Pasado (Past) / Pablo Neruda

Pasado Tenemos que echar abajo el pasadoy como se construyepiso por piso, ventana a ventana,y sube el edificioasí, bajando vamosprimero tejas rotasluego orgullosas puertashasta que del pasadosale polvocomo si se golpearacontra el suelo,sala humocomo si se quemara,y cada nuevo díarelucecomo un platovacío :no hay nada, no hubo nada :hay que llenarlode nuevas nutricionesespaciosas,entonces, hacia abajocae […]

Towards a Relative Ending / Wyatt Prunty

Uninterrupted days occasion us,Affording light, withdrawing light,Almost as if someone too far away,Had thought but then forgotten why he thoughtOr, intuitive, had acted without causeAnd, looking again, wondered what it was he meant. Self-thinking and forgetful at one time,We live in rooms we know too wellUntil that ocular day,Vivid for the sky’s emptiness:The desk no […]

Paradoxes and Oxymorons / John Ashbery

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level. Look at it talking to you. You look out a window Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it. You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other. The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and […]

The Candle Indoors / Gerard Manley Hopkins

Some candle clear burns somewhere I come by. I muse at how its being puts blissful back With yellowy moisture mild night’s blear-all black, Or to-fro tender trambeams truckle at the eye. By that window what task what fingers ply, I plod wondering, a-wanting, just for lack Of answer the eagerer a-wanting Jessy or Jack […]

Monday / Billy Collins

The birds are in their trees, the toast is in the toaster, and the poets are at their windows. They are at their windows in every section of the tangerine of earth— the Chinese poets looking up at the moon, the American poets gazing out at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise. The clerks […]

Two Look At Two / Robert Frost

Love and forgetting might have carried them A little further up the mountainside With night so near, but not much further up. They must have halted soon in any case With thoughts of the path back, how rough it was With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness; When they were halted by a tumbled […]