Any Good Poem

"It is not a place out there but a place in here. I catch on its barbed wire in both places."

"But you who know all will never comprehend our resentment of perfection, the flawlessness you take for granted..."

"...this memory held on chest, in hand..."

"Scores of textbooks later we’re a pair of pagers and missed dinners, companions in sleep-deprived nights."

"I am not comforted by the morning after the night."

"Nothing is so beautiful as Spring..."

"Everyone thinks the brain is so complicated, but let’s look at the facts."

"We lower a plastic tray on his ribs as if food can stop the dying..."

"I had no expectation though of actually catching a fish when somehow we did."

"Migrants pay for safety. We pay people to believe that what we tell them is true, especially when we have spared them the hardest facts to hold."

"Each spring, when earth warms and begs me to open its dark skin, I carry them past flowering apples and pears to the quiet square of garden..."

Is your card the king of rats? Is your card the queen of roaches?

"I hold a thousand kites in a field loosed from their tethers at once..."

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals..."

"Under the bludgeonings of chance, My head is bloody, but unbowed."

"I remember perfumes and anxious sweat, who preferred the big leather chair and who liked to hide in the sofa’s corner."

"This isn’t as easy as it seems..."

"There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost... I am helpless."

"The dust of snow, From a hemlock tree, Has given my heart, A change of mood..."

"By year’s end, brittle with guilt, we hovered over our hollow creation..."

"I wish I could have caught his eye, delivered the silent message that I understood what he had to go through every day to keep the peace..."

"There is no greater loneliness..."

Welcome to 2023, the 25th year of Poetry of the Times with Richard Berlin, MD!