Ted Kooser

 A Happy Birthday

From A House Called Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Poetry from Copper Canyon Press

William Stafford

William Stafford - An Afternoon in the Stacks 

Nikki Grimes

At the Library

From The 20th Century Children's Poetry Treasury

Toi Derricotte

Watch a roach give birth on YouTube, I think of Lucille Clifton meeting God

From The American Poetry Review, March-April, 2018

Tony Hoagland

Illness and Literature

From The Sun, February 2018

Stephen Dunn

Click to enlarge. A Romance From New and Selected Poems 1974-1994.

Howard Nemerov

To David, About His Education

The world is full of mostly invisible things,
And there is no way but putting the mind’s eye,
Or its nose, in a book, to find them out,
Things like the square root of Everest
Or how many times Byron goes into Texas,
Or whether the law of the excluded middle
Applies west of the Rockies. For these
And the like reasons, you have to go to school
And study books and listen to what you are told,
And sometimes try to remember. Though I don’t know
What you will do with the mean annual rainfall
On Plato’s Republic, or the calorie content
Of the Diet of Worms, such things are said to be
Good for you, and you will have to learn them
In order to become one of the grown-ups
Who sees invisible things neither steadily nor whole,
But keeps gravely the grand confusion of the world
Under his hat, which is where it belongs,
And teaches small children to do this in their turn.

From 100 Plus American Poems

Linda Pastan

What We Want

What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names—
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don't remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.

From 100 Essential Modern Poems By Women.

Danusha Laméris

Click to enlarge