Poetry Friday--Poets on Poems

First of all, congratulations to Nastasha Trethewey who yesterday was named the new U.S. Poet Laureate!

Secondly, I'd like to offer five little poems about poems for Poetry Friday:

[haiku]
by Matsuo Allard

deep in my notebook a lily pad floats away


The Last Poem in the World
by Hayden Carruth

Would I write it if I could?
Bet your glitzy ass I would.


The Poem
by Donald Hall

It discovers by night
what the day hid from it.
Sometimes it turns itself
into an animal.
In summer it takes long walks
by itself where meadows
fold back from ditches.
Once it stood still
in a quiet row of machines.
Who knows
what it is thinking?


Poem to Be Read at 3 A.M.
by Donald Justice

Excepting the diner
On the outskirts
The town of Ladora
At 3 A.M.
Was dark but
For my headlights
And up in
One second-story room
A single light
Where someone
Was sick or
Perhaps reading
As I drove past
At seventy
Not thinking
This poem
Is for whoever
Had the light on


Ars Poetica
by Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown--

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

                                            *

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind--

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

                                            *

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea--

A poem should not mean
But be.

I'll meet you over at Jama's Alphabet Soup with my spoon in hand!

Photo by theclyde.