'Lay your sleeping head, my love' by WH Auden

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephermeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreadful cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but not from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless.
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

'The Deaths' by Jo Shapcott

I thought I knew my death.
I thought he would announce
himself with all the little creaks
and groan you hear of
that we'd get friendly and walk
our walk of two drunkards
with him chattering inside me
about lumps and arteries
and his gift of pain which would be
too big to wrap properly,
that some way into our courtship
he'd give me the look and
I'd implode like a ripe mango.

I thought I knew my death
so when, after a bee buzz
of an afternoon, the rain started
and the fine hairs rose on my neck
and the long hairs tugged my scalp
and my mouth stank of seaweed
and a tingle ran round my wrists,
I didn't recognise her. She lit
a green flame over my head
and even then I didn't get it. She threw
me yards back, traced her filigree
red cartoons on my palms until
I was gone and still I didn't know. 

'Muse' by Jo Shapcott

When I kiss you in all the folding places
of your body, you make that noise like a dog
dreaming, dreaming of the long run he makes
in answer to some jolt to his hormones,
running across landfills, running, running
by tips and shorelines from the scent of too much,
but still going with head up and snout
in the air because he loves it all
and has to get away. I have to kiss deeper
and more slowly – your neck, your inner arm,
the neat creases of your toes, the shadow
behind your knee, the white angles of your groin -
until you fall quiet because only then
can I get the damned words to come into my mouth.

'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep. 

'Blackberry-Picking' by Seamus Heaney

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. 

'Adlestrop' by Edward Thomas

Yes, I remember Adlestrop -- 
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop -- only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

'Ash Wednesday 2009' by Stina Vogt

If you didn´t believe me then, I will tell you now,  again and with exquisite precision, 

I loved you through sleep, when nordurljosin were raging over Snæfjellsjökull, 

I know how naked you were in front of the wide window

in this night where almond coloured horses found no shelter, but stood with eyes closed, green and purple shadows on their fur.

It should be imaginable, that we woke up again there, were the earth felt round and with a center.

And that we slowly tied the laces in our hiking boots

went out in the vague daybreak and disappeared in the yellow grass

Stina is a Norwegian poet with whom I had the pleasure of working at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Summer School 2012

'Flying at Night' by Ted Kooser

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.

Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies


like a snowflake falling on water. Below us, 


some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death, 


snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn


back into the little system of his care.


All night, the cities, like shimmering novas, 


tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his. 

'Forgetfulness' by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go


followed obediently by the title, the plot,


the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel


which suddenly becomes one you have never read,


never even heard of,



as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor


decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,


to a little fishing village where there are no phones.



Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye


and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,


and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,



something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,


the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.



Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,


it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,


not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.



It has floated away down a dark mythological river


whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,


well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those


who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.



No wonder you rise in the middle of the night


to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.


No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted


out of a love poem that you used to know by heart. 

'Delay' by Elizabeth Jennings

The radiance of the star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eyes may never see,
And so the time lag teases me with how

Love that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent. The star's impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else.