from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
A wood near Athens. A Fairy speaks. Read more about Over Hill, Over Dale

Ego Tripping

Nikki Giovanni

Someone asked me recently what I do when I feel afraid, and I told them that since I can't whistle, I hold my head up high and tell myself I am a priestess of the goddess. He sent me this poem by Nikki Giovanni who was born the same year as I. 1943 – (I relate in a Nordic/Celtic sort of way) Read more about History of the World

If there was ever a year to take heed, 2024 could be it:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, Read more about Once Again

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

a July like this? Or were we always waiting for disasters? Watching the sky for tornados, locusts, dust clouds or smoke? Hiding in the shadows from the heat? Can we, even in our imaginations, conjure up this lazy summer afternoon? Will our children have any idea that such a thing ever existed?

by Susan Hartley Swett Read more about Was there ever

May and the Poet

There is May in books forever;
May will part from Spenser never;
May’s in Milton, May’s in Prior,
May’s in Chaucer, Thomson, Dyer;

May’s in all the Italian books:—
She has old and modern nooks,
Where she sleeps with nymphs and elves,
In happy places they call shelves, Read more about May and the Poets

Writing a recent piece referencing the town I grew up in, the phrase "pretty how town" popped into my head. Some see this poem as a negative picture of mid-century Middle American towns like mine. I see it as a cautionary tale.

anyone lived in a pretty how town

No Songs In Winter

By Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The sky is gray as gray may be,
There is no bird upon the bough,
There is no leaf on vine or tree.

In the Neponset marshes now
Willow-stems, rosy in the wind,
Shiver with hidden sense of snow.

So too 't is winter in my mind,
No light-winged fancy comes and stays:
A season churlish and unkind.