The Answer, Sara Teasdale

The Answer

Sara Teasdale

When I go back to earth

And all my joyous body

Puts off the red and white

That once had been so proud,

If men should pass above

With false and feeble pity,

My dust will find a voice

To answer them aloud:

“Be still, I am content,

Take back your poor compassion,

Joy was a flame in me

Too steady to destroy;

Lithe as a bending reed

Loving the storm that sways her—

I found more joy in sorrow

Than you could find in joy.”

How The Trees On Summer Nights, Barbara Crooker

How the Trees on Summer Nights Turn into a Dark River

by Barbara Crooker

how you can never reach it, no matter how hard you try,
walking as fast as you can, but getting nowhere,
arms and legs pumping, sweat drizzling in rivulets;
each year, a little slower, more creaks and aches, less breath.
Ah, but these soft nights, air like a warm bath, the dusky wings
of bats careening crazily overhead, and you'd think the road
goes on forever. Apollinaire wrote, "What isn't given to love
is so much wasted," and I wonder what I haven't given yet.
A thin comma moon rises orange, a skinny slice of melon,
so delicious I could drown in its sweetness. Or eat the whole
thing, down to the rind. Always, this hunger for more.

"How the Trees on Summer Nights Turn into a Dark River," by Barbara Crooker from More.

A Word For Joy, Franz Wright

A Word For Joy

 

I am happy among children's eyes

I am very worried and happy

among the crazy and the hopeless

they recognize me, right away

I'm home

And there is nowhere I would rather be

alive or dead

than in this world

Inside this skull I hold and ponder

unending space expanding if I understand correctly

at an accelerating rate, meanwhile

housing perpetual births and disappearances of its numberless

deafening nuclear furnaces unheard,

I consider the voices, identically soundless, in every

mind, behind each face I pass

and as I've been instructed each morning

on rising I obliterate the print of my body

and am glad (the wind is blowing, it is written, adore

the wind)

and am speechlessly grateful and glad and afraid

I don't mind saying that I am scared

to death of God: I am

afraid and blind and ignorant and naked and

I'll take it!

I have been happy here

among all the suffering eyes: why they were brought here

and exactly what it was they were expected

to take a good close look at,

I can't grasp it, but I am so very glad.

 

~ Franz Wright ~

 

(God's Silence)