Poetry

BY DG NANOUK OKPIK For Arthur Sze (Qin) Dim Sum equivalent to: dot, speck heart. Stone piled on stone I finish my meal. In this early sunrise I see shadows where a cairn of rocks used to stack in the …

Invictus BY WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY 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…

At the Window The pine-trees bend to listen to the autumn wind as it mutters Something which sets the black poplars ashake with hysterical laughter; While slowly the house of day is closing its easter…

At its most negatively capable, poetry pinches your business, your situation, your significance, and supplants it with protoplasm, percussion, and clairvoyance. It rewires your thinking. You need this…

Ellen West BY FRANK BIDART I love sweets,— heaven would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream … But my true self is thin, all profile and effortless gestures, the sort of blond elegant girl who…

In the same way that the mindless diamond keeps one spark of the planet’s early fires trapped forever in its net of ice, it’s not love’s later heat that poetry holds, but the atom of…

The Prince is a 16th-century political treatise by the Italian diplomat and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. From correspondence a version appears to have been distributed in 1513, using a Lati…

The Garden by Moonlight A black cat among roses, Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon, The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock. The garden is very still, It is dazed with moon…

Muscular as a stallion in fact — but I have no horse in this race of people against people. It was made certain I wouldn’t, that I’d inherit nothing except a whipping of my hindquarters as a form of c…

I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life. I want a peek at the back Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows. A girl gets sick of a rose. I want to go in the back yard now And maybe down t…