You can find this poem in The Essential Rumi.
The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
ho blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.
Poetry
Evening Poetry, July 14
From The Book of a Monastic Life in Rilke’s Book of Hours.
I, 17
Because once someone dared
to want you,
I know that we, too, may want you.
When gold is in the mountain
and we’ve ravaged the depths
till we’ve given up digging,
It will be brought forth into day
by the river that mines
the silences of stone.
Even when we don’t desire it,
God is ripening.
Evening Poetry, July 13
The Moon
by Emily Dickinson
The moon was but a chin of gold
A night or two ago,
And now she turns her perfect face
Upon the world below.
Her forehead is of amplest blond;
Her cheek like beryl stone;
Her eye unto the summer dew
The likest I have known.
Her lips of amber never part;
But what must be the smile
Upon her friend she could bestow
Were such her silver will!
And what a privilege to be
But the remotest star!
For certainly her way might pass
Beside your twinkling door.
Her bonnet is the firmament,
The universe her shoe,
The stars the trinkets at her belt,
Her dimities of blue.
You can find this poem in Hope is the Thing With Feathers.
Evening Poetry, July 12
The Willows
by Walter Prichard Eaton
By the little river,
Still and deep and brown,
Grow the graceful willows,
Gently dipping down.
Dipping down and brushing
Everything that floats–
Leaves and logs and fishes,
And the passing boats.
Were they water maidens
In the long ago,
That they lean out sadly
Looking down below?
In the misty twilight
You can see their hair,
Weeping water maidens
That were once so fair.
You can find this poem in the collection Favorite Poems Old and New.
Evening Poetry, July 11
Grown-Up
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Was it for this that I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?
You can find this poem in Collected Poems.
Evening Poetry, July 10
The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
this grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
You can find this poem in Devotions.
Evening Poetry, July 9
Vegetables
by Eleanor Farjeon
The country vegetables scorn
To lie about in shops,
They stand upright as they were born
In neatly-patterned crops;
And when you want your dinner you
Don’t buy it from a shelf,
You find lettuce fresh with dew
And pull it for yourself;
You pick an apronful of peas
And shell them on the spot.
You cut a cabbage, if you please,
To pop into the pot.
The folk who their potatoes buy
From sacks before they sup,
Miss half of the potato’s joy,
And that’s to dig it up.
You can find this in Favorite Poems Old and New.
Evening Poetry, July 8
You can find this poem in The Essential Rumi.
In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest,
where no one else sees you,
but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.
Evening Poetry July 7
From The Book of a Monastic Life from Rilke’s Book of Hours.
I, 17
She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life, and weaves them gratefully
into a single cloth–
it’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
and clears it for a different celebration
where the one guest is you.
In the softness of evening
it’s you she receives.
You are the partner of her loneliness,
the unspeakable center of her monologues.
With each disclosure you encompass more
and she stretches beyond what limits her,
to hold you.
Evening Poetry, July 6
Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
You can find this poem in the collection The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes.
Life of Kim 