Peapods and Plain Rocks

 Prairie Dawn by Willa Cather   A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars; A pungent odor from the dusty sage; A sudden stirring of the hud...

The Summer Ends by Wendell Berry The summer ends, and it is time To face another way. Our theme Reversed, we harvest the last row To st...

Solitude, by Alexander Pope Happy the man, whose wish and care A few paternal acres bound, Content to breathe his native air           ...

VII.  by Wendell Berry Again I resume the long lesson: how small a thing can be pleasing, how little in this hard world it takes to sa...

Excerpt from BODY AND SOUL    by Charles Wright   (for Coleman Hawkins) I used to think the power of words was inexhaustible, T...

  Night     by Louise Bogan The cold remote islands And the blue estuaries Where what breathes, breathes The restless wind of the inlet...

The war against euphemism and cliché matters not because we can guarantee that eliminating them will help us speak nothing but the truth b...

A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment by Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) My head, my heart, mine eyes,...

Barter by Sara Teasdale Life has loveliness to sell, All beautiful and splendid things, Blue waves whitened on a c...

I Happened To Be Standing by Mary Oliver  I don't know where prayers go,       or what they do. Do cats pray, while they sleep    ...

Travel                  Edna St. Vincent Millay The railroad track is miles away,        And the day is loud with voices speaking, Yet...

Why Some People Do Not Read Poetry --W. S. Merwin Because they already know that it means stopping and without stopping they know th...

I stopped to pick up the bagel rolling away in the wind, annoyed with myself for having dropped it as if it were a portent. Fas...

“Cosmically, I seem to be of two minds,” John Updike wrote, a decade ago. “The power of materialist science to explain everything—from the ...

Onomatomania by Thomas Lux    the word for the inability to find the right word, leads me to self-diagnose: onomatomaniac. ...

"I must be willingly fallible to deserve a place in the realm where miracles happen." William Stafford (1914-1993)

Token Loss   by Kay Ryan To the dragon any loss is  total.  His rest is disrupted if a single  jewel encrusted goblet has been stol...

Sugar Maples, January What years of weather did to branch and bough No canopy of shadow covers now, And these great trunks, when the wi...

" So much of what I love about poetry lies in the vast possibilities of voice, the spectacular range of idiosyncratic flavors that ca...

Asked by an interviewer about his “study” of several poets, [Philip] Larkin responded, “Oh...one doesn’t study poets! You read them, and...

Nuthatch What if a sleek, grey-feathered nuthatch flew from a tree and offered to perch on your left shoulder, accompany you on al...

(October 7, 2013 - excerpt from Time Magazine article, "Power Surge," by Bryan Walsh, p. 39) The same innovations that have resu...

Afternoon on a Hill by Edna St. Vincent Millay  I will be the gladdest thing    Under the sun! I will touch a hundred flowers    And n...

Butterfly Prayer Square   (The butterfly is a symbol of resurrection and renewal.)  This cloth is adapted from a Drops (Garn Studio) bu...

Descending Dove Prayer Square   3 " x 5" size        Size 7 needles, worsted-weight yarn Cast on (long tail) 19 stitches....