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Myth by Rebecca Elson

What I want is a mythology so huge That settling on its grassy bank (Which may at first seem ordinary) You catch sight of the frog, the stone, The dead minnow jewelled with flies, And remember all at once The things you had forgotten to imagine.

— A Responsibility to Awe by Rebecca Elson

In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars

of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment,

the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders

of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is

nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned

in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side

is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world

you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it

against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

— Devotions by Mary Oliver (Page 389 - 390)

FUTURA VECCHIA, NEW YEAR’S EVE by Rebecca Elson

Returning, like the Earth
To the same point in space,
We go softly to the comfort of destruction,

And consume in flames
A school of fish,
A pair of hens,
A mountain poplar with its moss.

A shiver of sparks sweeps round
The dark shoulder of the Earth,
Frisson of recognition,
Preparation for another voyage,

And our own gentle bubbles
Float curious and mute
Towards the black lake
Boiling with light,
Towards the sharp night
Whistling with sound.

— A Responsibility to Awe by Rebecca Elson

What I Didn't Know Before by Ada Limón

was how horses simply give birth to other horses. Not a baby by any means, not a creature of liminal spaces, but already a four-legged beast hellbent on walking, scrambling after the mother. A horse gives way to another horse and then suddenly there are two horses, just like that. That's how I loved you. You, off the long train from Red Bank carrying a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two computers swinging in it unwieldily at your side. I remember we broke into laughter when we saw each other. What was between us wasn't a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.

— The Carrying: Poems by Ada Limón (Page 71)

The Cure for Melancholy Is to Take the Horn by Natalie Diaz

Powered unicorn horn was once thought to cure melancholy.

What carries the hurt is never the wound but the red garden sewn by the horn as it left—and she left. I am rosing, blossoming absence—a brilliant alarum.

Brodsky said, Darkness restores what light cannot repair. You thrilled me—torn to the comb. I want everything—the ebon bull and the moon. I come and again for the honeyed horn.

Queen Elizabeth traded a castle for a single horn. I serve the kingdom of my hands— an army of touch marching the alcázar of your thighs blaring and bright as any war horn.

I arrive at you—half bestia, half feast. Night after night we harvest the luxed Bosque de Caderas, reap the darkful fruit mulling our mouths, separate sweet from thron.

My lanternist. Your hands wick at the bronzed lamp of my breast. Strike me to spark— tremble me to awe. Into your lap let me lay my heavy horns.

I fulfilled the prophecy of your throat, loosed in you the fabulous wing of my mouth. Red holy-red ghost. Left my body and spoke to God, came back seraphimed—copper feathered and horned.

Our bodies are nothing if not places to be had by, as in, God, she had me by the throat, by the hip bone, by the moon. God, she hurt me with my own horns.

— Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz (Page 77)

Migratory by Les Murray

I am the nest that comes and goes, I am the egg that isn't now, I am the beach, the food in sand, the shade with shells and the shade with sticks. I am the right feeling on washed shine, in wing-lifting surf, in running about beak-focused: the feeling of here, that stays and stays, then lengthens out over the hills of hills and the feedy sea. I am the wrongness of here, when it is true to fly along the feeling the length of its great rightness, while days burn from vast to a gold gill in the dark to vast again, for many feeds and floating rests, till the sun ahead becomes the sun behind, and half the little far days of the night are different. Right feelings of here arrive with me: I am the nests danced for and now, I am the crying heads to fill, I am the beach, the sand in food, the shade with sticks and the double kelp shade.

— Learning Human by Les Murray

Grandfathers Say by Naomi Shihab Nye

Grandfathers say the garden is deep, old roots twisted beyond our worry or reach. Maybe our grief began there, in the long history of human suffering, where rain goes when it soaks out of sight. Savory smoke from ancient fires still lingers. At night you can smell it in the stones of the walls. When you awaken, voices from inside your pillow still holding you close.

— Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye (Page 100)

Breathing by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

For weeks we inhaled the dead scent the same, financier or footman, and like moths all rested on sills, searched for light.

— Streaming by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke (Page 104)

Practice Makes People by Amanda Gorman

The making of plans, When this is over; The We can't wait, Really our knuckles rapping Against the future, sounding Out what lies beneath its hull. But tomorrow isn't revealed, Rather rendered, refined. Wrought. Remember that fate isn't fought Against. It is fought for. Again & again.

Maybe there is no fresh wisdom, Just old woes, New words to name them by & the will to act. We've seen life lurching back in stops & starts Like a wet-born thing learning to walk. The air charged & changed. Us, charged & changed. A yoked-out eternity For that needle to pierce our arm. At last: a pain we asked for. Yes, it is enough to be moved By what we might be.

— Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman

Sights and Sounds by Benjamin Zephaniah

There are More than Six thousand Different Languages Spoken On Earth.

There is No person On Earth Who can speak Them all.

Every person On Earth Could learn To speak Any language On Earth.

There are Some languages That are not Spoken.

Languages Like people Have family trees.

Languages Like people Are all precious.

Languages Like people Can disappear.

Languages are Like people

Respect your tongue.

Sign languages Are Crucial

Protect your hands.

— Wicked World! by Benjamin Zephaniah (Page 68 - 69)

We Are All Saying the Same Thing by Juan Felipe Herrera after Szymborska

Yeti come down. The escape is over—the earthquake mixes the leaves into an exotic pattern.

You slide down the precipice & spit. You chew on a Tibetan prayer wheel.

This is our city with the bridge in flames, call it Desire. This is our mountain, hear its umber harness shiver, call it Time.

& this old woman beating a bluish rag with her shredded hands—call her now,

call her with your honey-like voices. She is the sky you were after, that immeasurable breath in every one of us.

We are all saying the same thing, Yeti. We lift our breast & speak of fire, then ice.

We press into our little knotted wombs, wonder about our ends, then, our beginnings.

— Half of the world in light by Juan Felipe Herrera (Camino del sol) (Page 188)

My Father as Cartographer by Natasha Tretheway

In dim light now, his eyes straining to survey the territory: here is the country of Loss, its colony Grief; the great continent Desire and its borderland Regret;

vast, unfathomable water, an archipelago—the tiny islands of Joy, untethered, set adrift. At the bottom of the map his legend and cartouche, the measures of distance, key

to the symbols marking each known land. What's missing is the traveler's warning at the margins: a dragon— its serpentine signature—monstrous as a two-faced daughter.

— Monument by Natasha Trethewey (Page 167)