Public Posts

         Sufficient
Citron, pomegranate,
     Apricot, and peach,
  Flutter of apple-blows
     Whiter than the snow,
  Filling the silence
     With their leafy speech,
  Budding and blooming
     Down row after row.

Breaths of blown spices,
     Which the meadows yield,
  Blossoms broad-petaled,
     Starry buds and small;
  Gold of the hill-sides,
     Purple of the field,
  Waft to my nostrils
     Their fragrance, one and all.

Birds in the tree-tops,
     Birds that fill the air,
  Trilling, piping, singing,
     In their merry moods, —
  Gold wing and brown wing,
     Flitting here and here,
  To the coo and chirrup
     Of their downy broods.

What grace has summer
     Better that can suit?
  What gift can autumn
     Bring us more to please?
  Red of blown roses,
     Mellow tints of fruit,
  Never can be fairer,
     Sweeter than are these.

Ina Donna Coolbrith  (1841 – 1928) American poet, writer and librarian. She was the first California Poet Laureate and the first poet laureate of any American state. Born Josephine Donna Smith, she was the niece of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She left the Mormon community as a child to enter her teens in Los Angeles, California, where she began to publish poetry. She later made her home in San Francisco, where she formed the "Golden Gate Trinity". with writers Bret Harte and Charles Warren Stoddard. Her poetry received positive notice from critics and established poets such as Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce and Alfred Lord Tennyson.
This poem is in the public domain.

The Things I Love

A butterfly dancing in the sunlight,
A bird singing to his mate,
The whispering pines,
The restless sea,
The gigantic mountains,
A stately tree,
The rain upon the roof,
The sun at early dawn,
A boy with rod and hook,
The babble of a shady brook,
A woman with her smiling babe,
A man whose eyes are kind and wise,
Youth that is eager and unafraid—
When all is said, I do love best
A little home where love abides,
And where there’s kindness, peace, and rest.

Scottie McKenzie Frasier (1884-1964) was an American teacher, poet, author, newspaper editor, lecturer, and socialite. She was born in Talladega, Alabama. She did newspaper work for four years in New York City and while there, she became a suffrage advocate and a member of the League of Women Voters She moved back to  to Dothan, Alabama where she went on to be a co-founder of the Dothan Equal Suffrage Association. Frasier's activities during World War I included being a Four Minute Speaker, a group of volunteers authorized by United States President Woodrow Wilson, to give four-minute speeches on topics given to them by the Committee on Public Information (CPI).

This poem is in the public domain.

To the living, I am gone.
To the sorrowful, I will never return.
To the angry, I was cheated 
But to the happy, I am at peace
And to the faithful, I have never left...

...For if you always think of me, I will never be gone. Read the full poem

             Spring Night

The park is filled with night and fog,
The veils are drawn about the world,
The drowsy lights along the paths
Are dim and pearled.

Gold and gleaming the empty streets,
Gold and gleaming the misty lake,
The mirrored lights light sunken swords,
Glimmer and shake.

Oh, is it not enough to be
Here with this beauty over me?
My throat should ache with praise, and I
Should kneel in joy beneath the sky.
Oh, beauty, are you not enough?

Why am I crying after love
With youth, a singing voice and eyes
To take earth’s wonder with surprise?
Why have I put off my pride,
Why am I unsatisfied,

I for whom the pensive night
Binds her cloudy hair with light,
I for whom all beauty burns
Like incense in a million urns?
Oh, beauty, are you not enough?
Why am I crying after love?

Sara Teasdale (1884 – 1933) was an American lyric poet. She was born Sarah Trevor Teasdale in St. Louis, Missouri, and used the name Sara Teasdale Filsinger after her marriage in 1914. She is the author of many poetry collections and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her "Love Songs"  Read more  

This poem is in the public domain.

                Easter

Let all the flowers wake to life;
Let all the songsters sing;
Let everything that lives on earth
Become a joyous thing.

