I collect poems that I call “poems to live by.” These poems change the way I see the world, others, or myself. Some cause my soul’s techtonic plates to shift. Or one will grab my hand like a quiet child and not let go. Some just help me to take another step.
Here are just a few on my list. (Know that always with me are Eliot’s Four Quartets, quite a few Richard Wilbur poems, and many by Czeslaw Milosz.)
What poems accompany you in your life?
Czeslaw Milosz, “One More Day”
“Nonbeing sprawls, everywhere it turns into ash whole expanses of being . . .// And when people cease to believe that there is good and evil / Only beauty will call to them and save them / So that they will still know how to say: this is true and that is false.”
Czeslaw Milosz, “An Appeal”
“Tell me, as you would in the middle of the night / When we face only night, the ticking of a watch, / The whistle of an express train, tell me / Whether you really think that this world is your home?”
Jack Gilbert, “Horses at Midnight without a Moon”
“Hope is pushed down / but the angel flies up again taking us with her.”
Scott Cairns, “After the Last Words”
“Something to say? / Say it now. Let the napkins fall and stay.”
Brad Aaron Modlin, “What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade”
“And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation / look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions // and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking / for whatever it was you lost, and one person // add up to something.”
David Brendan Hopes, “Birdbones”
“If you sought your soul and didn’t find / a small bird beating straight home forever / where there is no road, you were seeking something else.”
Ellen Bass, “The Thing Is”
“you think, How can a body withstand this? / Then you hold life like a face / between your palms…”
Adam Zagajewski, “To Go to Lvov”
“and now in a hurry just / pack, always, each day, / and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all / it exists, quiet and pure as / a peach. It is everywhere.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”
“And though the last lights off the black West went / Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Grief”
“Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet: / If it could weep, it could arise and go.”
Nazim Hikmet, “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved”
“I never knew I liked / night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain”
Jeanne Murray Walker, “Staying Power”
“Say God’s not fire, say anything, say God’s / a phone, maybe. You know you didn’t order a phone, / but there it is. It rings.”
I love to share with writing groups, student groups, and others about this idea of “poems to live by.” Please reach out to me if you’d be interested in a poetry talk for your group!
