We Real Cool Gwendolyn Brooks - 1917-2000

 

We Real Cool

Gwendolyn Brooks - 1917-2000

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                   THE POOL PLAYERS. 
                   SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Character Being a Different Thing from Beauty, Describe the Difference by Carl Phillips

 

Character Being a Different Thing from Beauty, Describe the Difference

Carl Phillips

And sometimes, yes, I’d beg for it—            he’d make me beg: Shy moon,                        why shy tonight?  I heard the geese before I saw them again this morning— this time, flying north. Above them, thunderheads like doomed  zeppelins, like whales when sounding, though they brought  no rain. That’s how I used to write, insisting on ordinary things  being somehow more than that, that they had to mean something,  the way disruption can punctuate with meaning an established  pattern, or as when finding out one’s silence has been mistaken  for arrogance or, worse, indifference, when all you meant  was to be kind—retreat, not exile; less the monsters, than  how we lived beside them, our lives not leaves not trash on an  updraft that at random carries them then refuses them, can a wind  refuse. And yet…                          Shy moon -- As if doing what we’d always done were enough to be grateful for,  as if to keep doing it were itself to be grateful. You just forgot,  that’s all. It’s harder not to forget. How the yard gave way  like a ragged imperative to a forest of scrub-pines and oak, mostly,  how a stand of ferns there almost looked, from above, like a boat  of shadows, coming at last unmoored, and the forest a sea—that  endless-seeming, that steeped in night-dark, beg for it, why shy tonight?

Copyright © 2021 by Carl Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 1, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.