Humanity i hate you

By: E.E. Cummings

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you

unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because

when youre hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
youre flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shop and

because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you

are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
its there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you
 Storm Warnings
By: Adrienne Rich
The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of grey unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky
And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.
Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.
I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.
 Gretel In Darkness
By: Louise Glck
This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch's cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas . . .

Now, far from women's arms

and memory of women, in our father's hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,

summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln--

Nights I turn to you to hold me

but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real,
that black forest and the fire in earnest.
 Mirror
By: Sylvia Plath
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
 Blackberry Picking
By: Wendy Mooney
No movement, not a stir
In the trees, the pass between the houses,
but A woman in torn jeans walking
Down the white line of the pathway;
Her two girls in green uniforms dashing into the blackberry bushes
Centipedes between their teeth,
A thousand legs of conversation..

Glaring at her from beneath their eyebrows

When they return, becoming sullen:
Shut up mother,
We are gelling our hair, painting our lips.
Smell of moss and cobwebs that will never wash off.

This is it then
Two girls bloomed into two self-conscious women,
Two mountain ewes with long lashes
Tossing their heads, disappearing down the pathway
All their kisses waiting
Their mothers face turned purple,
Like a wine glass tilted to catch the lamplight
Swollen with the berries swilling in her cheeks,
Dribbling from her chin.

-Wendy Mooney