More on: poetry

in every generation, each person must regard himself or herself as if he or she were the one liberated, on the very night of Passover, from Egypt                                         adapted from the Passover Haggadah This won’t do, the Seder your grandmother cooked and indexed on cards to leap down the generations; this won’t do, the Seder…

My aged father and I enjoy the silence between us as we sit in the Adirondacks, watching the children playing tag on the lawn and running in circles, happy to be it or not to be it, happy just to be, though I know they give no thought to being. My father leans toward me…

The pain passes, ——but the beauty remains.                             —Renoir Wandering the Musée de l’Orangerie with my sister, we find a bouquet of roses painted in 1878 by Auguste Renoir, voluptuous white roses placed in a red velvet chair. My sister says Renoir’s last word was “flowers” and that toward the end of his life he…

incalculable snow was coming down heaven in tatters was slipping down thus she was ascending passing motionlessly white after white a mild height after height in the Elijah’s chariot of her humiliation above the fallen angels of snowflakes into the zenith of frost higher and higher hosanna raised to the lowest   Translated from the…

It was in the spring of 1944, during the delousing of the Gypsy barracks in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp skirts scarves withered in the delousing room all in protective colors in poppies in buttercups in daisies in case of a meadow that wasn’t going to appear a Gypsy in the bathhouse of birkenau stripped of colors…

Eat honey, my son, for it is good, and the honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste. ———–—Proverbs 24:13 Honey lives only in hexagons because they ensure a balance of sweetness their shape is a star’s design six implied triangles drinking from the center’s source shrouded in the most frugally abundant capacity in order not…

Charles Wright is the author of nearly thirty collections of poetry, most recently Sestets, Bye-and-Bye, and Caribou (all from Farrar, Straus and Giroux), as well as two books of criticism and a collection of translations of the Italian poet Eugenio Montale. Born in 1935 in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, Wright attended Davidson College and the Iowa…

______I am soft sift ______In an hourglass _____________ —Hopkins Against the darkening winterplum sky, a lone contrail whitens—loose thread, untufted cotton. A perfect inverse of me: ____________________________Lenten moon of my belly taut, halved by a slurred gray line. Linea nigra, the doctor says, my belly button’s new ashen tail a ghostly likeness of the cut…

Last week a jellied disc in one of my husband’s lower vertebrae cinched, slipped—on the x-ray the bones’ thorned edges gritted against each other, his whole spine yearning left, a lily stem arched toward the promise of light. Now the days shrink into themselves, the trees bare-limbed but for squirrels’ nests and the green bloom…

Midnight, mid-May. The earth supple with three weeks of rain, Queen Anne lacing the clover, dandelions racing the slope of hill behind our house. Water pooled in every nick and hollow bared to sky, moss slick and greening inside the curbs. Our dog noses through yards, puddle-pawed, until suddenly he is gone—bent to the wild…