Mimesis, by Fady Joudah My daughter                         wouldn’t hurt a spider That had nested Between her bicycle handles For two weeks She waited Until it left of its own accord If you tear down the web I said It will simply know This isn’t a place to call home And you’d get to go biking She said that’s how others Become refugees isn’t it?

Fady Joudah, “Mimesis” from Alight. Copyright © 2013 by Fady Joudah.

 My Picture Left in Scotland, by Ben Jonson

 

I now think Love is rather deaf than blind,

For else it could not be

That she,

Whom I adore so much, should so slight me

And cast my love behind.

I'm sure my language to her was as sweet,

And every close did meet

In sentence of as subtle feet,

As hath the youngest He

That sits in shadow of Apollo's tree.

O, but my conscious fears,

That fly my thoughts between,

Tell me that she hath seen

My hundred of gray hairs,

Told seven and forty years

Read so much waste, as she cannot embrace

My mountain belly and my rocky face;

And all these through her eyes have stopp'd her ears.

The courage that my mother had     by Edna St. Vincent Millay

 The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried;
Now granite in a granite hill.

 

The golden brooch my mother wore
She left behind for me to wear;
I have no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it is something I could spare.

 

Oh, if instead she’d left to me
The thing she took into the grave!—
That courage like a rock, which she
Has no more need of, and I have.