Year of 1000 Poems (2025): 126 – 169 / 1000

Gwendolyn Brooks

Negro Hero
We Real Cool
The Lovers of the Poor
An Aspect of Love Alive in the Ice and Fire
To Don at Salaam

Lucille Clifton

Admonitions
Miss Rosie
[If I Stand in My Window]
The Lost Baby Poem
God’s Mood
Roots
[Come Home From the Movies]
To a Dark Moses
She Understands Me
Cutting Greens
[At Last We Killed the Roaches]
Breaklight
The Carver
Homage to my Hips
Forgiving my Father
I Once Knew a Man
For the Lame
For the Mute
Perhaps
Speaking of Loss

Robert Creely

The Business
I Know a Man
A Form of Women
A Wicker Basket
The Flower
The Rain
The Memory
The Rescue
The Language
The Window
On Vacation
Moment
Outside
First Rain
Mother’s Voice
The Movie Run Backward

James Dickey

The Heaven of Animals
The Performance
The Hospital Window

Year of 1000 Poems (2025): 95-125 / 1000

Elizabeth Bishop

The Fish
Letter to N.Y.
The Armadillo
North Haven
In The Waiting Room
One Art

Robert Bly

Surprised by Evening
Waking from Sleep
Poem in Three Parts
Snowfall in the Afternoon
In a Train
Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter
Watering the Horse
After Long Busyness
Counting Small-Boned Bodies
Looking Into a Face
The Hermit
Shack Poem
Looking Into a Tide Pool
Visting Emily Dickenson’s Grave With Robert Francis
Insect Heads
Passing an Orchard by Train
Driving My Parents Home at Christmas
For My Son Noah, Ten Years Old
My Father’s Wedding
At Midocean
In Rainy September

Gwendolyn Brooks

from A Street in Bronzeville
kitchennette building
the mother
a song in the front yard
of De Will Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery

Year of 1000 Poems (2025): 58-94 / 1000

John Ashberry

The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers
“They Dream Only of America”
Leaving the Atocha Station
Definition of Blue
As You Came from the Holy Land
The Ice-Cream Wars
Street Musicians
Paradoxes and Oxymorons
Introduction

Marvin Bell

White Clover
The Extermination of the Jews
from The Escape Into You: Homage to the Runner
The Mystery of Emily Dickinson
To Dorothy
During the War
The Last Thing I Say
These Green-Going-to-Yellow
Drawn by Stones, by Earth, by Things That Have Been in the Fire
They
The Nest
Long Island

John Berryman

The Song of the Tortured Girl

from The Dream Songs
1 [Huffy Henry]
4 [Filling her compact & delicious body]
8 [The weather was fine]
9 [Deprived of his enemy]
13 [God bless Henry]
14 [Life, friends, is boring]
29 [There sat down, once]
45 [He stared at ruin]
46 [I am, outside]
55 [Peter’s not friendly]
230 [There are voices]
384 [The marker slants]

from Eleven Addresses to the Lord
1 [Master of beauty]

Henry’s Understanding

Elizabeth Bishop

The Man-Moth

Year of 1000 Poems (2025): 34-57 / 1000

Galway Kinnell, from The Book of Nightmares:

The Hen Flower
The Shoes of Wandering
Dear Stranger Extant in Memory by the Blue Juniata
In the Hotel of Lost Light
The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible
Little SleepsHead Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight
The Call Across the Valley of NotKnowing
The Path Among the Stones
Lastness

Richard Cecil:

In Search of the Great Dead

A.R. Ammons:

Apologia Pro Vita Sua
Laser
He Held a Radical Light
Working with Tools
The Unifying Principle
Cut the Grass
The City Limits
The Eternal City
White Dwarf
Distraction
Neighbors
Breaking Out
Extrication
Volitions

Year of 1000 Poems | 10/1000 | Tool & Die – John Lyon

A poem I wrote about my father in 1994, shared here in recognition of his birthday. I’m not sure what he would have thought about this poem; he appreciated more the poetry of the long sloping lines of a 64 Galaxie 500.

Tool & Die
John Lyon

Calipers and micrometers, cradled by the red felt
lining the half opened drawers of the wooden toolbox that belonged to his father,
wait to measure the tolerances of parts that must work together without touching.

