I want to get up early one more morning,

before sunrise. Before the birds, even.

I want to throw cold water on my face

and be at my work table

when the sky lightens and smoke

begins to rise from the chimneys

of the other houses.

I want to see the waves break

on this rocky beach, not just hear them

break as I did all night in my sleep.

I want to see again the ships

that pass through the Strait from every

seafaring country in the world—

old, dirty freighters just barely moving along,

and the swift new cargo vessels

painted every color under the sun

that cut the water as they pass.

I want to keep an eye out for them.

And for the little boat that plies

the water between the ships

and the pilot station near the lighthouse.

I want to see them take a man off the ship

and put another up on board.

I want to spend the day watching this happen

and reach my own conclusions.

I hate to seem greedy—have so much

to be thankful for already.

But I want to get up early one more morning, at least.

And go to my place with some coffee and wait.

Just wait, to see what’s going to happen.

~ from Where Water Comes Together With Other Water

(Random House, 1985)

I’ve come back to the country where I was happy 
changed. Passion puts no terrible strain on me now. 
I wonder what will take the place of desire. 
I could be the ghost of my own life returning 
to the places I lived best. Walking here and there, 
nodding when I see something I cared for deeply. 
Now I’m in my house listening to the owls calling 
and wondering if slowly I will take on flesh again.

~ from A Book of Luminous Things, edited by Czeslaw Milosz (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1996)

There's just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never 
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea, 
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

~ from 180 more,  Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, selected by Billy Collins (Random House, 2005)

All was taken away from you: white dresses, 
wings, even existence. 
Yet I believe you, 
messengers. 

There, where the world is turned inside out, 
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts, 
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams. 

Short is your stay here: 
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear, 
in a melody repeated by a bird, 
or in the smell of apples at close of day 
when the light makes the orchards magic. 

They say somebody has invented you 
but to me this does not sound convincing 
for the humans invented themselves as well. 

The voice— no doubt it is a valid proof, 
as it can belong only to radiant creatures, 
weightless and winged (after all, why not?), 
girdled with the lightening. 

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep 
and, what is strange, I understood more or less 
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue: 

day draw near 
another one 
do what you can. 

~ from New and Collected Poems 1931-2001 (Ecco HarperCollins 1988)

Duped by the moon    
a woman walks into snow and knows
at once what she once was.
Feathers return to the hollow   
above her shoulder blades, 
gravity swoops from the earth
into the sky
and she soars upward
head turning like an owl’s,
eyes big enough to see a vole 
sleeping in it’s soft
sarcophagus of snow;
when she swerves
to look at what’s behind
she glimpses
through the farmhouse window
her daughter, her white-haired
husband and the old 
amnesiac who is her father
dumbly waiting at the table
she had set,
their empty plates
shining from this height
as if the moon itself
had been sliced like a winter turnip
and could serve no better purpose
than to hold what they would eat.

~ from The Wrong Cat (McClelland & Stewart, 2015)

Merely to name them is the prose 
Of diarists, to make you a name 
For readers who like travellers praise 
Their beds and beaches as the same; 
But islands can only exist 
If we have loved them. I seek, 
As climate seeks its style, to write 
Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight, 
Cold as the curved wave, ordinary 
As a tumbler of island water; 
Yet, like a diarist, thereafter 
I savour their salt-hunted rooms 
(Your body stirring the creased sea 
Of crumpled sheets), whose mirrors lose 
Our huddled, sleeping images, 
Like words which love had hoped to use 
Erased with the surf's pages. 

So, like a diarist in sand, 
I mark the peace with which you graced 
Particular islands, descending 
A narrow stair to light the lamps 
Against the night surf's noises, shielding 
A leaping mantle with one hand, 
Or simply scaling fish for supper, 
Onions, jack-fish, bread, red snapper; 
And on each kiss the harsh sea-taste, 
And how by moonlight you were made 
To study most the surf's unyielding 
Patience though it seems a waste.

~ from Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007)

Idling in traffic, bass jacked 
all the way up, the car shuddering, 
the driver pretending not to notice,
his friends nodding to the beat—how easy
it is to hate them when you’re standing
out in the sun on the sidewalk, or some
country road in early spring.  And then
you’re the one in the car.
A song takes you back, let’s you touch 
what you couldn’t reach in silence.
Which means the song should be played    

again and louder, as if that were the way 
to live with disappointment.  Perhaps
the soul is divided like this,
half desiring to hear itself listening,
half needing to be seized
and overwhelmed.  And each remains fearful
of the other, the one who might
at any moment do something foolish—
the way a man suddenly drives
his car off the road, while someone else
just stands there, and watches it happen.

~ from The History of Forgetting (Penguin Books, 2009)

Saturday evening grows
darker as the teapot
whistles. I get a mug,
humming, and breathe
the ancient scent,
faintly familiar.

Every summer we
gathered the young
jasmine leaves, while I sang
songs that I learned in school.
On sunny days, she spread
the leaves out in the back
yard where I sat and dreamt
the scent of long winter
nights beside the hot stove.
Immense warmth calms my throat

as I hear
what’s not there anymore.
Mama’s dead: someone else
is picking the leaves,
drinking my tea
in nights of winter.

~ translated by May Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye, from This Same Sky, A Collection of Poems from around the World, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye

Oh, the dream!  The dream!
My sturdy gilded wagon
has collapsed,
its wheels have scattered like gypsies.
One night I dreamt of spring
and when I woke
flowers covered my pillow.
I dreamt once of the sea.
In the morning my bed was rich
with shells and fins.
But when I dreamt of freedom
spears surrounded my neck
with morning’s halo.

