You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
— John Adams (in a letter to John Quincy Adams; May 14, 1781)
by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)[This is the dedicatory sonnet that prefaces Christina Rossetti’s collection of poems, A Pageant and Other Poems]

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there! Especially to my own mom, “whose heart is my heart’s quiet home.”

by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
[This is the dedicatory sonnet that prefaces Christina Rossetti’s collection of poems, A Pageant and Other Poems]

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there! Especially to my own mom, “whose heart is my heart’s quiet home.”

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                                          i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)


E. E. Cummings

A black biplane crashes through the window
of the luncheonette. The pilot climbs down,
removing his leather hood.
He hands me my grandmother’s jade ring.
No, it is two robin’s eggs and
a telephone number: yours.


“Love Poem” by Gregory Orr

you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you’re young,whatever life you wear

it will become you;and if you are glad
whatever’s living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love

whose any mystery makes every man’s
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time

that you should ever thing,may god forbid
and(in his mercy)your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave
called progress,and negation’s dead undoom.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance


E. E. Cummings

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
— William Faulkner, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (December 10, 1950)