Read A Little Poetry
@readalittlepoem
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A thriving collection of great poems • Holding poets to the light alongside experiences being human • A passion project by @andhow • EST 2005
Joined March 2020
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“If I must die / let it bring hope / let it be a tale”
— Refaat Alareer
Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer was killed alongside several family members by an Israeli air strike in Gaza. I don't have words for this loss.
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"I love you. I'm glad I exist." — Wendy Cope
Always a favourite.
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“I move in this house with you, the way I move
in my mind, unencumbered by beauty’s cage.”
— Ada Limón, from Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance
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"That poem you love,
That saved your life,
Wasn’t it given to you?"
Today's poem from Gregory Orr.
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“listen I love you joy is coming”
— Kim Addonizio
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“I love you, the stained white cotton T-shirt, / the tears, pistachio shells, the mess of orange / peels on my desk”
— Ada Limón (
@adalimon
)
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416
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“Don’t worry you’ll die many times
Until you learn at the very end to love life”
— Anna Kamienska
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“let ruin end here”
— Danez Smith, from little prayer
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“if there is no savior, I’ll do it myself, I’ll forgive myself”
— Danez Smith
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“afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy”
— Louise Glück, Snowdrops
There is no word for this ache. Goodbye, goodbye. 💔
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“I’m writing to you / all the time”
— Franz Wright
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“I think: / Hurt won't be there. // But I'm wrong.”
— Gregory Orr
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285
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“Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgiveable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.”
— Raymond Carver, from Rain
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“Long radiant minutes, / your hand in my hand, / still warm, still warm.”
— Wendy Cope
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“again and again the two of us walk out together”
— Rainer Marie Rilke
(via )
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287
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“Let us take a knife / And cut the world in two- / And see what worms are eating / At the rind.”
— Langston Hughes
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“It could happen any time, tornado, / earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen. / Or sunshine, love, salvation.”
— William Stafford
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“Sometimes a crumb falls
From the tables of joy,
Sometimes a bone
Is flung.”
— Langston Hughes
(via )
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“To love at all is to be vulnerable. ”
— C.S. Lewis, from The Four Loves
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“The most beautiful part of your body / is where it's headed. & remember, / loneliness is still time spent / with the world.”
— Ocean Vuong
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“The world is not simple. / Anyone will tell you.”
— Jenny George
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“I remember everything, / even your ears”
— Dorothea Grossman
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“Love for the earth / and love for you are having such a long / conversation in my heart.”
— Mary Oliver, from Thirst
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Happy birthday, dearest Mary Oliver. How you changed my life.
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This poem appeared in American Primitive by Mary Oliver, published by Back Bay Books, 1978. Shared here with deep gratitude.
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“Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.”
— Noor Hindi (
@MyNrhindi
)
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“I don’t think / I’m allowed // To kill something // Because I am // Frightened”
— Nikki Giovanni
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“Six billion tons sounds impossible / until I consider how it is to swallow grief— / just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed / a neutron star.”
— Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
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“you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again”
— Ellen Bass, from The Thing Is
Read more:
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“When you held my body close to yours, I thought of clementines, sweet citrus, all the world’s lemons we’d temper with honey.”
— Noor Hindi
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“It is a kind of love, is it not? / How the cup holds the tea”
— Pat Schneider
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“Let me at least fail at my life.”
— Jack Gilbert
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“I like my body when I’m in the woods
and I forget my body”
— Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, from Yes, That's When
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“and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of / strangers my most tender feelings / writhe and / bear the fruit of screaming.”
— Frank O'Hara
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“it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.”
— Mary Oliver
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“He was my North, my South, my East and West, / My working week and my Sunday rest, / My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; / I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”
— W.H. Auden
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“the gods will offer you chances. / know them. / take them.” — Charles Bukowski
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“I think / heartbreaking, but also / insane. Also / very funny.”
— Louise Glück
.
.
.
This poem appeared in Meadowlands by Louise Glück, published by Ecco, 1996. Shared here with deep gratitude.
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“love between us is / speech and breath.”
— Sonia Sanchez, from Haiku [for you]
0
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854
“Not for discipline,
nor memory”
— Jane Hirshfield
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“Look at him: / even in the dark he touches it gently.”
— Larry Levis
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“Every minute of sunshine, every shadow. / Every wisp of cloud”
— Tennessee Williams
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“I realize how my life Is about to leave me to stay with the living here And I do not question what will fill the gap”
— Mahmoud Darwish
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“I know there is a river somewhere, / lit, fragrant, golden mist, all that”
— Molly Brodak
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“The world is full of paper. // Write to me.”
— Agha Shahid Ali
.
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This poem appeared in The Half-Inch Himalayas by Agha Shahid Ali, published by Wesleyan University Press, 1987. Shared here with profound gratitude.
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"so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it"
— W.S. Merwin, To the New Year
Also:
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“we loved / and the closest we’ve come to explaining why / is because it was you / and because it was I”
— Linda Goodman
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“What did I know / thinking myself / able to go / alone all the way.”
— Robert Creeley, from Love Comes Quietly
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“I am writing
with both hands,
day and night.”
— Franz Wright
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“Always do the hard thing and you will have a better day. / The second thing will seem less hard.”
