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Today's your natal day
Sweet flowers I bring;
Mother accept I pray,
My offering.

And may you happy live,
And long us bless;
Receiving as you give
Great happiness.

"To My Mother on Her Birthday" was Christina Rossetti's first poem, written when she was eleven. Apropos for Mother's Day.

Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830 –1894), was an English writer born in London. She authored many romantic, devotional and children's poems, including "Goblin Market" and "Remember". She also wrote the words of two Christmas carols well known in Britain: "In the Bleak Midwinter" and "Love Came Down at Christmas",  She was a sister of the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

I waited on
In the late autumn moonlight,
A train droning out of thought—

The mind on moonlight
And on trains.

Blind as a thread of water
Stirring through a cold like dust,
Lonely beyond all silence

And humming this to children,
The nostalgic listeners in sleep,

Because no guardian
Strides through distance upon distance,
His eyes a web of sleep.

Yvor Winters, (1900 - 1968), was an American poet, literary critic and professor. Winters was the author of many books. He married the poet and novelist Janet Lewis in 1926. He was awarded the 1961 Bollingen Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems. Read more

“The Moonlight” was published in Secession no. 7 (Winter, 1924).This poem is in the public domain.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

This poem is in the public domain.

William Ernest Henley (1849 – 1903) British poet, writer, critic and editor in late Victorian England. He wrote several books of poetry. Biography

And now the sun in tinted splendor sank,
  The west was all aglow with crimson light;
The bay seemed like a sheet of burnished gold,
  Its waters glistened with such radiance bright.

At anchor lay the yachts with snow-white sails,
  Outlined against the glowing, rose-hued sky.
No ripple stirred the waters’ calm repose
  Save when a tiny craft sped lightly by.

Our boat was drifting slowly, gently round,
  To rest secure till evening shadows fell;
No sound disturbed the stillness of the air,
  Save the soft chiming of the vesper bell.

Yes, drifting, drifting; and I thought that life,
  When nearing death, is like the sunset sky:
And death is but the slow, sure drifting in
  To rest far more securely, by and by.

Then let me drift along the Bay of Time,
  Till my last sun shall set in glowing light;
Let me cast anchor where no shadows fall,
  Forever moored within Heaven’s harbor bright.

This poem is in the public domain.

Olivia Ward Bush-Banks - née Olivia Ward; (1869 – 1944) was an American author, poet and journalist of African-American and Montaukett Native American heritage. Ward celebrated both of her heritages in her poetry and writing. She was a regular contributor to the Colored American magazine and wrote a column for the New Rochelle, New York publication, the Westchester Record-Courier. More at Wikipedia

I sought the wood in summer
When every twig was green;
The rudest boughs were tender,
And buds were pink between.
Light-fingered aspens trembled
In fitful sun and shade,
And daffodils were golden
In every starry glade.
The brook sang like a robin—
My hand could check him where
The lissome maiden willows
Shook out their yellow hair.

“How frail a thing is Beauty,”
I said, “when every breath
She gives the vagrant summer
But swifter woos her death.
For this the star dust troubles,
For this have ages rolled:
To deck the wood for bridal
And slay her with the cold.”

I sought the wood in winter
When every leaf was dead;
Behind the wind-whipped branches
The winter sun set red.
The coldest star was rising
To greet that bitter air,
The oaks were writhen giants;
Nor bud nor bloom was there.
The birches, white and slender,
In deathless marble stood,
The brook, a white immortal,
Slept silent in the wood.

“How sure a thing is Beauty,”
I cried. “No bolt can slay,
No wave nor shock despoil her,
No ravishers dismay.
Her warriors are the angels
That cherish from afar,
Her warders people Heaven
And watch from every star.
The granite hills are slighter,
The sea more like to fail;
Behind the rose the planet,
The Law behind the veil.”

This poem is in the Public Domain.

Willa Sibert Cather (1873 – 1947) American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for "One of Ours", a novel set during World War I.
Cather achieved recognition as a novelist of the frontier and pioneer experience.

No one told me it would be like this—
how growing older is another passage of discovery
and that aging is one grand transformation,
and if some things become torn apart
or even lost along the way,
many other means show up
to bring me closer
to the center of my heart.

No one ever told me
if whatever wonder waits ahead
is in another realm and outside of time.
But the amazement, I found,
is that the disconcerting things
within the here and now
that I stumble and trip my way through,
also lead me gracefully home.

And no one told me that I would ever see
an earth so strong and fragile,
or a world so sad and beautiful.
And I surely didn't know
I'd have all this life yet in me
or such fire inside my bones.

From Susan Frybort, (author of Open Passages) poetry collection "Look to the Clearing"