The Gladness of Nature - William Cullen Bryant

Is this a time to be cloudy and sad,
When our mother Nature laughs around;
When even the deep blue heavens look glad,
And gladness breathes from the blossoming ground?

Benediction - Sister Ruth Fox

May God bless us with discomfort
at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships,
so that we may live from deep within our hearts.

The Harvest Bow - Seamus Heaney

As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.

Untitled [This is what was bequeathed us] - Gregory Orr

This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth the beloved left
And, leaving,
Left to us.

The Changing Light - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The changing light
                    at San Francisco
       is none of your East Coast light

A Drinking Song - W. B. Yeats

Wine comes in at the mouth

And love comes in at the eye;

They had it coming - Steve Turner

The South East Asians,
they were made to cry,
Look at their eyes all
narrowed up and ready to bawl.

Upon Julia's Clothes - Robert Herrick

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,

Jabberwocky - Lewis Carroll

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Ballad - Sonia Sanchez

forgive me if i laugh
you are so sure of love
you are so young
and i too old to learn of love.

Song - H. D.

You are as gold
as the half-ripe grain

A Blessing - James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

Mother Teresa - Sydney Carter

No revolution will come in time
   to alter this man's life
   except the one
   surprise of being loved.

Summer Song - William Carlos Williams

Wanderer moon
smiling a
faintly ironical smile

Father's Song - Gregory Orr

Yesterday, against admonishment,
my daughter balanced on the couch back,
fell and cut her mouth.

Gospel - Philip Levine

The new grass rising in the hills,
the cows loitering in the morning chill,
a dozen or more old browns hidden
in the shadows of the cottonwoods
beside the streambed. I go higher

A Girl - Ezra Pound

The tree has entered my hands,

My Father's Love Letters - Yusef Komunyakaa

On Fridays he'd open a can of Jax
After coming home from the mill,

Daniel Boone - Stephen Vincent Benét

When Daniel Boone goes by

Three rusty nails - Roger McGough

Mother, there's a strange man
Waiting at the door
With a familiar sort of face
You feel you've seen before.

Haiku (the spotted moon) - Bruce Levitan

the spotted moon hangs

Dream Variations - Langston Hughes

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
    Dark like me--
That is my dream!

Where I Live - Maxine Kumin

is vertical:
garden, pond, uphill

Stanzas in Meditation - Gertrude Stein

I think very well of Susan but I do not know her name

Home-Thoughts, From Abroad - Robert Browning

Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England--now!

As Far As My Eye Can See In My Body’s Senses - Paul Éluard

All the trees all their branches all of their leaves
The grass at the foot of the rocks and the houses en masse