poem endings

If you want what visible reality
can give, you’re an employee.
If you want the unseen world,
you’re not living your truth.
Both wishes are foolish,
but you’ll be forgiven for
forgetting
that what you really want is
love’s confusing joy.

- Rumi (tr. Coleman Barks)

Come when the nights are bright with stars
Or come when the moon is mellow;
Come when the sun his golden bars
Drops on the hay-field yellow.
Come in the twilight soft and gray,
Come in the night or come in the day,
Come, O love, whene'er you may,
And you are welcome, welcome.

You are sweet, O Love, dear Love,
You are soft as the nesting dove.
Come to my heart and bring it to rest
As the bird flies home to its welcome nest.

Come when my heart is full of grief
Or when my heart is merry;
Come with the falling of the leaf
Or with the redd'ning cherry.
Come when the year's first blossom blows,
Come when the summer gleams and glows,
Come with the winter's drifting snows,
And you are welcome, welcome.

- Paul Laurence Dunbar

We are looking for your laugh.
Trying to find the path back to it
between drooping trees.
Listening for your rustle
under bamboo,
brush of fig leaves,
feeling your step
on the porch,
natty lantana blossom
poked into your buttonhole.
We see your raised face
at both sides of a day.
How was it, you lived around
the edge of everything we did,
seasons of ailing & growing,
mountains of laundry & mail?
I am looking for you first & last
in the dark places,
when I turn my face away
from headlines at dawn,
dropping the rolled news to the floor.
Your rumble of calm
poured into me.
There was the saving grace
of care, from day one, the watching
and being watched
from every corner of the yard.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

At night I sleep poorly. When I dream 
of your face, the papery cotton sheets 
go cool as your hand used to be. 
Downstairs, you are there, in the box 
I will not look at. 
The world is askew without you, 
like a lock jimmied by a thief. 
When together now, four of us, not five, 
we eat quickly, nibbling the corn to the husk. 
Even the dogs have gotten quiet 
in your absence. The other morning, 
I sat in your chair reading. 
Next door the mower started up. 
I startled at the noise. 
Nothing should be growing.

- Meghan O’Rourke

I give you back your heart. 
I give you permission - 
for the fuse inside her, throbbing 
angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her 
and the burying of her wound - 
for the burying of her small red wound alive - 
for the pale flickering flare under her ribs, 
for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse, 
for the mother’s knee, for the stocking, 
for the garter belt, for the call - 
the curious call 
when you will burrow in arms and breasts 
and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair 
and answer the call, the curious call. 
She is so naked and singular 
She is the sum of yourself and your dream. 
Climb her like a monument, step after step. 
She is solid. 
As for me, I am a watercolor. 
I wash off. 

- Anne Sexton, For My Lover, Returning to His Wife

In the spring I asked the daisies
If his words were true,
And the clever, clear-eyed daisies
Always knew.

Now the fields are brown and barren,
Bitter autumn blows,
And of all the stupid asters
Not one knows.

- Sara Teasdale

Did you love well what very soon you left?
Come home and take me in your arms and take
away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.
Never so full, I never was bereft
so utterly. The winter evenings drift
dark to the window. Not one word will make
you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake
from your night toward me. The only gift
I got to keep or give is what I’ve cried,
floodgates let down to mourning for the dead
chances, for the end of being young,
for everyone I loved who really died.
I drank our one year out in brine instead
of honey from the seasons of your tongue.

- Marilyn Hacker

My path is sweet on either side
All through the dragging day,—sharp underfoot
And hot, and like dead mist the dry dust hangs—
But far, oh, far as passionate eye can reach,
And long, ah, long as rapturous eye can cling,
The world is mine: blue hill, still silver lake,
Broad field, bright flower, and the long white road
A gateless garden, and an open path:
My feet to follow, and my heart to hold.

– Edna St. Vincent Millay

For your listening pleasure, I turn as old as I was born, 
stroke the bumpy skin of our whisky illness, manage the pyramids 
we’ve never climbed or crawled within, 
enter the Morocco never wrapped by your feet 
kissing pebbles, visiting your veins, telling you mythologies 
that include how we are the sores of hope riding 
the backs of tomorrow, mountain peaks we climb 
and shout the names of those to come and those who’ve been, 
each of us who happens to be the world’s greatest against every 
shade of sky, and every sky that cradles our dying heads, still living.

- Amy King