What instinct forces man to journey on,
           Urged by a longing blind but dominant!
           Nothing he sees can hold him, nothing daunt
          His never failing eagerness. The sun
          Setting in splendour every night has won
           His vassalage; those towers flamboyant
           Of airy cloudland palaces now haunt
          His daylight wanderings. Forever done
          With simple joys and quiet happiness
           He guards the vision of the sunset sky;
          Though faint with weariness he must possess
           Some fragment of the sunset's majesty;
          He spurns life's human friendships to profess
           Life's loneliness of dreaming ecstasy.

This poem is in the public domain.

Love, leave me like the light,
The gently passing day;
We would not know, but for the night,
When it has slipped away.

So many hopes have fled,
Have left me but the name
Of what they were. When love is dead,
Go thou, beloved, the same.

Go quietly; a dream
When done, should leave no trace
That it has lived, except a gleam
Across the dreamer’s face.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 28, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Dream on, for dreams are sweet:
     Do not awaken!
Dream on, and at thy feet
     Pomegranates shall be shaken.

Who likeneth the youth
     of life to morning?
’Tis like the night in truth,
     Rose-coloured dreams adorning.

The wind is soft above,
     The shadows umber.
(There is a dream called Love.)
     Take thou the fullest slumber!

In Lethe’s soothing stream,
     Thy thirst thou slakest.
Sleep, sleep; ’tis sweet to dream.
     Oh, weep then thou awakest!

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 17, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow:
You are not wrong who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

This poem is in the public domain.

Little grey dreams,
I sit at the ocean’s edge,
At the grey ocean’s edge, 
With you in my lap.

I launch you, one by one,
    And one by one,
      Little grey dreams,
Under the grey, grey, clouds,
Out on the grey, grey, sea, 
You go sailing away, 
From my empty lap,
      Little grey dreams.

Sailing! Sailing!
Into the black,
At the horizon’s edge.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 26, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

translated by Tess O'Dwyer
 
Listen to me, ladies and gentlemen. Listen to the sermon of memories and sorrows. Listen to hell. Why didn’t I do what I should have done. I repent. I’ve  sinned. I have memories. And torments. I am burning in the flames of memories. Why didn’t I keep quiet? Why did I do that? I repent a thousand times. Why did I betray you, and why do I remember you? Oh woe, woe is me! Oh, and I stood you up in the street. Listen to memories. Listen to them again. Why did I betray you? Why did you leave and forget me? And I grieve and remember you. And the worst were my tears. And the worst was your memory. Listen to the soap opera and listen to memory. Oh, and now what’s left for me. I’m left with monologues, soliloquies, and memories. I’m left with shadows. I’m left with memories. I don’t want monologues or sorrows or soliloquies. I am a singing bird. I am a child. I am the nightingale. What does winter or autumn or spring or summer know of memory? They know nothing of memory. They know that seasons pass and return. They know that they are seasons. That they are time. And they know how to affirm themselves. And they know how to impose themselves. And they know how to maintain themselves. What does autumn know of summer? What sorrows do seasons have? None hate. None love. They pass.
 

Copyright © 2019 Giannina Braschi. Translation © 2019 by Tess O'Dwyer. All rights reserved. Used with the permission of the author and translator. 

We build these
into the dream-

house, holes drilled
into window sills,

so rainy days
drain out. No

dream’s complete
without looking

ahead, without
seeing ourselves

looking back
at who—

dreaming—
we’d been.

Copyright © 2018 Andrea Cohen. This poem originally appeared in Kenyon Review, November/December 2018. Used with permission of the author.

A man leaves the world
and the streets he lived on
grow a little shorter.

One more window dark
in this city, the figs on his branches
will soften for birds.

If we stand quietly enough evenings
there grows a whole company of us
standing quietly together.
overhead loud grackles are claiming their trees  
and the sky which sews and sews, tirelessly sewing,
drops her purple hem.
Each thing in its time, in its place,
it would be nice to think the same about people.

Some people do. They sleep completely,
waking refreshed. Others live in two worlds,
the lost and remembered.
They sleep twice, once for the one who is gone,
once for themselves. They dream thickly,
dream double, they wake from a dream
into another one, they walk the short streets
calling out names, and then they answer.

From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye. Published by Far Corner. Reprinted with permission of the author. Copyright © 1995 Naomi Shihab Nye.

I

She knew how to seduce her destiny,
predict the time of flight
In 1939, dressed in garments
of night and happiness
at the threshold of a fearful
Hamburg Harbor
resolved to live,
she sailed 
to Southern seas.

In 1938, the windows
of her house of water and stone
resisted the extreme
horror of that night
of broken crystals.

She, my grandmother,
taught me to recognize
the landscape of danger,
the shards of fear,
the impenetrable faces
of women,
fleeing,
accused,
audacious in their will to live.

II

Helena Broder,
created a domain
of papers, fragile vessels,
clandestine poems and
notes to be made,
discreet addresses.
With little baggage,
like a frail and ancient
angel,
she arrived,
although ready to embark again.

I survived next to her
and I was thankful for the gift of her presence.

From At the Threshold of Memory by Marjorie Algosín, translated by Cola Franzen and Monica Bruno Galmozzi. Translation copyright © 2003 by Cola Franzen and Monica Bruno Galmozzi. Reprinted by permission of White Pine Press. All rights reserved.