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Seven Generations by Joy Harjo

Children play with full bellies At the edge of the mating dance. Beneath a sky thrown open To the need of stars To know themselves against the dark. All night we dance the weave of joy and tears All night we're lit with the sunrise of forever Just ahead of us, through the trees One generation after the other.

— An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo (Page 25)

Monument by Natasha Trethewey

Today the ants are busy beside my front steps, weaving in and out of the hill they're building. I watch them emerge and—

like everything I've forgotten—disappear into the subterranean—a world made by displacement. In the cemetery last June, I circled, lost—

weeds and grass grown up all around— the landscape blurred and waving. At my mother's grave, ants streamed in and out like arteries, a tiny hill rising

above her untended plot. Bit by bit, red dirt piled up, spread like a rash on the grass; I watched a long time the ants' determined work,

how they brought up soil of which she will be part, and piled it before me. Believe me when I say I've tried not to begrudge them

their industry, this reminder of what I haven't done. Even now, the mound is a blister on my heart, a red and humming swarm.

— Black nature by Camille T. Dungy (Page 175)

Constellations Rearrange Themselves into a Protest Sign by Andrea Gibson

Every uprising has the universe on their side.

That's not a horizon. That's the earth drawing the line.

— You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson (Page 81)

The Man with the Cactus Heart by Juan Felipe Herrera

Political meetings cabbage and richman's literature (oh, yes, and altar boys)

abolish them. Immediately.

I want to go to Milano. Eat chocolate.

You with music— a crescendo.

These are the principal things; a condensed century

for my thirst. Reach into me.

I beg you, open this shirt pressing violently, breathe into me.

— Half of the world in light by Juan Felipe Herrera (Camino del sol) (Page 50)

Poem with Two Endings by Jane Hirshfield

Say "death" and the whole room freezes— even the couches stop moving, even the lamps. Like a squirrel suddenly aware it is being looked at.

Say the word continuously, and things begin to go forward. Your life takes on the jerky texture of an old film strip.

Continue saying it, hold it moment after moment inside the mouth, it becomes another syllable. A shopping mall swirls around the corpse of a beetle.

Death is voracious, it swallows all the living. Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead. Neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled, each swallows and swallows the world.

The grip of life is as strong as the grip of death.

(but the vanished, the vanished beloved, o where?)

— Given Sugar, Given Salt by Jane Hirshfield (Page 55)

I Don't Want to Be Demure or Respectable by Mary Oliver

I don't want to be demure or respectable. I was that way, asleep, for years. That way, you forget too many important things. How the little stones, even if you can't hear them, are singing. How the river can't wait to get to the ocean and the sky, it's been there before. What traveling is that! It is a joy to imagine such distances. I could skip sleep for the next hundred years. There is a fire in the lashes of my eyes. It doesn't matter where I am, it could be a small room. The glimmer of gold Böhme saw on the kitchen pot was missed by everyone else in the house.

Maybe the fire in my lashes is a reflection of that. Why do I have so many thoughts, they are driving me crazy. Why am I always going anywhere, instead of somewhere? Listen to me or not, it hardly matters. I'm not trying to be wise, that would be foolish. I'm just chattering.

— Devotions by Mary Oliver (Page 18)

Stun by Naomi Shihab Nye

Who's remembering Yemen had the most amazing architecture in the world?

Yeminis remember. No one mentions this on the news. Bomb explodes, bus of schoolchildren. Their glory also unmentioned.

*

Sometimes I just call out to Dubai. Dubai! I say. If you can build new buildings like that, can't you help us?

*

We stood in the parking lot of the hospital after Daddy died.

I couldn't remember how to open a car door.

— Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye (Page 80)

Spring by Mary Oliver

All day the flicker has anticipated the lust of the season, by shouting. He scouts up tree after tree and at a certain place begins to cry out. My, in his black-freckled vest, bay body with red trim and sudden chrome underwings, he is dapper. Of course somebody listening nearby hears him; she answers with a sound like hysterical laughter, and rushes out into the field where he is poised on an old phone pole, his head swinging, his wings opening and shutting in a kind of butterfly stroke. She can't resist; they touch; they flutter. How lightly, altogether, they accept the great task, of carrying life forward! In the crown of an oak they choose a small tree-cave which they enter with sudden quietness and modesty. And, for a while, the wind that can be a knife or a hammer, subsides. They listen to the thrushes. The sky is blue, or the rain falls with its spills of pearl. Around their wreath of darkness the leaves of the world unfurl.

