We leave the everyday world—our jobs, responsibilities, and friendships—and enter into a spell cast by language. Here are ten poems to read before you fall asleep. As always, all are free to download.
It’s a calm, peaceful scene. Yet Harwell infuses it with emotional and spiritual complexity as she imagines her daughter as one of the dead, “gone to Hades / with her stuffed animals.” By the end, we feel the complicated weight of a mother’s love when she states, “my body seizes when she leaves to go / where I am not, and yet every night I urge her, go.” “Summer Sleep,” Marilyn Chin Chin’s poem begins with a placid image of sleeping in on a summer’s day, one filled with “false emergencies,” then quickly pivots to a dream in which the speaker sleeps in a claustrophobic “one-girl” coffin, and “death coins on the roof.” Here, the dream carries the true emotional weight, and the waking world is what deceives us. What follows in Glück’s poem is a complicated exploration of lust and desire in which “the human body / makes an impasse, an obstacle.” “My Dream About Time,” Lucille Clifton In a single lyrical, winding sentence, Clifton creates a disorienting dream of a house that opens to a world that “she has no language for” and where “all of the clocks strike / no.” It’s a prime example of the way poetry can viscerally draw us into the allegorical and strange logic of dreams.
The result is a poem of moral reckoning in which “you wonder, would you make it, / if you had the driver turn around now.” “I Wake Early,” Jane Hirshfield Every day, we wake to a fresh start. The speaker in Hirshfield’s poem wakes twice, inviting us to consider both a physical awakening and a spiritual one. But the waking is not simple.
In addition to the morning coffee, with each waking there is “the window / unbroken, transparent” and “the war (my war)” that lingers in the distance. Four Dream Songs,” John Berryman Berryman wrote two volumes of poetry that comprise his canonical, polyphonic Dream Songs: 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. The poems follow a character named Henry who shares a biographical likeness to the author, though Berryman states Henry is an imaginary character.
Here are four in the series.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
