of flames,
You who have kept the fire burning!
Lo, I am helpless!
Would God they had taken me with them!

What Shines Does Not Always Need To
By Adam Clay

Because today we did not leave this world,
We now embody a prominence within it,
Even amidst its indifference to our actions,
Whether they be noiseless or not.
After all, nonsense is its own type of silence,
Lasting as long as the snow on your
Tongue. You wonder why each evening
Must be filled with a turning away, eyes to the lines
Of the hardwood floor as if to regret the lack
Of movement in a single day, our callous hope
For another wish put to bed with the others in a slow
Single-file line. I used to be amazed at the weight
An ant could carry. I used to be surprised by
Survival. But now I know the mind can carry
Itself to the infinite power. Like the way snow
Covers trauma to the land below it, we only
Believe the narrative of what the eye can see.

About This Poem

“I wrote this poem thinking about the recent death of a young poet and how loss can mean both the absence of a person but also the absence of the work that could have been created, had the poet’s life not been cut so short. This idea of creation, of course, extends beyond art and into other facets of life—the line our lives will follow isn’t always straight or straightforward. Within the reality of living another day lives the possibility of creation, despite the sense of loss we might feel right beneath the surface.”
—Adam Clay

Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost, 1874 – 1963

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

For Joe
By Sandra Simonds

Locked in the beauty of the pearl, far from frail,
these people who claim to love us still
they don’t give up much, do they, sealed? To eradicate class—
the looking glass of it, the complex glare: “Let me introduce
xxx, impoverished poet.” Winter let up
like a terrible religion. In its wake, a politics came,
profane. You were on a train
from Philly to Mass. Winter let up like bands and globes
and globules and I could feel the trade ships
in my bloodstream, the blood that made me,
and I wanted to kill it
really bad like a war path. They said my poems
were a mess. Well, if that’s the case, then, go ahead.
Strike one match and the mansion will go up in its own ash,
in its obsession with accumulation against the glint of trees.

About This Poem

“I was talking to my friend Joe on the phone one night (also a poet) and he told me that he was invited to give a poetry reading at a university by another poet and that poet introduced Joe to the audience as an ‘impoverished poet.’ It got me thinking about class consciousness/unconsciousness in poetry and about the class position of the poet who introduced Joe. How does hegemony assert itself both within the complex social relations of the poetry world and beyond, and how do we begin to call out and change these power structures?”
—Sandra Simonds

Resurrection
By Alison Hawthorne Deming

My friend a writer and scientist
has retreated to a monastery
where he has submitted himself
out of exhaustion to not knowing.
He’s been thinking about
the incarnation a.k.a. Big Bang
after hearing a monk’s teaching
that crucifixion was not the hard part
for Christ. Incarnation was.
How to squeeze all of that
all-of-that into a body. I woke
that Easter to think of the Yaqui
celebrations taking place in our city
the culminating ritual of the Gloria
when the disruptive spirits
with their clacking daggers and swords
are repelled from the sanctuary
by women and children
throwing cottonwood leaves and confetti
and then my mother rose
in me rose from the anguish
of her hospice bed a woman
who expected to direct all the action
complaining to her nurse
I’ve been here three days
and I’m not dead yet—not ready
at one hundred and two to give up
control even to giving up control.
I helped with the morphine clicker.
Peace peace peace the stilling
at her throat the hazel eye
become a glassy marble. Yet here she is
an Easter irreverent still rising
to dress in loud pastels
and turn me loose
in Connecticut woods to hunt
my basket of marshmallow eggs
jelly beans and chocolate rabbit
there fakeries of nature made vestal
incarnated in their nest of shiny manufactured grass.