A Love Poem for Daylight Saving Time

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
For the first time since November 6
I slept the night through.

I know some are sad,
but spring's 'round the bend,
and then here comes summer--
here's your coffee, my friend.

Like the widow who danced
when she found her lost coin,
I'll try not to rub your face in it
if you've been kicked in the... loins.

Joy comes in the morning
when the sun sets at seven
so please join my rejoicing
and go to bed by eleven!

I Could Give All to Time

To Time it never seems that he is brave
To set himself against the peaks of snow
To lay them level with the running wave,
Nor is he overjoyed when they lie low,
But only grave, contemplative and grave.

What now is inland shall be ocean isle,
Then eddies playing round a sunken reef
Like the curl at the corner of a smile;
And I could share Time’s lack of joy or grief
At such a planetary change of style.

I could give all to Time except – except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There,
And what I would not part with I have kept.


—Robert Frost (1874-1963), eminent American poet, four time Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry (nominated 31 times), and former poet laureate of Vermont

The Wish to Be Generous

All that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man's evil, or dwindle
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know
my little light taken from me into the seed
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass.

--Wendell Berry (1934- ), America poet, farmer, agrarian, essayist, and philosopher

Lectionary scripture: 2 Corinthians 8:7-15, Proper 8B

Shoring Up and Shoring Down

With near-anaphoric repetition
   the tedious Pacific yet insists
on pressing this our gritty beach
   for further evidence. And look!
At intervals the shore concedes. And Look!
   Here and there the cliffs
reveal the land has altogether
   acquiesced, having shrugged
its shoulders, shedding heaps
   of clay onto the grit.

With near-anaphoric repetition
   the melancholic ebb and flow
repeat their endless question, just as we
   interrogate the rock and clay
and fossil-bearing strata for a clue
   regarding what has brought us here,
regarding what might lead us hence.

--Scott Cairns (1954- ), American poet and former professor at the University of Missouri, from Anaphora: New Poems

What Are Years?

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are 

naked, none is safe. And whence 

is courage: the unanswered question, 

the resolute doubt, — 

dumbly calling, deafly listening—that 

in misfortune, even death, 

encourages others 

and in its defeat, stirs 

the soul to be strong? He 

sees deep and is glad, who 

accedes to mortality 

and in his imprisonment rises 

upon himself as t

he sea in a chasm, struggling to be 

free and unable to be, 

in its surrendering 

finds its continuing. 

So he who strongly feels, 

behaves. The very bird, 

grown taller as he sings, steels 

his form straight up. Though he is captive, 

his mighty singing 

says, satisfaction is a lowly 

thing, how pure a thing is joy. 

This is mortality, 

this is eternity.


--Marianne Moore (1887-1972), American poet and editor

Museum of Stones

These are your stones, assembled in matchbox and tin, 

collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct, 

battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir— 

stones, loosened by tanks in the streets, 

from a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen, 

schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse, 

pebble from Baudelaire’s oui, 

stone of the mind within us 

carried from one silence to another, 

stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, hornblende, 

agate, marble, millstones, ruins of choirs and shipyards, 

chalk, marl, mudstone from temples and tombs, 

stone from the silvery grass near the scaffold, 

stone from the tunnel lined with bones, 

lava of a city’s entombment, stones 

chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium, 

paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army,
stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown, 

those that had flown through windows, weighted petitions, 

feldspar, rose quartz, blue schist, gneiss, and chert, 

fragments of an abbey at dusk, sandstone toe 

of a Buddha mortared at Bamian, 

stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt, 

from a chimney where storks cried like human children, 

stones newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones, a heart, 

altar and boundary stone, marker and vessel, first cast, load and hail, 

bridge stones and others to pave and shut up with, 

stone apple, stone basil, beech, berry, stone brake, 

concretion of the body, as blind as cold as deaf, 

all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk 

with hope that this assemblage of rubble, taken together, 

would become a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immovable and sacred 

like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.

--Carolyn Forché, (1950- ), American poet, translator, and editor, from In the Lateness of the World, 2020.

For the Anniversary of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

-- W. S. Merwin (1927- 2019), American poet, naturalist, and writer, US poet laureate (1999-2000 and 2010-2011), two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who passed away one year ago today.

Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn ...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn ...)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(... that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
                                         No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

--Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966), American poet and teacher, from Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge

Ode: Intimations of Immortality

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
     The earth, and every common sight,
               To me did seem
     Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
          Turn wheresoe'er I may,
               By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

          The rainbow comes and goes,
          And lovely is the rose;
          The moon doth with delight
     Look round her when the heavens are bare;
          Waters on a starry night
          Are beautiful and fair;
     The sunshine is a glorious birth;
     But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
     And while the young lambs bound
          As to the tabor's sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
          And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the echoes through the mountains throng,
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
          And all the earth is gay;
               Land and sea
     Give themselves up to jollity,
       And with the heart of May
     Doth every beast keep holiday;—
          Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy
     Shepherd-boy!

Ye blessèd creatures, I have heard the call
     Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
     My heart is at your festival,
       My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
          O evil day! if I were sullen
          While Earth herself is adorning,
               This sweet May-morning,
          And the children are culling
               On every side,
          In a thousand valleys far and wide,
          Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the babe leaps up on his mother's arm:—
          I hear, I hear, with joy I hear! —
          But there's a tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have look'd upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
          The pansy at my feet
          Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
          Hath had elsewhere its setting,
             And cometh from afar:
          Not in entire forgetfulness,
          And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
          From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
          Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
          He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
     Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
     And by the vision splendid
     Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a mother's mind,
          And no unworthy aim,
     The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster-child, her Inmate Man,
     Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years' darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learnèd art;
     A wedding or a festival,
     A mourning or a funeral;
          And this hath now his heart,
     And unto this he frames his song:
          Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
          But it will not be long
          Ere this be thrown aside,
          And with new joy and pride
The little actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his 'humorous stage'
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
          As if his whole vocation
          Were endless imitation.

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
          Thy soul's immensity;
Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,—
          Mighty prophet! Seer blest!
          On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a master o'er a slave,
A presence which is not to be put by;
          To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight
        Of day or the warm light,
A place of thought where we in waiting lie;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

          O joy! that in our embers
          Is something that doth live,
          That nature yet remembers
          What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest— 
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:—
          Not for these I raise
          The song of thanks and praise;
     But for those obstinate questionings
     Of sense and outward things,
     Fallings from us, vanishings;
     Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
          But for those first affections,
          Those shadowy recollections,
     Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
  Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
               To perish never:
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
               Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
     Hence in a season of calm weather
          Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
          Which brought us hither,
     Can in a moment travel thither, 
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

Then sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
          And let the young lambs bound
          As to the tabor's sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
          Ye that pipe and ye that play,
          Ye that through your hearts to-day
          Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
     Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
          We will grieve not, rather find
          Strength in what remains behind;
          In the primal sympathy
          Which having been must ever be;
          In the soothing thoughts that spring'
          Out of human suffering;
          In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

And O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquish'd one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripp'd lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
               Is lovely yet;
The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.


--William Wordsworth (1770-1850)