memorize 5 poems

Whoever you are: some evening, take a step
out of your house, which you know so well
Enormous space is there, your house lies where it begins
Whoever you are

Your eyes find it hard to tear themselves
from the sloping threshold. With your eyes,
slowly, slowly, lift one black tree
up so it stands against the sky, skinny and alone

With this you have made the world
The world, which is like a word
still growing in the silence
In the moment that your will grasps it
your eyes, feeling its subtlety, will leave it

All of you undisturbed cities,
haven’t you ever longed for the Enemy?
I would like to see you besieged by him
for ten endless and groundshaking years

Until you were desperate and mad in suffering
finally, in hunger, you would feel his weight
He lies outside the walls like the countryside
He knows very well how to endure
longer than those he comes to visit

Climb up on your roofs and look out:
his camp is there. His morale will not falter
His number will not decrease, he will not weaken
He sends no one into the city to threaten
or promise and no one to negotiate

He is the one who breaks down the walls
and when he works, he works in silence.

Memorized this Emily Dickinson one almost by accident (we’re prepping the munchkins at school for a field trip to the Emily Dickinson Homestead in town)...seems such a little thing after Prufrock.

I’m Nobody, who are you?
Are you Nobody, too?
There’s a pair of us – don’t tell!
They’ll banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody,
as public as a frog
To tell your name the livelong June
To an admiring bog.