Poetic Medicine

By Chase Twichell Don't tell me we're not like plants, sending out a shoot when we need to, or spikes, poisonous oils, or flowers. C...

By Jane Hirshfield This was once a love poem, before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short, before it found itself sitting, perplexe...

By Jane Cooper If you want my apartment, sleep in it but let's have a clear understanding: the books are still free agents. If the rocki...

By Mark Twain Genius, like gold and precious stones, is chiefly prized because of its rarity. Geniuses are people who dash of weird, wild, i...

By Wendell Berry Horseback on Sunday morning, harvest over, we taste persimmon and wild grape, sharp sweet of summer's end. In time'...

By Rainer Maria Rilke I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough to truly consecrate the hour. I am much too small in this worl...

By Kimiko Hahn The coral reefs are changing color, the black and crimson bleached away: the ocean’s rising fever, in every drop the seas ove...

By Adam Zagajewski How unattainable life is, it only reveals its features in memory, in nonexistence. How unattainable afternoons, ripe, tum...

By Jose Emilio Pacheco Luz de domingo. Quietud domestica. Trinos entre la hiedra amarilla. La tarde se vuelve noche en los fresnos. La tempe...

By James Dickey We have all been in rooms We cannot die in, and they are odd places, and sad. Often Indians are standing eagle-armed on hill...

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...

By Bruce Weigl I didn't know I was grateful for such late-autumn bent-up cornfields yellow in the after-harvest sun before the cold plow...

By Billy Collins My pen moves along the page like the snout of a strange animal shaped like a human arm and dressed in the sleeve of a loose...

By Rita Dove "Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me...." The He...

Nature's first green is gold Her hardest hue to hold Her early leaf's a flower But only so an hour Then leaf subsides to leaf Eden s...

By Mary Oliver Last night, an owl in the blue dark tossed an indeterminate number of carefully shaped sounds into the world, in whic...

By Joy Harjo She had some horses. She had horses who were bodies of sand. She had horses who were maps drawn of blood. She had horses who we...

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 disa...

i like my body when it is with your body. it is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more. i like your body. i like what it does,...

By Edward Hirsch A hook shot kisses the rim and hangs there, helplessly, but doesn't drop, and for once our gangly starting center boxes...