A Pasture Poem by Richard Wilbur This upstart thistle Is young and touchy; it is All barb and bristle, Threatening to wield Its green, jagged armament Against the whole field. Butterflies will dare Nonetheless to lay their eggs In that angle where The leaf meets the stem, So that ants or browsing cows Cannot trouble them. Summer will grow old As will the thistle, letting A clenched bloom unfold To which the small hum Of bee wings and the flash of Goldfinch wings will come, Till its purple crown Blanches, and the breezes strew The whole field with down. "A Pasture Poem" by Richard Wilbur,  from Anterooms. © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.

 What if you slept...
             by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in your hand
Ah, what then?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Public Domain

 

The New Song
by W. S. Merwin

For some time I thought there was time
and that there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then

there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song

from the book, The Moon Before Morning

 O sweet spontaneous
by e e cummings
 
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

               fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and

poked
thee
, has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

         beauty                  how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
         (but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

              thou answerest

them only with

                                spring)
 
"O Sweet Spontaneous" by e e cummings. Public Domain.

 

Monarchs, Viceroys, Swallowtails 

For years they came tacking in, full sail, 
Riding the light down through the trees,
Over the rooftops, and not just monarchs,
But viceroys, swallowtails, so many
They became unremarkable, showing up
As they did whether we noticed them or not,
Swooping and fanning out at the bright
Margins of the day. So how did we know
Until it was too late, until they quit coming,
That the flowers in the flower beds
Would close their shutters, and the birds
Grow so dull they’d lose the power to sing,
And how later, after the river died,
Others would follow, admirals, buckeyes,
All going off like some lavish parade
Into the great overcrowded silence.
And no one bothered to tell the trees
They wouldn’t be coming back any more,
The huge shade trees where they used 
To gather, every last branch and leaf sagging
Under the bright freight of their wings.

 by Robert Hedin, in Alaska Quarterly Review (2020)