Featured Topic: Dreams
Featured Product: Seasons
Featured Writer: poets better and more famous than me
Featured Form: Rondel
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The Unspeakable Name
"But, my Lord, who will I say has sent me?" asked shoe-less Moses on his holy plot, expecting an answer from the burning tree. But the cloaking, indirect "I Am" is not a name but a refusal to be named— words that reveal as much as they obscure. For such a being never...
Sonnet 129 by William Shakespeare
Is lust in action; and till action, lust The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust; Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight; Past reason hunted; and no sooner had, Past reason...
The Waking by Theodore Roethke
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go. We think by feeling. What is there to know? I hear my being dance from ear to ear. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. Of those so close beside...
A Freedom Worthy of God: a villanelle
A circle can't be squared and still a circle be; the points are fixed, they cannot bend or sway. A man cannot be forced and still considered free. The change begins, the end we can't foresee; some ideas do not mold as easily as clay. A circle can't be squared and...
Footnote to All Prayer by C.S. Lewis
He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou, And dream of Pheidian* fancies and embrace in heart Symbols (I Know) which cannot be the thing Thou art. Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme Worshiping...
Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost
Nature's first green is gold Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
I Sat Down to Drink the Wine: a villanelle
I sat down to drink the wine and hungry fingers reached for a baguette but he stopped my hand and claimed "It's mine." Jesus Christ man! Whatever—fine. I don't know why this guy is so upset. I sat down to drink the wine. What right has he to stop us when we dine? I...
Sonnet 75 by William Shakespeare
So are you to my thoughts as food to life, Or as sweet seasoned show'rs are to the ground; And for the peace of you I hold such strife As ’twixt a miser and his wealth is found; Now proud as an enjoyer, and anon Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure; Now...
Mad Girl’s Love Song by Sylvia Plath
"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.)The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I dreamed that...
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night – Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.Good...
The House on the Hill by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Most of you know that I have a certain affection/obsession with sonnets, but I have been tinkering with a new poetic form, called a villanelle, in recent days. Similar to a sonnet, villanelles have a fixed rhyme scheme and predefined structure and length. These...
The Rape of Tamar and the Half-life of Joy
Amnon held his desired to the bed and, famished, smiled as he ravished the prey. Then he sickened like a man overfed; the flesh he sought, consumed, stank of decay. Absalom smiled too as he avenged the rape. But even the pleasures of revenge take flight; once the trap...
The Fires of Carthage Catch
Who could foresee how such a thing begins with the striking of Bouazizi's match. The despots stare with their uneasy grins as the flickering fires of Carthage catch. The people of a thousand crescent lands cast off their shah, their colonel or their king whose...
Alyosha’s Troubled Mind
Parallel lines extend along the graph and far as eyes can see draws mystery. All our lives we wonder if this paragraph is the final or the first of history. We see both hell and heaven occupied and know the perfect judge of all must be by justice or by mercy...
The Hated Hymn
His enemies, subdued, still spit with rage their hated hymns, "He is just, He is just," looking at their punisher with disgust, but cannot quench His wrath with such a wage. Our calculus is prone to soon forget just how His wrath must burn against all crime— how, to...