From now on you will not find me
at ports or among trains
but in public libraries
sleeping head down on the maps of the world
as the orphan sleeps on pavement
where my lips will touch more than one river
and my tears stream from continent 
to continent.

~ translated by May Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye, from This Same Sky, A Collection of Poems from around the World, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye

fallen willow warrior guardian of the bay and sky torqued by water and winter a prayer scrawled on the wind weed trees— willows don’t last they glory pollarded and scarred living to shelter and dance wild in storm and light old wounds grown over cored in earth and heartwood until the fall reflection shatters and after— sinking, out beyond the shore a sprawl of dying branches witness shoots birthing digging in the green bank hungry to root and soar. ~from Still Dances (2015)

How unusual to be living a life of continual self-expression, jotting down little things, noticing a leaf being carried down a stream, then wondering what will become of me, and finally to work alone under a lamp as if everything depended on this, groping blindly down a page, like someone lost in a forest. And to think it all began one night on the steps of a nunnery where I lay gazing up from a sewing basket, which was doubling for a proper baby carrier, staring into the turbulent winter sky, too young to wonder about anything including my recent abandonment— but it was there that I committed my first act of self-expression, sticking out my infant tongue and receiving in return (I can see it now) a large, pristine snowflake much like any other. ~ from Aimless Love, New and Selected Poems (Random House, 2013)

Why not wake at dawn? Why not break
From the coffin of night, whose nails
Are the only stars left.  Why not follow
A tear like a comet's tail, and trail
The grief of a year until it ends--
Who knows where.  Why not wake
At dawn, after all is gone, and go on?

~ from The Art of Losing (Bloomsbury USA, 2010)

Because we dream and want and carry on,
we think we're exempt. We think we're
above working the Earth on all fours.

We often miss the point.
A bear may feel like a hummingbird
the moment he catches a salmon,
but his paws are still paws.

As for me, I feel like a horse chasing
birds that cross the sky.  When they fly
out of view, I know I'm a hawk born as
a horse.  All poets are.  A tangle of wings
and hooves.  Trying to run in the sky
and fly on Earth.

So it's useless to pine for your lover
to be delicate, if she's really a cheetah.
Or for your mother to see clearly,
if her path is that of a bat.

It doesn't mean we can't try.
Just that we work
with what we're given.

~ from Reduced to Joy (Viva Editions  2013)

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horse strained at his clicking tongue. 

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck 

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly. 

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod. 

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm. 

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today 
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.

~ from Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 (Faber and Faber, 2002)

As the wind makes a different song
through the same tree as its branches
break, God makes finer and finer music
through the wearing down of our will.

~ from Reduced to Joy (Viva Editions  2013)

The time has come
To stop allowing the clutter
To clutter my mind
Like dirty snow,
Shove it off and find
Clear time, clear water.
Time for a change,
Let silence in like a cat
Who has sat at my door
Neither wild nor strange
Hoping for food from my store
And shivering on the mat.

Let silence in.
She will rarely speak or mew,
She will sleep on my bed
And all I have ever been
Either false or true
Will live again in my head.

For it is now or not
As old age silts the stream,
To shove away the clutter,
To untie every knot,
To take the time to dream,
To come back to still water.

~ from Collected Poems 1930-1993 (W.W. Norton & Co, 1993)

So the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive,
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - Listen!!
All the long echoes sing the same delight,
This shortest day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, fest, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends, and hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

~ Copyright Susan Cooper 1974

You know when you unwrap them:
fruitcake is notorious. There were only
51 of them baked in 1917 by the
personal chef of Rasputin. The mad monk
ate one. That was what finally killed him

But there are many more bouncers:
bowls green and purple spotted like lepers.
Vases of inept majolica in the shape
of wheezing frogs or overweight lilies.
Sweaters sized for Notre Dame's hunchback.

Hourglasses of no use humans
can devise. Gloves to fit three-toed sloths.
Mufflers of screaming plaid acrylic.
Necklaces and pins that transform
any outfit to a thrift shop reject.

Boxes of candy so stale and sticky
the bonbons pull teeth faster than
your dentist. Weird sauces bought
at warehouse sales no one will ever
taste unless suicidal or blind.

Immortal as vampires, these gifts
circulate from birthdays to Christmas,
from weddings to anniversaries.
Even if you send them to the dump,
they resurface, bobbing up on the third

day like the corpses they call floaters.
After all living have turned to dust
and ashes, in the ruins of cities
alien archeologists will judge our
civilization by these monstrous relics. 

~ from The Hunger Moon (Knopf, 2012)

I meant to return long before this
but in looking back we learn too much
of loss and I dreaded that.
Now going through the house
and my parents’ lives
too revealed by what they saved
and what they left behind
for me to find, I feel nothing
but pain for the past
trying to understand
how I fell so short of what I intended
to do with my life.
How life twists and turns
against us. How a childhood
is not really understood
until it is lived a second time
in memory. How wonderful
and how terrible
it seems now
because it is gone
and because it was mine.

~ from The Heart of All That Is: Reflections on Home
edited by Jim Perlma, Deborah Cooper, Mara Hart, and
Pamela Mittlefehldt (Holy Cow! Press, 2013)

Leucon, no one’s allowed to know his fate, 
Not you, not me: don’t ask, don’t hunt for answers 
In tea leaves or palms. Be patient with whatever comes. 
This could be our last winter, it could be many 
More, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks: 
Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines 
And forget about hope. Time goes running, even 
As we talk. Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair. 

[translated by Burton Raffel]

~ from Ten Windows, How Great Poems Transform the World, by Jane Hirshfield (Alfred A Knopf, 2015)