— Naomi Shihab Nye
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“you fit into me / like a hook into an eye.”
— Margaret Atwood
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“I want to tell you your life is a blue coal, a slice / of orange in the mouth”
— Barbara Crooker
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“Love and a cough / cannot be concealed. / Even a small cough. / Even a small love.”
— Anne Sexton
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“Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has / so much to do in the world.”
— William Stafford
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“I love flight. I love cages / left wide open. I am not a window. / I could be a window. Open me,”
— Todd Dillard
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“Do not mock them for their gentleness, they have a muscle that loves being alive.”
— Mary Oliver
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“fear has led me / to abandon what I know I must relinquish / in time.”
— Li-Young Lee
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“I still sit in your chair for hours // without taking my coat off”
— Sean Thomas Dougherty (
@SeanLemonhead
)
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“If we can make, from tenderness, a revolution—”
— Carl Phillips, from Fixed Shadow, Moving Water
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Rainer Maria Rilke on joy. From Letters to a Young Poet.
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“a return / to the strange idea of continuous living despite / the mess of us, the hurt, the empty”
— Ada Limón, from Instructions on Not Giving Up
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“How hard, how heavy this all is. / How beautiful, these things you do,”
— Victoria Adukwei
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“But that isn’t how it works. God isn’t / a diner waitress saying what can I get you, hon?”
— Rachel Barenblat
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“It's almost cruel, he laughs. / After everything, how the world still insists / on being beautiful.”
— Joy Sullivan
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.
This poem appeared in Instructions for Traveling West: Poems by Joy Sullivan, published by the Dial Press, 2024. Shared here with deep gratitude.
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“To feel abandoned is to deny / the intimacy of your surroundings.”
— David Whyte (
@poetdavidwhyte
)
0
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“I hate hearts please don’t have one”
— Kim Addonizio
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“when I say love, I mean / I wait at the door for / you to arrive”
— William Bortz (
@william_bortz
)
.
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This poem appeared in Many Small Hungerings by William Bortz, published by Andrews McMeel (
@AndrewsMcMeel
), 2023. Shared here with deep gratitude.
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“I would like to be the air / that inhabits you for a moment / only. I would like to be that unnoticed / & that necessary.”
— Margaret Atwood
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“I’m back / with a bullet in my heart”
— Ghassan Zaqtan
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“Would I live my life over again? / Make the same unforgiveable mistakes?”
— Raymond Carver
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“and as for me / I bless everyone / who kissed you here”
— Michael Ondaatje
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“I still love books where nothing happens, / good or bad. The page is one landscape I move through.”
— Derrick Austin (
@ParadiseLAust
)
0
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525
“I had hoped / they would live forever”
— Jim Harrison
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“O heart weighed down by so many wings”
— Joseph Hutchison
0
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“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself...”
— Virginia Woolf, from The Waves
1
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508
“When my voice fills in love with you. / When I sing on the outside.”
— Yanyi
2
98
510
“What are we now but voices / who promise each other a life”
— Eliza Griswold
2
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“It is raining now. / It is raining more than ever, / and you do not come in.”
— Mahmoud Darwish
0
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512
“I wanted to tell people how I became this woman with razor blades between her teeth”
— Sonia Sanchez
1
83
489
“let’s not come back, let’s go by the speed of / queer zest & stay up / there”
— Chen Chen (
@chenchenwrites
)
3
88
467
“And you wait, you wait for that one thing
that will infinitely enlarge your life;
the gigantic, the stupendous,
the awakening of stones,
depths turned round toward you.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from Memory
0
110
469
“Why did you vanish / into empty sky?”
— Izumi Shikibu
0
122
461
“I'll say a sonnet is a little song
to hold a thing that otherwise cannot
be held”
— Sophie Klahr, from Tender
4
91
462
“When I touch her, my fingers don’t question what she is.”
— Jeanette Winterson, from The Stone Gods
0
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“Suppose the stars are just our grief reflected back to us, proof that grief sometimes forgets its source, that it can find dead things no matter how distant.”
— Victoria Chang
7
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“O wounded body / wounded soul / Admit you've been happy / Just between us / admit it”
— Abdellatif Laâbi
2
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“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”
— Audre Lorde
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“Wherever I am / I am what is missing.”
— Mark Strand
1
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“You grind the coffee / with the small roar of a mind / trying to clear itself.”
— Linda Pastan
1
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424
“I do think it's wonderful, Susie, that our hearts don't break, every day,”
— Emily Dickinson, from a correspondence with Susan Dickinson
0
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“Shall I condemn myself a little / for you to forgive yourself”
— Fady Joudah
.
.
.
This poem spurred the essay, “My Palestinian Poem that “The New Yorker” Wouldn’t Publish,” an essay by Fady Joudah published in The Los Angeles Review of Books:
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“Isn't that / like us, going from place to / place, looking to be alive?”
— Victoria Chang
0
107
419
“If we're not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?”
— Gregory Orr, from To Be Alive
(via )
1
108
427
“On a day like today, I can love you forever.”
— Tyler Starks
1
77
422
“I love you. I want us both to eat well.”
— Christopher Citro
1
141
409
“What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?”
— Robert Hayden
2
85
410
“i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. ”
— e.e. cummings
2
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411