Mr. Write's Page

More poetry that isn’t pretentious and a waste of time…

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We Wear the Mask

By Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,–
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

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Mirror

By Silvia Plath

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful —
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

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Light

By Francis William Bourdillon

Francis William Bourdillon (1852-1921)

The Night has a thousand eyes,
And the Day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.

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Myth

By Barbara Crooker

Barbara Poti Crooker (B. 1945)

In the beginning, God separated the darkness from the light,
like two different skeins of wool, and She saw that it was good.
She scooped up clay, rolled balls and snakes in her hands,
joined them together with spit and tears, created them
man and woman.  After that messy bit in the apple orchard,
She gave them their roles: Woman would wear pinstripes,
oxfords, go forth to the office with a briefcase and laptop,
have a staff. Man would stay home, bake bread, have babies,
work part-time jobs at minimum wage, balance
the checkbook, correct homework, drive children
to the orthodontist/dance lessons/swim team, scrub
floors, patch jeans, and still have a hot dinner
on the table every night at five. When all the bright
balls Adam was juggling came bouncing down
on his head, God reconsidered. “Let’s start again
from scratch,” She said.

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Snow

By David Berman

David Berman (B. 1967)

Walking through a field with my little brother Seth

I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.

He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer.

Then we were on the roof of the lake.
The ice looked like a photograph of water.

Why he asked. Why did he shoot them.

I didn’t know where I was going with this.
They were on his property, I said.

When it’s snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.
Today I traded hellos with my neighbor.
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.

We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence.

But why were they on his property, he asked.