Loneliness – Emma Lazarus

All stupor of surprise hath passed away;
She sees, with clearer vision than before,
A world far off of light and laughter gay,
Herself alone and lonely evermore.
Folk come and go, and reach her in no wise,
Mere flitting phantoms to her heavy eyes.

All outward things, that once seemed part of her,
Fall from her, like the leaves in autumn shed.
She feels as one embalmed in spice and myrrh,
With the heart eaten out, a long time dead;
Unchanged without, the features and the form;
Within, devoured by the thin red worm.

By her own prowess she must stand or fall,
This grief is to be conquered day by day.
Who could befriend her? who could make this small,
Or her strength great? she meets it as she may.
A weary struggle and a constant pain,
She dreams not they may ever cease nor wane.

Pain—has an Element of Blank – E Dickinson

Pain—has an Element of Blank—
It cannot recollect
When it begun—or if there were
A time when it was not—

It has no Future—but itself—
Its Infinite contain
Its Past—enlightened to perceive
New Periods—of Pain.

Alice at the Animal Fair – Earl Coleman

Things seem hairy when the dodos
whistle through their talons thrice

croaking warnings at the heffalumps
for skating on thin ice

and the turtles drag their asses
or they stand stock still and mock

as their little ones learn Writing
while they rock around the clock.

The jellyfish were scared because
the waves had got too high

but the lobster has convinced them
they’ll be lower by and by.

The walrus flips its fins at
donkeys sporting on the beach

where the loonies and the rednecks
are exulting each to each.

The only thing that’s needed
to make Wonderland complete

is to crown the Weasel Royal
and lay laurels at his feet.

Prayer – James Elroy Flecker

Let me not know how sins and sorrows glide
Along the sombre city of our rage,
Or why the sons of men are heavy-eyed.

Let me not know, except from printed page,
The pain of litter love, of baffled pride,
Or sickness shadowing with a long presage.

Let me not know, since happy some have died
Quickly in youth or quietly in age,
How faint, how loud the bravest hearts have cried.

Confessional – Katharine McCluskey

I do not kneel at night, to say a prayer;
I think of spiders and I do not dare!

My knees are thin, and easily they could
Gather a splinter, roughened from the wood.

I’m cold, and bed is warm; I’m better there,
Than in the outer darkness of a prayer!

But when the morning wakes up, pink and cool,
And sunrise makes our peach-blooms glory-full;

And God comes smiling down the garden-walk,
I run and slip my hand in His, and talk!

I tell Him that I am a naughty lamb;
He laughs and says He made me as I am!

Bluebeard’s Closet – Monica Jenny Sharma

I went to Bluebeard’s closet
Because he left the key
And there were five little doll heads
Staring dead at me.

Five nameless, sparkless ladies
Cracked face and broken limb
All meanly slashed to pieces
Washed sick with pea green skin.

Now I know it was a ruse,
and he will be back soon.

So I closed shut Bluebeard’s closet
Stuffed full of tattered dolls
Cold, cruel, cramped and ugly
Splashed blood-brown on the walls.

And crouched among the women
My face bleached white as chalk
Waiting for the terminus:
Keys turning in a lock.

Home, Sweet Home – Frances E.W. Harper

Sharers of a common country,
They had met in deadly strife;
Men who should have been as brothers
Madly sought each other’s life.

In the silence of the even,
When the cannon’s lips were dumb,
‘Thoughts of home and all its loved ones
To the soldier’s heart would come.

On the margin of a river,
‘Mid the evening’s dews and damps,
Could be heard the sounds of music
Rising from two hostile camps.

One was singing of its section
Down in Dixie, Dixie’s land,
And the other of the banner
Waved so long from strand to strand.

In the land where Dixie’s ensign
Floated o’er the hopeful slave,
Rose the song that freedom’s banner,
Starry-lighted, long might wave.

From the fields of strife and carnage,
Gentle thoughts began to roam,
And a tender strain of music
Rose with words of “Home, Sweet Home.”

‘Then the hearts of strong men melted,
For amid our grief and sin
Still remains that “touch of nature,”
Telling us we all are kin.

In one grand but gentle chorus,
Floating to the starry dome,
Came the words that brought them nearer,
Words that told of “Home, Sweet Home.”

For awhile, all strife forgotten,
They were only brothers then,
Joining in the sweet old chorus,
Not as soldiers, but as men.

Men whose hearts would flow together,
Though apart their feet might roam,
Found a tie they could not sever,
In the mem’ry of each home.

Never may the steps of carnage
Shake our land from shore to shore,
But may mother, home and Heaven,
Be our watchwords evermore.

Now is the time of the Year – Bliss Carman

NOW is the time of year
When all the flutes begin, —
The redwing bold and clear,
The rainbird far and thin.

In all the waking lands
There’s not a wilding thing
But knows and understands
The burden of the spring.

Now every voice alive
By rocky wood and stream
Is lifted to revive
The ecstasy, the dream.

For Nature, never old,
But busy as of yore,
From sun and rain and mould
Is making spring once more.

She sounds her magic note
By river-marge and hill,
And every woodland throat
Re-echoes with a thrill.

O mother of our days,
Hearing thy music call,
Teach us to know thy ways
And fear no more at all!

Bad – Holly Day

after we lay together in the garden
and the snake subsided and disappeared
Adam turned and looked right at me and said,
“Let me write this story, Love”

and why did I trust him to tell
the truth
when I had grown up with him, knew all his
bad secrets
and why was I so surprised when I read
the fiction of our first time, and how
it was so wrong

I suppose I’m just a silly, silly girl.

Madness – Juan Carlos Vargas

Time is the source of all madness, beige white
On green, yellowish green escalette
we can barely see ourselves in—

As if held up by design the reeds speak
To each other through tall-stemmed whispers—

Tendrils in tentative tugs, the lane-charm of docks,
Cryptic consolations that cube our lives,

Like the cumulative cumulus of clouds
whose cunning

Edges citadels of paint. There are daggers
In thought, cutthroats deployed to design

Diagonal lines, diggings of one’s own

That raise a Lazarus tree
lost in grains of sleep.

What we disown is the disparate and dispatched
Only to find it dispensed again in palettes
by the human dispatcher:

Divergent lines mask the confluence
of our lives

The failed districts of paint, the downtrodden
that becomes a downward glance,

Locked between movement and stasis
in varying variance

Of its repeated self: There are daggers in thought,

—fields of wheat banking in memory
north to the rhythm of three black birds.

Sweaty and pale, white on black
like a fevered moon

And still night opens—beneath this hint of sky,

Leaving a broken summer
unhealed beneath each tree.