Don’t be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that
may run down your chin.
— Eve Merriam

Don’t be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that
may run down your chin.
— Eve Merriam

Over the river and through the wood,
To have first-rate play.
Hear the bells ring,
“Ting-a-ling-ding!”
Hurrah for Thanksgiving Day!
— Lydia Maria Child

Just the passion of painters
and poets trying to catch
who they think we might be.
— Heid E. Erdrich

PS:
This poem is written in response to Amedeo Modigliani’s portrait Roma Woman with Baby.


— by Charles Wright

青山交叠如画
我的目光泼墨而过,完成一轴山水
— 乃生 《行者》
Hills and mountains fold as in a painting
My gaze, pouring over like ink, completes a scroll of landscape
— by Nai Sheng

The apples are thumping, winter is coming.
The lips of the pumpkin soon will be humming.
By the caw of the crow on the first of the year,
Something will die, something appear.
— from Maurice Kilwein Guevara “A Rhyme for Halloween”

We are the kindly ones
And we feed them
Their annual meal, a handful
Of sugar the shape of corn,
Apples, a rope of black candy.
……
The apples are full of knives.
We will never return.
— from John N. Morris “Halloween”

Here is a coast; here is a harbor;
here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery;
impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains,
sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,
with a little church on top of one. And warehouses,
some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue,
and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist,
is this how this country is going to answer you
…….
— by Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

Between the striped walls of the canyon
Burns a crescent of blue water, arresting, poignant:
Jewel-blue,
soul of opals and sapphires;
Feather-blue,
stain of indigo on the peacock’s breast;
Flame-blue,
color that hovers above the copper-saturated drift-
wood in the beach-fire.
And the tall white poppy down the canyon
Sways against the blaze
Like a ship.
— by Grace Hazard Conkling (1878-1958)

Moonlight is sharp until I see
A rabbit sitting quietly.
Then wall and fence and tree and burr
Grow soft and touch the night with fur.
— by Frank Mitalsky

Awakened by some fear, I watch the sky.
Compelled as though by purposes they know,
The stars, in the blue distance, still affirm
The bond of heaven and earth, the ancient way.
This old assurance haunts small creatures, dazed
In icy mud, though cold may freeze them there
And leave them as they are all summer long.
— by Edgar Bowers