Wake up, thou pansy, purple-eyed,
And greet the dewy spring;
Swell out, ye buds, and o’er the earth
Thy sweetest fragrance fling.

Why dost thou sleep, sweet violet?
The earth has need of thee;
Wake up and catch the melody
That sounds from sea to sea.

Ye stars, that dwell in noonday skies,
Shine on, though all unseen;
The great White Throne lies just beyond,
The stars are all between.

Ring out, ye bells, sweet Easter bells,
And ring the glory in;
Ring out the sorrow, born of earth—
Ring out the stains of sin.

O banners wide, that sweep the sky,
Unfurl ye to the sun;
And gently wave about the graves
Of those whose lives are done.

Let peace be in the hearts that mourn—
Let “Rest” be in the grave;
The Hand that swept these lives away
Hath power alone to save.

Ring out, ye bells, sweet Easter bells,
And ring the glory in;
Ring out the sorrow, born of earth—
Ring out the stains of sin.

Fannie Isabelle Sherrick Wardell -  American poet, essayist, and columnist, whose work flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Not much is known about her early life, but her poetry was well-regarded and she became known for her romantic verses. She published 46 romantic and philosophical poetry in several volumes. She was Influenced by her contemporary of Ella Wheeler Wilcox. She was a native of St. Louis and worked as a teacher. She was a descendant of Moses Cleaveland the founder and namesake of Cleveland, Ohio.

BUT WE HAD MUSIC

Right this minute
across time zones and opinions
people are
making plans
making meals
making promises and poems

while

at the center of our galaxy
a black hole with the mass of
four billion suns
screams its open-mouth kiss
of oblivion.

Someday it will swallow
Euclid’s postulates and the Goldberg Variations,
swallow calculus and Leaves of Grass.

I know this.

And still
when the constellation of starlings
flickers across the evening sky,
it is enough

to stand here
for an irrevocable minute
agape with wonder.

It is eternity.

By Maria Popova Read more at the Marginalian

                Spring
With a difference —Hamlet.

Again the bloom, the northward flight,
The fount freed at its silver height,
And down the deep woods to the lowest,
The fragrant shadows scarred with light.

O inescapable joy of spring!
For thee the world shall leap and sing;
But by her darkened door thou goest
Forever as a spectral thing.

Louise Imogen Guiney (1861–1920) - American poet, essayist, editor, literary critic and biographer. Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts. She was a contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's Magazine, McClure's, Blackwood's Magazine, Dublin Review, The Catholic World, and the Catholic Encyclopedia. There are twenty books published of her poetry and prose, including   Letters (1926, letters) and Recusant Poets, (1939, ed., with Geoffrey Bliss) which were published posthumously.

This poem is in the public domain

At the mid hour of night, when stars are weeping, I fly
To the lone vale we loved, when life shone warm in thine eye;
And I think oft, if spirits can steal from the regions of air,
To revisit past scenes of delight, thou wilt come to me there,
And tell me our love is remembered, even in the sky.

Then I sing the wild song ’twas once such pleasure to hear!
When our voices commingling breathed, like one, on the ear;
And, as Echo far off through the vale my sad orison rolls,
I think, oh my love! ’tis thy voice from the Kingdom of Souls,
Faintly answering still the notes that once were so dear. 

Thomas Moore (1779 – 1852), was an Irish writer, poet, and lyricist, born in Dublin. He is celebrated for his Irish Melodies. His setting of English-language verse to old Irish tunes marked the transition in popular Irish culture from Irish to English. The poem, about the memory of a lost love. was published in 1813 in Irish Melodies and later in 1903, in Poetry of Thomas Moore - Macmillan and Co. This poem is now in the public domain. More 

For a glance, a world;
for a smile, a heaven;
for a kiss...., I don't know
what I would give you for a kiss!

