Search Categories - Any -25 Lines or FewerCanadaPre 21st Century21st Century Grade levels - Any -Grades 7-9 / Sec. 1-3Grades 10-12 / Sec. 4 & 5 / CEGEP 1 Sort by RandomNewestMost popularA -> ZZ -> A Apply Robert Creeley Self-Portrait He wants to be a brutal old man, an aggressive old man, Aphra Behn Love Armed Love in Fantastic Triumph sat, Whilst Bleeding Hearts around him flowed, For whom Fresh pains he did Create, Ron Padgett Prose Poem (“The morning coffee.”) The morning coffee. I’m not sure why I drink it. Maybe it’s the ritual of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the Jalal al-Din Rumi Where did the handsome beloved go? Where did the handsome beloved go? I wonder, where did that tall, shapely cypress tree go? He spread his light among us like a candle. Where did he go? So strange, where did he go without me? Natalie Scenters-Zapico Lima Limón :: Madurez I wear a peineta & pin a mantilla to my hair I want to be Conchita Piquer warning women about becoming lemons. The goal: tener alguien quien me quiera. I want to be my mother singing me Joy Harjo Praise the Rain Praise the rain, the seagull dive The curl of plant, the raven talk- Praise the hurt, the house slack Meghan Kemp-Gee A Newly Discovered Species of Lizard with Distinctive Triangular Scales I am Charles Darwin. I eat owlflesh at Cambridge University. I have discovered something, an entirely new species with tropical fever in its reptile fingers. I am busy with taxonomying its most peculiar and three-sided Yoko Ono Color Piece Visual world not exactly shaped – Sense of smell, anticipation, senses that are not exactly shaped — Dark shadows casted — Rat colors with faint hairly smells and pale Gwendolyn Brooks kitchenette building Joy Kogawa Where There’s a Wall Where there’s a wall there’s a way through a gate or door. There’s even Noelle Kocot Paying Attention He is not doing well. She is not Charlotte Smith Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes! How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn! For me wilt thou renew the withered rose, Amy Lowell A Fixed Idea What torture lurks within a single thought When grown too constant, and however kind, However welcome still, the weary mind John Clare I Am I am — yet what I am none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes — Dina Del Bucchia Wow! You've Changed You’ve changed. You used to be so and now you’re all like, you’ve transformed I don’t know how to describe it’s like you don’t like canasta anymore you text IN ALL CAPS Lucille Clifton won't you celebrate with me won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up Michael Fraser Coloured Hockey League of the Maritimes The puck skates in on parted-snow ice. It's the season’s last game, an encore to stomach winter’s sliver, to shrug off the townsfolk stares. The moonlit night is advanced in years Carl Sandburg I Am the People, the Mob I am the people — the mob — the crowd — the mass. Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me? I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes. Ada Limón How to Triumph Like a Girl I like the lady horses best, how they make it all look easy, like running 40 miles per hour is as fun as taking a nap, or grass. I like their lady horse swagger, Weyman Chan But I’m No One for M. Maylor Dear Anne Carson: My friend read me the poem where your mom said that the dead walk backwards. You thought this myth arose from poor translation. Lord (George Gordon) Byron She Walks in Beauty She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright Pierre Nepveu Last Visit Now I set out across a minefield, space having taken all I owned, I’m starting over from a point where every pebble may explode beneath my shoe and the flowers blaze up behind my body as I gasp for air, Jen Sookfong Lee Community Garden There, the bolting black kale, taller than it has any right to be and not the twitter troll who asked if you were on your period. In the corner, a pile of dead zucchini leaves, spotted with rot William Shakespeare Sonnet XXIX: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, Philip Larkin This Be The Verse They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls The tide rises, the tide falls, The twilight darkens, the curlew calls; Along the sea-sands damp and brown Lorna Crozier Not the Music Not the music. It is this other thing I keep from all of them that matters, inviolable. I scratch in my journals, a mouse rummaging through cupboards, John McCrae In Flanders Fields In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky William Blake The Chimney Sweeper: When my mother died I was very young When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry “‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!” Nicole Brossard Smooth Horizon of the Verb Love 1 an urban image from the eighties when we hung out at Chez Madame Arthur Suzannah Showler Too Negative I was a kid other kids’ parents gossiped about. They told their children what I was: too negative. I get it. Fair to fear contagion of bad attitudes, Charles G. D. Roberts The Potato Harvest A high bare field, brown from the plough, and borne Aslant from sunset; amber wastes of sky Washing the ridge; a clamour of crows… Bernard Ferguson juxtaposition with seeds i thought you were gone / stupid bird / darling worms shifting in the mud / this time i am not so certain / is it kinship or are you gloating? / have i grown bitter with the bees / how they bring the blooms reliably? Tamar Rubin Perennial For thirty-one years, my mother tried not to miss her. Every week, a little water or the trickle of a few ice cubes dropped in black earth. Years back, in the muck of Toronto, April, Langston Hughes The Negro Speaks of Rivers I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. Aimé Césaire New Year Out of their torments men carved a flower which they perched on the high plateaus of their faces hunger makes a canopy for them an image dissolves in their last tear Majzoob Tabrizi Fire in the Reeds One night, fire fell into a reed bed It burned like love falling onto a soul As fire’s head warmed to its work every reed turned into a candle at its own grave Hoa Nguyen My Idea of the Circus Is My Idea of the Circus Otherwise Known As: My Mother Was a Celebrated Stunt Motorcyclist, Vietnam, 1958 to 1962 Very loud a mad frenzy The wooden barrel she rode would have roared (I first wrote “road”) Lorna Crozier Fear of Snakes The snake can separate itself from its shadow, move on ribbons of light, taste the air, the morning and the evening, Raymond Antrobus Happy Birthday Moon Dad reads aloud. I follow his finger across the page. Sometimes his finger moves past words, tracing white space. He makes the Moon say something new every night to his deaf son who slurs his speech. Language English