All the time I am that nursery rhyme
the one where all the sisters build themselves with weakness
saying, no, no, you cannot come in
and yet he takes down their houses anyway,
that bad, bad wolf they don’t know
belonged in them before they were themselves,
you see, this is why
they build their homes of weak things;
only straw, only sticks.
As for that third one with the bricks,
she is only acting hard,
she will open the door and invite him in for tea
if he wants some.
– Penney Knightly…
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There will have been grief in the home country–
Parents’ long divorce, a grandfather’s slow death.
And among the burials and separations, there will have been
Familiarities and comforts to take leave of, or pack
For travel into Germany. There will have been
The German comforts of punctual trains, kaffee und kuchen,
Weekly flowers in a crackled glass vase,
American Time, and German streets, a marriage.
In Florence at Easter there were bells billowing the air,
And the light laying itself against walls,
Like a lover’s hand resting against the swell of a woman’s hip.
For years after Florence
I dreamt through the streets of an Italian city,
Touching what the light touched, praying.
In Florence I lay my palms against the stones.
– Devon Miller-Duggan…
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Tormented by the violent
slashes of swelling black crows
flying erratic over the corn,
and by the electric scintilla
of yellow light rising as stars
over the river Rhone,
and by the shades of azure blue,
capturing the white chalky glaze
of the sky as it spreads west
and east over the vanishing city,
and, seized by the blunt tombstones
where the derelict orphans…
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if there were ears
to hear
there is no sign,
only ebbing ripples show
where I threw that stone.
no sounds
no flecks of color
no cheerful splashes
mark the site.
that missile
plucked carefully
from fertile dirt,
smooth
and true within my hand.
lofted with a shout
then turning,
shining
briefly in the air.
now sunken, dark
and out of sight.…
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I hadn’t been there in decades and planned to speak
to the people who lived in it now.
A neighbor said it was vacant, sale pending.
A peaceful home full of the past,
set back from the road several hundred feet behind a serene lake.
I drove in beyond the tall trees, ones I helped plant as tiny seedlings, parked,
and walked around the outside.
My window was unlocked, close to the ground.
I climbed in.
Inside, memories crowded around me.
Long ago, seated comfortably on a deep, red, sectional sofa
in front of a window, as an only child,…
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The best love poems are
about the possibility of flight,
the phases of the moon
the endless Arctic night, a ring found
in the melting snow in spring.
They are about a
chimera of lust,
the dust train tracks make
carrying refugees
to an uncertain future.…
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After the annulment of light
In the stubborn kiln of winter
There is a beginning that hurts.
You hear it in the troubled cry
Spun from treetops,
In the muffled bending of trees
Cracking off the frost.
When you wander through the streets
Stunned by the bright emergence,
The wakened sunshine,
You start to remember
The endless colors of the world:
The Adriatic with its whitened dazzle,
Michelangelo’s angel-bitten blue,
All the faded shades of longing
In the remnants of the Roman Forum.…
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