Poem of the Week by Jan Heller Levi

Hanging out the Laundry to Dry

The sun is high in the sky,
vivid, livid, but kind. When the Master makes His appearance, He
doesn't always

shine. I say the sad music, the music like water, the music that makes
Buddha
anxious, the flip of the tuxedo tails when the Master

polishes His behind.
I want to be happy, will be too, wearing somebody's socks,
nobody's shoes.

Jan Heller Levi is the author of Once I Gazed at You in Wonder, winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. She is the editor of A Muriel Rukeyser Reader and coeditor of Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan. Her other honors include the George Bogin Memorial Award and the Emily Dickinson/Writer Magazine Award, both from the Poetry Society of America. She currently teaches at the Hunter College Graduate Program in Creative Writing.

The above poem and information comes from Levi's 2005 collection, Skyspeak.

Poem of the Week by Stephen Spender

This week's selection is one of the poems performed by the winner of last week's Poetry Out Loud Regional Finals, Langston Ward from Mead High School.

The Truly Great

I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history

Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.

And who hoarded from the Spring branches

The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious, is never to forget

The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.

Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light

Nor its grave evening demand for love.

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,

See how these names are fêted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.

Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun

And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

Sir Stephen Spender was born in London and attended Oxford University, where he became friends with the poet W. H. Auden. Auden convinced Spender that poets should find their material in the everyday world and in seemingly unpoetic things. In his poetry, Spender creates tension between the need to engage this world and a desire to transcend it.

Content from Poetry Out Loud.

Poem of the Week by Jane Hirshfield

Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight

I found myself
suddenly voluminous,
three-dimensioned,
a many-roofed building in moonlight.

Thought traversed
me as simply as moths might.
Feelings traversed me as fish.

I heard myself thinking,
It isn't the piano, it isn't the ears.

Then heard, too soon, the ordinary furnace,
the usual footsteps above me.

Washed my face again with hot water,
as I did when I was a child.

Jane Hirshfield's books of poetry include Come, Thief (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), After (HarperCollins, 2006), and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2004, Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets. She was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2012.

To read more work by Jane, visit poets.org