because I saw one at the farmers market today

Artichoke
Joseph Hutchison (1985)

O heart weighed down by so many wings

because we all feel this way sometimes

Sloth
Yusef Komunyakaa (1999)

If you're one of seven
Downfalls, up in your kingdom
Of mulberry leaves, there are men
Betting you aren't worth a bullet,

That your skin won't tan into a good
Wallet. As if drugged in the womb
& limboed in a honeyed languor,
By the time you open your eyes

A thousand species have lived
& died. Born on a Sunday
Morning, with old-world algae
In your long hair, a goodness

Disguised your two-toed claws
Bright as flensing knives. In this
Upside-down haven, you're reincarnated
As a fallen angel trying to go home.

because all things come to an end

Train Ride
Ruth Stone (2002)

All things come to an end;
small calves in Arkansas,
the bend of the muddy river.
Do all things come to an end?
No, they go on forever.
They go on forever, the swamp,
the vine-choked cypress, the oaks
rattling last year’s leaves,
the thump of the rails, the kite,
the still white stilted heron.
All things come to an end.
The red clay bank, the spread hawk,
the bodies riding this train,
the stalled truck, pale sunlight, the talk;
the talk goes on forever,
the wide dry field of geese,
a man stopped near his porch
to watch. Release, release;
between cold death and a fever,
send what you will, I will listen.
All things come to an end.
No, they go on forever.

because there are emotions so complex, we can only suffer them in a poem

I Go Back to May 1937
Sharon Olds (2004)

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the   
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,
the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips aglow in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,   
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are   
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.   
I want to go up to them and say Stop,   
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,   
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,   
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty face turning to me,   
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome face turning to me,   
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,   
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I   
take them up like the male and female   
paper dolls and bang them together   
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to   
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

because poetry teaches us without our realizing it

In Blackwater Woods
Mary Oliver (1983)

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

because April is National Poetry Month

Quahogs
Frank X. Gaspar (2016)

It was for the wind as much as anything.
It was for the tidal flats, for the miles of bars
and the freezing runs between them,
blued and darkened in the withering gusts.
For the buckets, for the long-tined rakes.
For our skin burning and the bones
beneath, all their ache. For the bent backs,
for the huddle toward warmth beneath
our incapable layers, how we beat
ourselves with our arms. The breath
we blew, the narrow steam that spun away.
How we searched their tell-draggle marks.
Then the feel of them as we furrowed. Then it
was surgery and force together. Like stones.
Opal or pearl or plain rock, ugly except
they were beautiful, their whorls and
purple stains. The bucket’s wire cutting
with their weight. For the sky blazing, its
sinking orange fire. For the sky’s black streaks
with night rising, winter-sudden. Back,
shoreward, home, the tide creeping like a wolf.
For the little stove warming, its own orange fire.
The old pot, the steam, the air in savor,
the close room, the precious butter, the
blue fingers throbbing, our bodies in all
the customs of weariness, the supper,
succulent of the freezing dark sea come up,
and hunger, its own happiness, its own
domain immeasurable. It was for the hunger.