Unfolding Bud By Naoshi Koriyama

One is amazed
By a water-lily bud
Unfolding
With each passing day,
Taking a richer color
And new dimensions.

One is not amazed,
At a first glance,
By a poem,
Which is as tight-closed
As a tiny bud.

Yet one is surprised
To see the poem
Gradually unfolding,
Revealing its rich inner self
As one reads it
Again
And over again.

Thanks For Remembering Us by Dana Gioia

The flowers sent here by mistake,
signed with a name that no one knew,
are turning bad. What shall we do?
Our neighbor says they're not for her,
and no one has a birthday near.
We should thank someone for the blunder.
Is one of us having an affair?
At first we laugh, and then we wonder.The iris was the first to die,
enshrouded in its sickly-sweet
and lingering perfume. The roses
fell one petal at a time,
and now the ferns are turning dry.
The room smells like a funeral,
but there they sit, too much at home,
accusing us of some small crime,
like love forgotten, and we can't
throw out a gift we've never owned.

Song of Myself by Walt Whitman

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance [suspension],
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

The Sandpiper

The roaring alongside he takes for granted 

and that every so often the world is bound to shake. 

He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward, in 

a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.
The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.
—Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between 

them, where (no detail too small) the Atlantic 

drains rapidly backwards and downwards. As he 

runs, he stares at the dragging grains.
The world is a mist. And then the world is 

minute and vast and clear. The tide is higher 

or lower. He couldn't tell you which. His beak 

is focused; he is preoccupied,
looking for something, something, 

something. Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and 

gray, mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

Pastoral by Wendy Cope

I wish I was a provincial poet,
Writing a lot about nature.
Whenever I thought about London poets,
I'd mutter darkly, ' I hate yer.'

And off I'd stomp down the wild, wild lanes
In my jeans and my Wellington boots.
A provincial poet doesn't need lipstick
Or tights or respectable suits —

The clutter of urban life. How wonderful
Just to discard it all
And spend one's time communing with everything,
Perched on a dry-stone wall.

And after a busy day communing
To amble back home for a bite,
Then go to the pub with some real people.
Who manage twelve pints in a night.

Which helps them get through the provincial evenings
Without too much boredom or pain.
Real people, as solid and ruddy and calm
As a London bus in the rain!

Some day I'll go and live in the country
And many a notebook I'll fill
With keen observations of animals (mostly
The dead ones because they keep still).
Dead sheep and squashed rabbits. Oh how I shall love it,
My face will be peaceful and brown
And shining with love for all of creation.

Excepting those poets in town.

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?