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Akhmatova, Anna | Arabian Nights | Arp, Jean Hans | Attar | Atwood, Margaret | Baba Tahir Oryan of Hamadan | Baudelaire, Charles | Behramoglu, Ataol | Blake, William | Brecht, Bertolt | Breton, André | Byron, Gordon George (Lord) | Carroll, Lewis | C'hang Ling, Wan | Chen, Yuan | Clough, Arthur Hugh | Coleridge, Samuel Taylor | Confucius | Cosbuc, George | Cummings, Edward Estlin | Dario, Ruben | De Cleyre, Voltairine | De Vere, Aubrey | Dickinson, Emily | Donne, John | Eluard, Paul | Emerson, Ralph Waldo | Emre, Yunus | Faiz, Faiz Ahmed | Farrokhzad, Forough | Ferdowsi | Gay, John | Gibran, Khalil | Ginsberg, Allen | Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von | Hafiz | Herrick, Robert | Hikmet, Nazim | Homer | Hughes, Langston | Hung, Han | Jamal, Mo | Jones, LeRoi | Keats, John | Kipling, Rudyard | Kushrau, Amir | Lawson, Henry | Lennon, John | Levertov, Denise | Lindsay, Vachel | Mayakovsky, Vladimir | Milligan, Spike | Mistral, Gabriela | Morrisson, Jim | Neruda, Pablo | O'Shaughnessy, Arthur | Parker, Dorothy | Paterson, Andrew Barton "Banjo" | Paz, Octavio | Plath, Sylvia | Poe, Edgar Allen | Pope, Alexander | Rilke, Rainer Maria | Rumi, Djalal-ud-Din | Saales, Akhavan | Scott, F.R. | Sepehri, Sohrab | Shakespeare, William | Shamlu, Ahmad | Shelley, Percy Bysshe | Sheridan, Richard B. | Tennyson, Alfred | Thomas, Dylan | Turold | Veli Kanik, Ohran | Whitman, Walt | Wilde, Oscar | Williams, William Carlos | Wordsworth, William | Yeats, William Butler | Yushij, Nima
Levertov, Denise
The Secret
Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.
I who don't know the secret wrote the line. They told me
(through a third person) they had found it but not what it was not even
what line it was. No doubt by now, more than a week later, they have forgotten the secret,
the line, the name of the poem. I love them for finding what I can't find,
and for loving me for the line I wrote, and for forgetting it so that
a thousand times, till death finds them, they may discover it again, in other lines
in other happenings. And for wanting to know it, for
assuming there is such a secret, yes, for that most of all.
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Talking to Grief
Ah, Grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.
I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.
You think I don't know you've been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider
my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.
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In Mind
There's in my mind a woman
of innocence, unadorned but
fair-featured and smelling of
apples or grass. She wears
a utopian smock or shift, her hair
is light brown and smooth, and she
is kind and very clean without
ostentation-
but she has
no imagination
And there's a
turbulent moon-ridden girl
or old woman, or both,
dressed in opals and rags, feathers
and torn taffeta,
who knows strange songs
but she is not kind.
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