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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jean Valentine
Jean Valentine
Jean Valentine was born in 1934 in Chicago, Illinois, and has lived most of her life in New York City. Her many collections of poetry include Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems ...
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FURTHER READING
Poems about Flowers
Endymion, Book I, [A thing of beauty is a joy for ever]
by John Keats
Littlefoot, 19, [This is the bird hour]
by Charles Wright
A Red, Red Rose
by Robert Burns
a woman had placed
by Anne Blonstein
Advice to a Prophet
by Richard Wilbur
Ah! Sunflower
by William Blake
Asphodel, That Greeny Flower [excerpt]
by William Carlos Williams
Astigmatism
by Amy Lowell
At Baia
by H. D.
Blur
by Andrew Hudgins
Botanica
by Eve Alexandra
Bulb Planting Time
by Edgar Guest
Come Slowly—Eden (211)
by Emily Dickinson
Day Lilies
by Rosanna Warren
Epitaph X
by Thomas Heise
Erotic Energy
by Chase Twichell
Far and Away [excerpt]
by Fanny Howe
Forced Bloom
by David Baker
Four Poems for Robin
by Gary Snyder
Girl
by Eve Alexandra
Heaven for Helen
by Mark Doty
Herb Garden
by Timothy Steele
In April
by James Hearst
Iris
by David St. John
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
by John Keats
Last Supper
by Charles Wright
Little Lion Face
by May Swenson
Nothing But Death
by Pablo Neruda
Nothing Stays Put
by Amy Clampitt
Nothing to Save
by D. H. Lawrence
One Flower
by Jack Kerouac
Practice
by Ellen Bryant Voigt
See How the Roses Burn!
by Hafiz
Shake the Superflux!
by David Lehman
Sonnet 2
by Gwendolyn Bennett
Taken Up
by Charles Martin
Terezin
by Taije Silverman
The Daffodils
by William Wordsworth
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
by Dylan Thomas
The Guarded Wound
by Adelaide Crapsey
The Métier of Blossoming
by Denise Levertov
The Mountain Cemetery
by Edgar Bowers
The Orchid Flower
by Sam Hamill
The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers
by Andrew Marvell
The Satyr's Heart
by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
The Separate Rose: I
by Pablo Neruda
The Violet
by Jane Taylor
The White Rose
by John Boyle O'Reilly
The Wild Honeysuckle
by Philip Freneau
To Dorothy
by Marvin Bell
To Earthward
by Robert Frost
To My Mother Waiting on 10/01/54
by Teresa Carson
Why Regret?
by Galway Kinnell
Wildflower
by Stanley Plumly
Wildwood Flower
by Kathryn Stripling Byer
Without a Philosophy
by Elizabeth Morgan
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La Chalupa, the Boat  
by Jean Valentine

I am twenty, 
drifting in la chalupa, 
the blue boat painted with roses,
white lilies—

No, not drifting, I am poling
my way into life.         It seems
like another life:

There were the walls of the mind.
There were the cliffs of the mind,
There were the seven deaths,
and the seven-bread offerings—

Still, there was still
the little boat, the chalupa
you built once, slowly, in the yard, after school—



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From Little Boat by Jean Valentine. Copyright © 2008 by Jean Valentine. Reprinted with permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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