"Grass" by Carl Sandburg

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo,
Shovel them under and let me work--
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

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"Kiss" by Frederick Smock

Since having to get reading glasses, taking them off has become my sign that I want to kiss you. Sometimes I call out, Honey, do you know where my glasses are? And you know, when we find them, I will put them on just so I can take them off again.

"The Music" by Sharon Olds

When I first stand up to my mother, when I am fifty--and on a civic issue-- she changes, as if she's been waiting for someone to lead her. She does not mention the beauty of her blue eyes, but says she has been sorting her late sweetheart's clothes-- and it BREAKS my HEART , she cries out. and then she cries, as if she has been lowered down into a river of music. I'm not unhappy, she says, this is better for me than church, her voice through tears like the low singing of a watered plant long not watered-- and now it can be heard, her fear of tears, as if they might take her far back to something like the swimming of the flayed in the flay. Now she lets me hear the music of her self--I could be in a cradle by the western shore of a sea, she could be a young or an ancient mother. Now I hear the melody of the one bound to the mast. It had little to do with me, her life, which lay on my life, it was not really human life but chemical, and approximate landscape, trenches and rea...

"The Last Toast (3)" by Anna Akhmatova

I drink to home, that is lost, To evil life of mine, To loneness in which we’re both, And to your future, fine, -- To lips by which I was betrayed, To eyes that deathly cold, To that that the world is bad and that We were not saved by God.

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