Poetic Medicine

By Cinthia Ritchie Fog fills the water, it’s hard to see the mountains, we’ve been camped here for days, like my own skin, ordinary, w...

By W.S. Merwin  Dragonflies were as common as sunlight hovering in their own days backward forward and sideways as though they were mem...

By Adrienne Rich Out in this desert we are testing bombs, that's why we came here. Sometimes I feel an underground river forcing ...

By Roque Dalton Like you I love love, life, the sweet smell of things, the sky-blue landscape of January days. And my blood boils up ...

By Pablo Neruda You will ask: But where are the lilacs? And the metaphysics covered with poppies? And the rain that often struck his wo...

By Bob Dylan Crickets are chirpin' the water is high There's a soft cotton dress on the line hangin' dry Window wide open Af...

By Georgeann Eskievich Rettberg Hell, steelworkers built this country. I work like a jackass in there. I deserve the money. They take h...

By Marge Piercy The moon is dark tonight, a new moon for a new year. It is hollow and hungers to be full. It is the black zero of begin...

By Marcia Falk Today is the birthday of the world. But the world knows nothing of this invention. The world just keeps moving about it...

By Nick Norwood, Michael McFalls, Marc Olivié and Marleen De Bode Olivié now that you are here amid crag and gleam mist-rise and vapor ...

By Langston Hughes I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother.  They send me to eat in the kitchen  When company comes,  But I lau...

By Serena Williams She turns her disappointment into triumph. Her grief into joy. Her rejections into approvals. If no one believes in h...

By Denise Duhamel “There was a time when Barbie couldn’t even bend her knees,” I told my nieces Kerri and Katie who sit before me on a l...

By W. H. Auden I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest dec...

By Elisabet Velasquez  Maybe it was because of the last time you ran away with the boy who looked like God. Maybe it was because of th...

By Calvin Trillin A man who goes ballistic At trivial rebukes Is just the sort of person One wants in charge of nukes

By Charles Bukowski sitting here on a boiling hot night while after winning $232 at the track. there's not much I can tell you excep...

By Carlos Drummond de Andrade  A time comes when we no longer can say: A time of total cleaning up. A time when we no longer can say: my...

Weapons are the tools of violence; all decent men detest them. Weapons are the tools of fear; a decent man will avoid them except in the...

By Susan Elizabeth Howe (A fortune cookie) Ominous inscrutable Chinese news to get just before Christmas, considering my reasonable hea...