Paul Celan, “I hear the axe has flowered”
I hear the axe has flowered is quite a sentence. It combines an instrument of violence, an axe, with a vision of growth. In case one feels tempted to say an axe...
Category: poetry
Emily Dickinson, “These are the days when Birds come back”(130)
Merely staring out the window, Dickinson envisions no less than a sacrament: Oh Sacrament of summer days, Oh Last Communion in the Haze — Permit a child to join...
Giuseppe Ungaretti, “I am a creature”
At the battle, where one maneuvers around life and death, the mountain comes into view over and over. The mountain, “this stone,” breaks the sky, bu...
Alicia Ostriker, “America”
Our earnestness our sincerity… when we learned to sing America. When studying Greek political thought, I’m tempted to think Americans especially nai...
Giuseppe Ungaretti, “Weightless Now”
In “I dwell in Possibility,” Dickinson declares hers “A fairer House than Prose.” At the end of the poem, she tells what she does in tha...