Sometimes you need stories and novels to heal. But other times you crave the sharply spoken bond of shared experience—and that’s what poetry is about. There is power in a single image that strikes the soul, in knowing that someone else has shared the fear. These poetry collections are for the lost and found; for anyone who has ever needed inspiration for love and healing.
Related: 20 Best Love Poems of All Time
Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful
love is not concerned
with whom you pray
or where you slept
the night you ran away
from home
love is concerned
that the beating of your heart
should kill no one.
A Durable Fire
Who wakes in a house alone
Wakes to moments of panic.
(Will the roof fall in?
Shall I died today?)
Who wakes in a house alone
Wakes to inertia sometimes,
To fits of weeping for no reason.
Solitude swells the inner space
Like a balloon.
We are wafted hither and thither
On the air currents.
How to land it?
Upstairs in the Garden
How shocked each lover is to hit the mark aimed for.
How they crawl toward one another between
bullets, how they weep and curse and call
each other liars, how they bleed their parts
according to the rules.
And the Stars Were Shining
How little we know,
and when we know it!
It was prettily said that “No man
hath an abundance of cows on the plain, nor shards
in his cupboard.” Wait! I think I know who said that! It was . . .
Never mind, dears, the afternoon
will fold you up, along with preoccupations
that now seem so important, until only a child
running around on a unicycle occupies center stage.
Then what will you make of walls? And I fear you
will have to come up with something,
be it a terraced gambit above the sea
or gossip overheard in the marketplace.
For you see, it becomes you to be chastened:
for the old to envy the young,
and for youth to fear not getting older,
where the paths through the elms, the carnivals, begin.
The Complete Poems
of her arms, this was her sin:
where the wood berries bin
of forest was new and full,
she crept out by its tall
posts, those wooden legs,
and heard the sound of wild pigs
calling and did not wait nor care.
The leaves wept in her hair
as she sank to a pit of needles
and twisted out the ivyless
gate, where the wood berries bin
was full and a pig came in.
War Dances
Whenever I’m asked
To trade seats
For somebody else’s love,
I do, I always do.
Related: 10 Essential Sherman Alexie Books
Manifestation Wolverine
no one can deny the strong force
the music we sing represents our struggle.
at first, it is a series and then it
culminates to one total.
from great distances, people arrive
and we are told to respect them
for they have retained the capacity
to cure anything.
Becoming Light
Give in.
Babies cry & music is your life.
Darling, you were born to bleed
or rock.
& the heart breaks
either way.
Photo: Thought Catalog / Unsplash