— Devotions by Mary Oliver (Page 201)

Spring Dawn by George Marion McClellan

There comes to my heart from regions remote A wild desire for the hedge and the brush, Whenever I hear the first wild note Of the meadow lark and the hermit thrush.

The broken and upturned earth to the air, By a million thrusting blades of Spring, Sends out from the sod and everywhere Its pungent aromas over everything.

Then it's Oh, for the hills, the dawn, and the dew, The breath of the fields and the silent lake, And watching the wings of light burst through The scarlet blush of the new daybreak.

It is then when the earth still nestles in sleep, And the robes of light are scarce unfurled, You can almost feel, in its mighty sweep The onward rush and roll of the world.

— Black nature by Camille T. Dungy (Page 334)

Beauty (My Plain Idea) by Lee Herrick

Is the dirt you shake from the root— not the part closest to heaven (the petal),

not even the aphids having their way. Beauty is forgetting how

the root hangs on but the dirt lets go.

Tonight, I dream about water: drowning in it, floating on it, the particles we cannot see:

all the body's water keeping us alive, the ghosts in every room.

Tonight, I weigh their echoes. I wonder if good fortune means a bird

who remembers you, a ghost in the room approving the lines you write, how your birth was a death

nearly delivered, how you recover and become a believer. The blooming flowers around

you have all the answers. Be quiet. You should

hear them aspiring under this very floor.

— This Many Miles from Desire by Lee Herrick (Page 46)

Decomposition by Lee Herrick

My country fell apart. What I mean to say is:

we forgot about the stars. We forgot we need the moon.

We asked all the wrong questions about our founding documents,

all burnt wire and fray. We focused on the bullets

and the outcry instead of the corporation and the electorate

who make the bullets and the outcry. Or the shining decor on the breastplate.

We complicated it all. We were flattened with options.

We forgot our own fabric, the miracles in our simple hands.

— Scar and Flower by Lee Herrick (Page 82)

Bedside by Helen J. Aitken

Jumbled, like her thoughts A drawer full of memories We're in there, somewhere

— Our Own Coordinates by Annick Yerem, Mo Schoenfeld (Page 28)

Exile by Lee Herrick

Our natural state is not

defensive or tense

but water in a resting

state. We state this

to be true in an age

of inquiry, our failure

to put what is just

before ease. There

are lovers in another country

reclining by a fire, admitting

love in a common language

with faith in the exiles

of their state, where

a woman looks at her friend

and says please, put down

your bag and stay.

Please, stay to see how

the movie ends. Take my hand.

I think the city might go

up in flames.

— Scar and Flower by Lee Herrick (Page 23)

The Riveter by Ada Limón

What I didn't say when she asked me why I knew so much about dying was that, for me, it was work. When Dad called to say we had a month, I made a list. I called in my team to my office in a high rise, those Rosies of know-how, those that had lost someone loved, those that had done the assembly line of a home death, and said, What's this about not keeping her on TPN? One woman, who was still soft with sadness, said, It depends on whether she wants to die of heart failure or to drown in her own fluids. I nodded, and wrote that down like this was a meeting about a client who wasn't happy. What about hospice? I asked. They said, They'll help, but your dad and you guys will do most of it. I put a star by that. We had a plan of action. When this happens, we do this. When that happens, we do that. But what I forgot was that it was our plan, not hers, not the one doing the dying, this was a plan for those who still had a next. See, our job was simple: keep on living. Her job was harder, the hardest. Her job, her work, was to let the machine of survival break down, make the factory fail, to know that this war was winless, to know that she would singlehandedly destroy us all.

— Bright dead things by Ada Limón (Page 36)

Morning Poem by Mary Oliver

Every morning the world is created. Under the orange

sticks of the sun the heaped ashes of the night turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches and the ponds appear like black cloth on which are painted islands

of summer lilies. If it is your nature to be happy you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination alighting everywhere. And if your spirit carries within it

the thorn that is heavier than lead— if it's all you can do to keep on trudging—

there is still somewhere deep within you a beast shouting that the earth is exactly what it wanted—

each pond with its blazing lilies is a prayer heard and answered lavishly, every morning,

whether or not you have ever dared to be happy, whether or not you have ever dared to pray.

— Devotions by Mary Oliver (Page 345)