The Negro Speaks of Rivers Langston Hughes  I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the      flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln      went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy      bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky [...]

The Blue-Green Stream Wang Wei Translated by Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell Every time I have started for the Yellow Flower River, I have gone down the Blue-Green Stream,  Following the hills, making ten thousand turnings, We go along rapidly, but advance scarcely one hundred li. We are in the midst of a noise of water, Of the confused and mingled sounds of water broken by stones, And in the deep darkness of pine trees. Rocked, rocked, Moving on and on,  We float past water-chestnuts Into a still clearness reflecting reeds and rushes. My heart is clean and white as silk; it [...]

"The world is a beautiful place" Lawrence Ferlinghetti  The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind happiness not always being so very much fun if you don’t mind a touch of hell now and then just when everything is fine because even in heaven they don’t sing all the time The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind some people dying all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn’t half so bad if it isn’t you Oh the world is a beautiful place to [...]

The More Loving One W. H. Auden  Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day. Were all stars [...]

Remember Joy Harjo  Remember the sky that you were born under, know each of the star's stories. Remember the moon, know who she is. Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the strongest point of time. Remember sundown and the giving away to night. Remember your birth, how your mother struggled to give you form and breath. You are evidence of her life, and her mother's, and hers. Remember your father. He is your life, also. Remember the earth whose skin you are: red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth brown earth, we are earth. Remember the plants, trees, [...]

Hope is the thing with feathers (254) Emily Dickinson  Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all, And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm. I've heard it in the chillest land, And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me.

On Children Kahlil Gibran  And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.      And he said:      Your children are not your children.      They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.      They come through you but not from you,      And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.      You may give them your love but not your thoughts,      For they have their own thoughts.      You may house their bodies but not their souls,      For their souls dwell in the house [...]

The Fish Elizabeth Bishop  I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed [...]