One Poem Only

Circe

H.D. 1886 – 1961

It was easy enough to bend them to my wish, it was easy enough to alter them with a touch, but you adrift on the great sea, how shall I call you back? Cedar and white ash, roc…

Held

Maggie Devers

The sweetest meat is closest to the bone The most tender, the most true The tissue there is hardest to reach, To manipulate from the outside. If you squeezed my arm How much bone …

For My Daughter

by Maggie Devers

Chop off my head and put it on your shield. I will protect you until the day I die And all the days after that. You think I would let anything harm the perfection tha…

Renewal of Strength

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper 1825 – 1911

The prison-house in which I live Is falling to decay, But God renews my spirit’s strength Within these walls of clay. For me a dimness sl…

How often we greet each other with worries

by Maggie Devers

I went to the wilderness to escape And there are worries there too. Caterpillars falling from their tree Before their chrysalis is complete…

A Lady

by Amy Lowell 1874 – 1925

You are beautiful and faded, Like an old opera tune Played upon a harpsichord; Or like the sun-flooded silks Of an eighteenth-century boudoir. In your eyes Smoulder t…

Radical

by Marianne Moore 1887 – 1972

Tapering to a point, conserving everything, this carrot is predestined to be thick. The world is but a cir…

Who Has Seen the Wind

Christina Rossetti 1830 – 1894

Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you. But when the leaves hang trembling, The wind is passing through. Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor …

Asking the age old question, where do we start?

The Spark

by Maggie Devers

I try to think where her story starts. When I went to my parents' for the weekend And the Labrador could smell her And for t…

Starting May 1.

Submissions are open. If you have a poem you want me to read on the podcast, now’s the time.

I’m looking for the one that lights you up. The one you’re proud of. The one you can’t read…