✦ Have a Poem with Me

## *Scimitar*

# Arthur Sze



A magpie squawks at the top of a blue spruce,

while white-winged doves coo back and forth

across the orchard. Today I did not hike

into a rainforest and forage for a glowing

neon-green mushroom; I did not fly

to New Guinea to catch birdwing butterflies;

instead I hiked a trail across patches of snow

and, scratching the trunk of a ponderosa pine,

inhaled a vanilla scent. I strolled in the orchard

and spotted a magpie nest in an apple tree,

marveled at wisps of clouds like branching red coral

in the sea; near the scimitar of a moon,

Venus shimmered. I shoveled snow onto

a strawberry bed; then a dove cooed — on a day

when I did nothing but search myself

and steep in each minute of the deepening indigo sky,

I suddenly had somewhere everywhere to be.

## *A Prayer in Spring*

# Robert Frost



Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;

And give us not to think so far away

As the uncertain harvest; keep us here

All simply in the springing of the year.



Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,

Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;

And make us happy in the happy bees,

The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.



And make us happy in the darting bird

That suddenly above the bees is heard,

The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,

And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

## *The Year*

# Ella Wheeler Wilcox



What can be said in New Year rhymes,

That's not been said a thousand times?

The new years come, the old years go,

We know we dream, we dream we know.



We rise up laughing with the light,

We lie down weeping with the night.

We hug the world until it stings,

We curse it then and sigh for wings.



We live, we love, we woo, we wed,

We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,

And that's the burden of the year.

## *January Poem*

# Suzanne Matson



Only the wrinkle

of a disappearing squirrel

breaks the snow stillness.

The walker, swathed in wool,

lowers toward the prints left

by others, feet that lead to the village.

There a clock stands in front of a closed shop,

its hour not late, though the moon has come early

to mirror the white coin of its frozen face.

## *In the Woods*

# Kathryn Simmonds



The baby sleeps.

Sunlight plays upon my lap, through doily leaves a black lab comes,

a scotty goes, the day wears on, the baby wakes.

The good birds sing,

invisible or seldom seen, in hidden kingdoms, grateful for the in-

between. The baby sleeps. Elsewhere the Queen rolls by

on gusts of cheer —

ladies wave and bless her reign. The baby frets. The baby feeds.

The end of lunch, a daytime moon. The leaves

are lightly tinkered with.

It’s spring? No, autumn? Afternoon? We’ve sat so long, we’ve walked

so far. The woods in shade, the woods in sun, the singing birds,

the noble trees.

The child is grown. The child is gone. The black lab comes,

his circuit done. His mistress coils his scarlet lead.