[as freedom is a breakfastfood] - e. e. cummings

as freedom is a breakfastfood

or truth can live with right and wrong

or molehills are from mountains made

—long enough and just so long

will being pay the rent of seem

and genius please the talentgang

and water most encourage flame

as hatracks into peachtrees grow

or hopes dance best on bald men’s hair

and every finger is a toe

and any courage is a fear

—long enough and just so long

will the impure think all things pure

and hornets wail by children stung

or as the seeing are the blind

and robins never welcome spring

nor flatfolk prove their world is round

nor dingsters die at break of dong

and common’s rare and millstones float

—long enough and just so long

tomorrow will not be too late

worms are the words but joy’s the voice

down shall go which and up come who

breasts will be breasts thighs will be thighs

deeds cannot dream what dreams can do

—time is a tree(this life one leaf)

but love is the sky and i am for you

just so long and long enough

Joyce Sutphen on Poetry

Poet Joyce Sutphen told Contemporary Authors: "Here's what happens when I sit down to write a poem. I think that I will say something about this, but I end up writing about that. I have a catch in my heart (lump in my throat? whatever it is that Robert Frost says gets the poem going), and I am thinking about my brothers and sisters and all of the musical instruments they can play. My mind is filled with trombones, saxophones, trumpets, and drums. The brass glints, the black and white piano keys appear, and I begin caressing words: embouchure, vibrato, andante, and resin. I think of fingerings and positions, of tonguing and sustaining the last sweet note. I never realized how much music is like sex—how the technical aspects of music and sex share a vocabulary. I have a different poem in mind now from the one I was going to write, but to be honest I probably wouldn't have gotten this far.

"I don't always come away with a poem. Sometimes all I have is a notebook filled with starts, a few lines here, lots of crossed out lines there, a space and another couple of lines. In the last year or so my pages are filled with the funny marks I use to keep track of the poem's meter. Sometimes—but only rarely—there are columns of rhyming or slant rhyming words down the side of a page. Other times there are phone numbers, names of songs I heard on the radio, directions to a party in double-lined boxes. 'This is not a poem!' the boxes say, 'this is a reminder,' but sometimes when I go back to read them, they have become more like poems.

"Sometimes I go back to thinking that it's all nothing but what the preacher called it: vanity, vanity. These thoughts dissolve quickly when I remember what life was like without poetry, when all I had was the holy hush of ancient sacrifice. Poetry makes the world real for me.

"Two reasons keep me coming to the empty page: the desire to make a place for the glinting shard, the divine detail, and the hope that this caressing, this pressing against the visible will reveal the invisible. In the end, it isn't hard: when I sit down to write a poem, one thing just leads to another."

Annabel Lee - Edgar Allen Poe

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea—
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

To My Son's Girlfriend- Michael Milburn

I'm tempted to ask
what you see in him.
Although you probably
see the good that I see
I wonder if you realize
how much he is my handiwork,
or which of the qualities
you daydream about in class
are the ones that I take pride in,
his cordiality, for example,
or love of silliness.

It's uncomfortable for me
to think of anyone else
loving him the way I do,
possessing him in a way
that only his mother and I
have ever possessed him,
and I can't deny being jealous,
not so much reluctant
to share or relinquish him
as resolved to remind you
that he's been around
longer than your love,
under construction if you will,
and that each cute trait
or whatever occurs to you
when you hear his name
I feel proprietary about,
like a woodworker
who makes a table
intending to sell it
but prays that no buyer
will recognize its worth.