Nathan Spoon
The moon is lost tonight
in torrents of persistent rain. We are together in a cabin,
safe and dry and warm, you peacefully sleeping
and I awake writing these words. Once, as
a child, I looked out across the pond nearby

our house. Rain had filled it to the brim, expanding
the circumference of its goodness. I looked
with uneven eyes, letting the countless
and unfathomable combinations
of words gathered

bewilder my mind and heart. Images
discordant to these combinations
overwhelmed my imagination
and reason, the way light traveling from
the star of our sun enters our earth

pressing it, innocuously almost,
until the earth can do no more
than return the gentle light
as heat. But we are in a cabin and I was
recalling looking at a pond

in a state of overwhelm
at speech and image and language. Had some
invisible and innocuous energy really entered me, unbidden,
from somewhere? How does anybody, starlight
being what it is, master such

a thing? One day our earth
may burn itself to cinder. One day a vine may travel
the visible length of an oak, releasing and returning something
unbidden, infusing what is visible with
the glimmering scales of a caught sunfish.
from the journal SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW
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I wrote this during a cabin visit with my wife, Jamie. I was up late writing in a notebook I brought with me, while drinking a cup of tea. The poem moves from immediate setting into pondering human existence and earth in a cosmic way. It reflects on the sun as an animating source and ends with the image of a sunfish to hint at containing power and sharing meaning. 
Color photograph of a poem in Emily Bronte's handwriting
Emily Bronte's Handwritten Poems Rediscovered

"A 'lost library' of British literature, including rare handwritten poems by Emily Brontë and works by Robert Burns, is to be auctioned off at Sotheby's....Emily's poems are expected to fetch somewhere between £800,000 and £1.2m. A first edition of her famous novel Wuthering Heights could fetch between £200,000 and £300,000."

via BBC NEWS
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Cover of Sylvia Plath's book, The Collected Poems
What Sparks Poetry:
Corinna Vallianatos on Sylvia Plath's "Blackberrying"

"Nothing is ever nothing—description gives nothing shape. The seeing gains power, even as the one doing the seeing recedes. The bounty of what’s come before, the berries and their juices and the milkbottle the speaker uses to collect them, which brings to mind the body and domesticity, lifts at the end into the elemental, something seemingly less comforting but, to me, more so."
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