Bamboo by Jane Hirshfield From “Orion” What exists wants to persist. Even the knock of bamboo on bamboo spilled outward continues. And you who have lived—restless, ambitious, aggrieved. A Walter, a Shirley, a Tim. A Carlos, a Teisha, a Haavo. Do not think it unchanged, this world you are leaving.
I lived in New Mexico for seven years in the 1980s. I recall the Saturday night car parades down the main street of Espanola…and have magical memories of Chimayo. I’m glad our National Poetry Month editor Stephanie Farrow chose this poem for us. It brings back happy memories of one of my heart homes. –Janet…
Early in the Morning Li-Young Lee from Rose While the long grain is softening in the water, gurgling over a low stove flame, before the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced for breakfast, before the birds, my mother glides an ivory comb through her hair, heavy and black as calligrapher’s ink. She sits at the foot…
You Have to Be Careful by Naomi Shihab Nye from Yellow Glove You have to be careful telling things. Some ears are tunnels. Your words will go in and get lost in the dark. Some ears are flat pans like the miners used looking for gold. What you say will be washed out with the…
The Merchant of Venice (excerpt) Act 4, Scene 1 by William Shakespeare Portia: The quality of mercy is not strain’d, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes: ‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes The throned monarch…
Happiness by Jane Kenyon There’s just no accounting for happiness, or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet having squandered a fortune far away. And how can you not forgive? You make a feast in honor of what was lost, and take from its place…
Jennifer Perrine, of Des Moines, Iowa, won the Taste Test contest. Her poem “If Life Gives You Lemons, Make” was made into a limited-edition letterpress broadside by Virginia Artists for the Book. Every year there is a contest on a different theme that can be interpreted visually in a high quality book. If Life Gives…
Finding a Bible in an Abandoned Cabin Poem reprinted from “The Hudson Review,” Vol. LIX, no. 4, Winter, 2007, by permission of Robert Wrigley Under dust plush as a moth’s wing, the book’s leather cover still darkly shown, and everywhere else but this spot was sodden beneath the roof’s unraveling shingles. There was that back-of-the-neck…
—from “Insect Life of Florida” by Lynda Hull In those days I thought their endless thrum was the great wheel that turned the days, the nights. In the throats of hibiscus and oleander…
One of the better side benefits from dedicated blogging is that you make friends. Sometimes, very good friends. If you aren’t a pro-blogger, you meet others similarly involved in this labor of love. I’ve been lucky in the friends Riehlife has attracted to our village. Two such friends, as yet unseen, are poet Stephen Kuusisto…