The Rider - Naomi Shihab Nye

A boy told me

if he roller-skated fast enough

his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,

the best reason I ever heard

for trying to be a champion.

What I wonder tonight

pedaling hard down King William Street

is if it translates to bicycles.

A victory! To leave your loneliness

panting behind you on some street corner

while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,

pink petals that have never felt loneliness,

no matter how slowly they fell.

Sadness - Stephen Dunn

It was everywhere, in the streets and houses,

    on farms and now in the air itself.

It had come from history and we were history

    so it had come from us.

I told my artist friends who courted it

    not to suffer

on purpose, not to fall in love

    with sadness

because it would naturally be theirs

    without assistance,

I had sad stories of my own,

    but they made me quiet

the way my parents’ failures once did,

    nobody’s business

but our own, and, besides, what was left to say

    these days

when the unspeakable was out there being spoken,

    exhausting all sympathy?

Yet, feeling it, how difficult to keep

    the face’s curtains

closed - she left, he left, they died -

    the heart rising

into the mouth and eyes, everything so basic,

    so unhistorical

at such times. And then, too, the woes

    of others would get in,

but mostly I was inured and out

    to make a decent buck

or in pursuit of some slippery pleasure

    that was sadness disguised.

I found it, it found me, oh

    my artist friends

give it up, just mix your paints,

    stroke,

the strokes unmistakably will be yours.

The Untrustworthy Speaker - Louise Glück

Don't listen to me; my heart's been broken.

I don't see anything objectively.

I know myself; I've learned to hear like a psychiatrist.

When I speak passionately,

that's when I'm least to be trusted.

It's very sad, really: all my life I've been praised

for my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight.

In the end, they're wasted--

I never see myself,

standing on the front steps, holding my sister's hand.

That's why I can't account

for the bruises on her arm, where the sleeve ends.

In my own mind, I'm invisible: that's why I'm dangerous.

People like me, who seem selfless,

we're the cripples, the liars;

we're the ones who should be factored out

in the interest of truth.

When I'm quiet, that's when the truth emerges.

A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.

Underneath, a little gray house, the azaleas

red and bright pink.

If you want the truth, you have to close yourself

to the older daughter, block her out:

when a living thing is hurt like that,

in its deepest workings,

all function is altered.

That's why I'm not to be trusted.

Because a wound to the heart

is also a wound to the mind.

I Am Not Yours - Sara Teasdale

I am not yours, not lost in you,

Not lost, although I long to be

Lost as a candle lit at noon,

Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

You love me, and I find you still

A spirit beautiful and bright,

Yet I am I, who long to be

Lost as a light is lost in light.

Oh plunge me deep in love -- put out

My senses, leave me deaf and blind,

Swept by the tempest of your love,

A taper in a rushing wind.

When You've Got - Helen Dunmore

When you’ve got the plan of your life

matched to the time it will take

but you just want to press SHIFT / BREAK

and print over and over

this is not what I was after

this is not what I was after.

When you’ve finally stripped out the house

with its iron-cold fireplace,

its mouldings, its mortgage,

its single-skin walls

but you want to write in the plaster

“This is not what I was after,”

when you’ve got the rainbow-clad baby

in his state-of-the-art pushchair

but he arches his back at you

and pulps his Activity Centre

and you just want to whisper

“This is not what I was after,”

when the vacuum seethes and whines in the lounge

and the waste-disposal unit blows,

when tenners settle in your account

like snow hitting a stove,

when you get a chat from your spouse

about marriage and personal growth,

when a wino comes to sleep in your porch

on your Citizen’s Charter

and you know a hostel’s opening soon

but your headache’s closer

and you really just want to torch

the bundle of rags and newspaper

and you’ll say to the newspaper

"This is not what we were after,

this is not what we were after.”

Father's Old Blue Cardigan - Anne Carson

Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair

where I always sit, as it did

on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.

I put it on whenever I come in,

as he did, stamping

the snow from his boots.

I put it on and sit in the dark.

He would not have done this.

Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky.

His laws were a secret.

But I remember the moment at which I knew

he was going mad inside his laws.

He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived.

He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way to the top.

Not only because it was a hot July afternoon

but the look on his face --

as a small child who has been dressed by some aunt early in the morning

for a long trip

on cold trains and windy platforms

will sit very straight at the edge of his seat

while the shadows like long fingers

over the haystacks that sweep past

keep shocking him

because he is riding backwards.