The Animals

By W. S. Merwin

All these years behind windows With blind crosses sweeping the tables And myself tracking over empty ground Animals I never saw I with no voice Remembering names to invent for them Will any come back will one Saying yes Saying look carefully yes We will meet again

Holy Sonnets: If poisonous minerals, and if that tree

By John Donne

If poisonous minerals, and if that tree

Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us,

If lecherous goats, if serpents envious

Cannot be damn'd, alas, why should I be?

Why should intent or reason, born in me,

Make sins, else equal, in me more heinous?

And mercy being easy, and glorious

To God, in his stern wrath why threatens he?

But who am I, that dare dispute with thee,

O God? Oh, of thine only worthy blood

And my tears, make a heavenly Lethean flood,

And drown in it my sins' black memory.

That thou remember them, some claim as debt;

I think it mercy, if thou wilt forget.

Unaccompanied Anthem

Unaccompanied Anthem 

By Rita Dove 

We live as we dream ... alone.—Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”I was not born to thiswariness. I came of ageas my kind do—armed with acheand swathed in rectitude,a rough carvingsluiced under a torrentof disregard. Still, I did notsuffer unduly. Most oftenI bore witness: I listened,then took it back into a solitudeneither light nor raincould reach. There I would sitand rock myself warm.I tell you this long pastthe learning of it. I ate quickly,dreamt little, read like a fiend—not quite a shadow,more than a smudge;you begrudged meeven these tremulouspleasures. I came to yougrinning with grief,but if called uponwould not pause to lift up a fist—the only one in the roomwho raises her handwhen no one else speaks,though the answer is obvious.

The Song of Smoke

The Song of the Smoke By W. E. B. Du Bois

I am the Smoke King I am black! I am swinging in the sky, I am wringing worlds awry; I am the thought of the throbbing mills, I am the soul of the soul-toil kills, Wraith of the ripple of trading rills; Up I’m curling from the sod, I am whirling home to God; I am the Smoke King I am black. I am the Smoke King, I am black! I am wreathing broken hearts, I am sheathing love’s light darts; Inspiration of iron times Wedding the toil of toiling climes, Shedding the blood of bloodless crimes— Lurid lowering ’mid the blue, Torrid towering toward the true, I am the Smoke King, I am black. I am the Smoke King, I am black! I am darkening with song, I am hearkening to wrong! I will be black as blackness can— The blacker the mantle, the mightier the man! For blackness was ancient ere whiteness began. I am daubing God in night, I am swabbing Hell in white: I am the Smoke King I am black. I am the Smoke King I am black! I am cursing ruddy morn, I am hearsing hearts unborn: Souls unto me are as stars in a night, I whiten my black men—I blacken my white! What’s the hue of a hide to a man in his might? Hail! great, gritty, grimy hands— Sweet Christ, pity toiling lands! I am the Smoke King I am black.

• The Humming-Bird Beatrice Ravenel The sundial makes no sign At the point of the August noon. The sky is of ancient tin, And the ring of the mountains diffused and unmade (One always remembers them). On the twisted dark of the hemlock hedge Rain, like a line of shivering violin-bows Hissing together, poised on the last turgescent swell, Batters the flowers. Under the trumpet-vine arbor, Clear, precise as an Audubon print,            The air is of melted glass,            Solid, filling interstices Of leaves that are spaced on the spines            Like a pattern ground into glass;            Dead, as though dull red glass were poured into the mouth, Choking the breath, molding itself into the creases of soft red tissues. And a humming-bird darts head first, Splitting the air, keen as a spurt of fire shot from the blow-pipe, Cracking a star of rays; dives like a flash of fire, Forked tail lancing the air, into the immobile trumpet; Stands on the air, wings like a triple shadow Whizzing around him. Shadows thrown on the midnight streets by a snow-flecked arc-light, Shadows like sword-play, Splinters and spines from a thousand dreams Whizz from his wings! This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 20, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast     “The Humming-Bird” first appeared in The Measure, no. 31 (September 1923), and later again in Beatrice Ravenel’s collection The Arrow of Lightning (Harold Vinal, 1926). In the introduction to The Yemassee Lands: Poems of Beatrice Ravenel (University of North Carolina Press, 1969), Louis D. Rubin Jr., former university distinguished professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes, “It is not without relevance, I think, that Beatrice Ravenel was university trained. Her work displays an unabashed use of the intellect, and is not content with the easy poetic phrases and undemanding language of so much Southern verse. Her poems are not oversimplifications of their subjects; they are not ‘written down.’ Consider, for example, her description, in a poem entitled [sic] ‘The Humming-Bird,’ of a summer garden after the rain [. . .]. There is a precision, a concrete specificity of language and imagery, here that are [sic] possible only because the poet knew that the connotative properties of words, and not Poetic Ideas, are what make a poem stay alive.” Beatrice Witte Ravenel, born on August 24, 1870, in Charleston, South Carolina, was a poet affiliated with the Southern Renaissance. She is the author of one collection, The Arrow of Lightning (Harold Vinal, 1926), though her collected works were published posthumously in The Yemassee Lands: Poems of Beatrice Ravenel (University of North Carolina Press, 1969). She died on March 15, 1956. The Arrow of Lightning (Harold Vinal, 1926)   “In Summer Twilight” by Joshua Henry Jones Jr. read more “The Swallow” by Luis G. Dato  read more Thanks to Divya Victor, author of Curb (Nightboat Books, 2021), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Victor’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year. “Poem-a-Day is brilliant because it makes space in the everyday racket for something as meaningful as a poem.” —Tracy K. Smith If this series is meaningful to you, join the community of Poem-a-Day supporters by making a gift today. Now serving more than 320,000 daily subscribers, this publication is only possible thanks to the contributions of readers like you.   donate Copyright © 2023 The Academy of American Poets, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Our mailing address is: The Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane STE #901 New York, NY 10038 Add us to your address book View this email in your browser Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from all Academy messages. For any other questions, please visit the Poem-a-Day FAQ page.

  

Visions

Our perceptions

Are glimpses

Into future possibilities.

These imagining are the musings of great and small minds alike. They show brilliant into the fantasy of our collective consciousness which is ever expanding.

#BeNoteWorthy

#piccadillyinc

Challenges

To persevere,
You have to overcome the obstacles set before you.
Through your trails you shall supercede the odds which have been set before you as well as the dares and moxie met through the highest spiritual powers.

#BeNoteWorthy
#piccadillyinc