Original Spanish version:
Por una mirada, un mundo;
por una sonrisa, un cielo;
por un beso… ¡yo no sé
qué te diera por un beso

Translation by Calob - All copy rights reserved - 2023

Gustavo Adolfo Claudio Domínguez Bastida . -- better known as Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836 – 1870), was a Spanish poet and writer (mostly short stories), also a playwright, literary columnist, and talented in drawing. Born in seville, He is now considered by some as one of the most important figures in Spanish literature, and possibly the most read author after Miguel de Cervantes. He adopted the alias of Bécquer as his brother Valeriano Bécquer, a painter, had done earlier. This poem was published posthumously in 1871 in “Rhymes”

What heart could have thought you?—
Past our devisal
(O filigree petal!)
Fashioned so purely,
Fragilely, surely,
From what Paradisal
Imagineless metal,
Too costly for cost?
Who hammered you, wrought you,
From argentine vapour?—
“God was my shaper.
Passing surmisal,
He hammered, He wrought me,
From curled silver vapour,
To lust of His mind;—
Thou could’st not have thought me!
So purely, so palely,
Tinily, surely,
Mightily, frailly,
Insculped and embossed,
With His hammer of wind,
And His graver of frost.”

Francis Joseph Thompson (1859 – 1907) was an English poet and Catholic mystic. He entered medical school at the age of 18, but at 26 left home to pursue his talent as a poet and writer and poet. He spent three years on the streets of London, supporting himself with menial labor. He become addicted to opium which he took to relieve a nervous problem. His first volume, "Poems" was published, in 1893. he began writing prose in 1897. His fragile health continued to deteriorate and he died of tuberculosis in 1907. 

This poem was published in 1897 and it is in the Public Domain.

Frail children of sorrow, dethroned by a hue,
The shadows are flecked by the rose sifting through,
The world has its motion, all things pass away;
No night is omnipotent, there must be day!

The oak tarries long in the depths of the seed
But swift is the season of nettle and weed,
Abide yet awhile in the mellowing shade
And rise with the hour for which you were made.

The cycle of seasons, the tidals of man,
Revolve in the orb of the infinite plan;
We move to the rhythm of ages long done,
And each has his hour — to dwell in the sun!

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880 – 1966), American poet and playwright, music teacher and school principal, born in Atlanta, Georgia. She was an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and one of the earliest female African-American playwiters. She published her first poems in 1916 in the NAACP’s magazine Crisis where she wrote a weekly column, “Homely Philosophy,” from 1926 to 1932. Douglas Johnson also wrote plays, and four collections of poetry: The Heart of  a Woman (1918). Bronze (1922) and An Autumn Love Cycle (1928), and Share My World (1962). More

        Remember Me
To the living, I am gone.
To the sorrowful, I will never return. 
To the angry, I was cheated. 
But to the happy, I am at peace.
And to the faithful, I have never left.

I cannot speak, but I can listen. 
I cannot be seen, but I can be heard. 
So as you stand upon a shore
gazing at a beautiful sea - Remember me.

As you look in awe at a mighty forest
and its grand majesty - Remember me.

As you look upon a flower and
admire its simplicity- Remember me.

Remember me in your heart: 

Your thoughts, and your memories,
of the times we loved, 
The times we cried,
The times we fought,
The times we laughed. 

For if you always think of me, I will never be gone.

Margaret Mead, (1901- 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist, author and speaker, who appeared frequently in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s. She was born in  Philadelphia but raised in nearby Doylestown. She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College and her MA and PhD degrees from Columbia University. She taught at a number of colleges and universities, including Vassar College and  New York University. In 1970 she was awarded the UNESCO Kalinga Prize for exceptional skill in presenting scientific ideas to lay people. In 1979, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Note: Although this poem is commonly attributed to Margaret Mead, There is no concrete evidence she authored it, and it's more likely, a poem with unknown origins that has been mistakenly associated with her name over time. In any case it is a beautiful poem which we are publishing on November 15, the anniversary of her passing away.