And his corrugated space smells of the sweet oil sliding down the bit,
smoking as metal bites into metal,
digging towards the core,
extruding the sharp helix that can tempt blood from my young fingers.

We hide behind masks, he and I,
as he draws a molten bead along the cold unparted edges,
the inscrutable panes protect our dark eyes.
We must not look directly at such couplings.

Even here, among the jagged edges and melting surfaces,
kindness lays down in the teeth.
The blade, oiled to cut softly through the angle iron
eases itself down under his sure fingers , chewing gently
through the 90º angles, 6″ at a time.

And there are no shadows here;
the cold fluorescent lights illuminate every square inch of my father’s workshop.
The only darknessess are the fears
lying beneath his clean work shirt,
beating against the pencils and rulers he carries in his breast pocket.

Year of 1000 Poems | 09/1000 | My Father’s Wedding – Robert Bly

My Father’s Wedding
Robert Bly

Today, lonely for my father, I saw
a log, or branch,
long, bent, ragged, bark gone.
I felt lonely for my father when I saw it.
It was the log
that lay near my uncle’s old milk wagon.

Some men live with a limp they don’t hide,
stagger, or drag
a leg. Their sons often are angry.
Only recently I thought:
Doing what you want…
Is that like limping? Tracks of it show in sand.

Have you seen those giant bird-
men of Bhutan?
Men in bird masks, with pig noses, dancing,
teeth like a dog’s, sometimes
dancing on one bad leg!
They do what they want, the dog’s teeth say that.

But I grew up without dog’s teeth,
showed a whole body,
left only clear tracks in sand.
I learned to walk swiftly, easily,
no trace of a limp.
I even leaped a little. Guess where my defect is!

Then what? If a man, cautious,
hides his limp,
somebody has to limp it. Things
do it; the surroundings limp.
House walls get scars,
the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.

On my father’s wedding day,
no one was there
to hold him. Noble loneliness
held him. Since he never asked for pity
his friends thought he
was whole. Walking alone he could carry it.

He came in limping. It was a simple
wedding, three
or four people. The man in black,
lifting the book, called for order.
And the invisible bride
stepped forward, before his own bride.

He married the invisible bride, not his own.
In her left
breast she carried the three drops
that wound and kill. He already had
his bark-like skin then,
made rough especially to repel the sympathy

he longed for, didn’t need, and wouldn’t accept.
So the Bible’s
words are read. The man in black
speaks the sentence. When the service
is over, I hold him
in my arms for the first time and the last.

After that he was alone
and I was alone.
Few friends came; he invited few.
His two-story house he turned
into a forest,
where both he and I are the hunters.

Year of 1000 Poems | 08/1000 | Eating Poetry – Mark Strand

Eating Poetry
Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

Year of 1000 Poems | 07/1000 | Driving Through Tennessee – Charles Wright

This is another one of those poems that has much more resonance now that it did then

Driving Through Tennessee
Charles Wright

It’s strange what the past brings back.
Our parents, for instance, how ardently they still loom
In the brief and flushed
Fleshtones of memory, one foot in front of the next
Even in retrospect, and so unimpeachable.

And towns that we lived in once,
And who we were then, the roads we went back and forth on
Returning ahead of us like rime
In the moonlight’s fall, and Jesus returning, and Stephen Martyr
And St. Paul of the Sword …

— I am their music,
Mothers and fathers and places we hurried through in the night:
I put my mouth to the dust and sing their song.
Remember us, Galeoto, and whistle our tune, when the time comes,
For charity’s sake.

Year of 1000 Poems | 06/1000 | Working with Tools – A.R. Ammons

Working with Tools
A.R. Ammons

I make a simple assertion
like a nice piece of stone
and you
alert to presence and entrance
man your pick and hammer

and by chip and deflection
distract simplicity
and cut my assertion
back to mangles, little heaps:

well, baby, that’s the way
you get along: it’s all right,
I understand such ways of being afraid:
sometimes you want my come-on

hard, something to
take in and be around:
sometimes you want
a vaguer touch: I understand
and won’t give assertion up.