Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
The world is a beautiful place by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don’t mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don’t sing
all the time
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn’t half bad
if it isn’t you
Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey to
with its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen
and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to
Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
‘living it up’
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician
Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Vanishing Interior by Suzanne Buffam
Little patches of grass disappear
In the jaws of lusty squirrels
Who slip into the spruce.
Cars collapse into parts.
Spring dissolves into summer,
The kitten into the cat.
A tray of drinks departs from the buffet
And voilà! the party’s over.
All that’s left are some pickles
And a sprig of wilting parsley on the rug.
When I think of all those
Gong-tormented Mesozoic seas
I feel a ripple of extinction
And blow a smoke ring through the trees.
Soon there will be nothing left here but sky.
When I think about the fact
I am not thinking about you
It is a new way of thinking about you.
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Love Poem: Minotaur by Donika Ross
Freedom is a thread of light snaking
the canyon like an ant through a conch.
A goodbye to each dead end and small room.
Salt, once of the sea, now of the wind,
now on my brow, making a witness of me.
I open my mouth to the wind. The wind
opens my heart, my breast. I leave the bare
bones behind. I leave the soul, once another’s,
once my own, there in that maze of sand,
mortar, and bellows. A golden light hails
me, pulls me like a worm from the earth.
If You Knew by Ellen Bass
What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.
When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.
A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.
How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?
Wild Is the Wind by Carl Phillips
About what’s past, Hold on when you can, I used to say,
And when you can’t, let go, as if memory were one of those
mechanical bulls, easily dismountable, should the ride
turn rough. I lived, in those days, at the forest’s edge —
metaphorically, so it can sometimes seem now, though
the forest was real, as my life beside it was. I spent
much of my time listening to the sounds of random, un-
knowable things dropping or being dropped from, variously,
a middling height or a great one until, by winter, it was
just the snow falling, each time like a new, unnecessary
taxonomy or syntax for how to parse what’s plain, snow
from which the occasional lost hunter would emerge
every few or so seasons, and — just once — a runaway child
whom I gave some money to and told no one about,
having promised … You must keep what you’ve promised
very close to your heart, that way you’ll never forget
is what I’ve always been told. I’ve been told quite
a lot of things. They hover — some more unbidden than
others — in that part of the mind where mistakes and torn
wishes echo as in a room that’s been newly cathedraled,
so that the echo surprises, though lately it’s less the echo
itself that can still most surprise me about memory —
it’s more the time it takes, going away: a mouth opening
to say I love sex with you too it doesn’t mean I wanna stop
my life for it, for example; or just a voice, mouthless,
asking Since when does the indifference of the body’s
stance when we’re alone, unwatched, in late light, amount
to cruelty? For the metaphysical poets, the problem
with weeping for what’s been lost is that tears
wash out memory and, by extension, what we’d hoped
to remember. If I refuse, increasingly, to explain, isn’t
explanation, at the end of the day, what the sturdier
truths most resist? It’s been my experience that
tears are useless against all the rest of it that, if I
could, I’d forget. That I keep wanting to stay should
count at least for something. I’m not done with you yet.
Volver, Volver by Ariana Brown
How does one lose an accent? coat the tongue in ice and watch the frosted muscle forget all its memories?
Mexico, a country which once included a third of the United States, is home to the largest Spanish speaking population in the world. My grandmother attended public school in Texas in the fifties, before it was legal to speak her native tongue in a classroom. As a child, my mother tells me I am “African American Mexican”. This means nothing to me. Often, she instructs me to speak like I have heritage, respect, a mouth of my own. But in Texas, Mexicans who speak Spanish are also called niggers.
1. Nigger wraps itself around the coils of my hair and speaks. The beginning of mirrors is the beginning of the end. I am six years old and ending all over.
2. 48% of the world’s black population resides in Latin America.
3. The first time I heard mariachis was in a restaurant, or at a parade, or an outdoor theater somewhere. I remember admiring the lone woman in the group, her green polyester, the way she made her whole body a song, the whole song a mountain, her mouth a red sun spilling with hurt.
4. Years later, at a play in my hometown of San Antonio, a stranger asks me a question in Spanish. I answer, pronouncing each syllable with the pride I inherited. Frustrating, how it is easier to communicate with a stranger than my own grandmother, that despite four and a half years of Spanish classes, I am still afraid that in front of my family, my shivering tongue will shake to a western rhythm, dry out, and die.
5. In Austin, it is normal to insult a Mexican street name, extract its religion and graze it irreverently down to Gwad-uh-loop instead of troubling oneself with Guadalupe, the patroness of Mexican people, la morena, dark like we are, sacred like our names have always been.
6. I am always amazed that the ability to forget history is a choice for some people, instead of an ancestral battle against hating the self and all its words for being.
7. Can you still be considered an immigrant if you are traveling to a place that was yours to begin with?
8. When I correct other people’s Spanish, I am often met with a laugh and the occasional “I’m white” as if that was an excuse to be anything but sorry.
9. Each letter in the Spanish alphabet will almost always make the same sound, no matter what word it appears in. Despite the excuses, pronunciation is not difficult.
10. My mother’s favorite mariachi song is “Volver, Volver”, a story of unrequited love and the desire to come home.
11. In times of crisis, the mouth will bake the air inside it, choose to remain silent to survive. The slow heat produces a small sun. To keep the sun from breaking on its way out of the mouth, the tongue must reacquaint itself with the work of legacy.
12. The work is never done.
American Sonnet for Wanda C. by Terrance Hayes
Who I know knows why all those lush-boned worn-out girls are
Whooping at where the moon should be, an eyelid clamped
On its lightness. Nobody sees her without the hoops firing in her
Ears because nobody sees. Tattooed across her chest she claims
Is BRING ME TO WHERE MY BLOOD RUNS and I want that to be here
Where I am her son, pent in blackness and turning the night’s calm
Loose and letting the same blood fire through me. In her bomb hair:
Shells full of thunder; in her mouth: the fingers of some calamity,
Somebody foolish enough to love her foolishly. Those who could hear
No music weren’t listening—and when I say it, it’s like claiming
She’s an elegy. It rhymes, because of her, with effigy. Because of her,
If there is no smoke, there is no party. I think of you, Miss Calamity,
Every Sunday. I think of you on Monday. I think of you hurling hurt
Where the moon should be and stomping into our darkness calmly.
Compassion Camp 