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Do Not!

By Stevie Smith

Do not despair of man, and do not scold him,   
Who are you that you should so lightly hold him?   
Are you not also a man, and in your heart
Are there not warlike thoughts and fear and smart?   
Are you not also afraid and in fear cruel,
Do you not think of yourself as usual,
Faint for ambition, desire to be loved,
Prick at a virtuous thought by beauty moved?   
You love your wife, you hold your children dear,   
Then say not that Man is vile, but say they are.   
But they are not. So is your judgement shown   
Presumptuous, false, quite vain, merely your own   
Sadness for failed ambition set outside,
Made a philosophy of, prinked, beautified   
In noble dress and into the world sent out
To run with the ill it most pretends to rout.
Oh know your own heart, that heart's not wholly evil,   
And from the particular judge the general,   
If judge you must, but with compassion see life,   
Or else, of yourself despairing, flee strife.

Stevie Smith, “Do Not!” from New Selected Poems. Copyright © 1972 by Stevie Smith. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Poet Bio

English poet and novelist Stevie Smith (1902 - 1971) reading a poem at a Poetry Festival held at the Royal Court Theatre, London, UK, July 15th to 20th, 1963.

Although the nursery-rhyme-like cadences of her poems and the whimsical drawings with which she illustrated them suggest a child’s innocence, Stevie Smith was much concerned with suffering and mortality. (Her macabre sense of humor can shock, as in her most famous poem, “Not Waving But Drowning.”) Born Florence Margaret Smith in Hull, Yorkshire, she moved with her family to London when three, then lived in the same house the rest of her life. She published several collections of short prose and letters as well as nearly a dozen volumes of verse. Glenda Jackson portrays the eccentric poet in the 1978 movie Stevie.

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Meanwhile

By Richard Siken

    Driving, dogs barking, how you get used to it, how you make
                            the new streets yours.
Trees outside the window and a big band sound that makes you feel like
     everything's okay,
  a feeling that lasts for one song maybe,
                 the parentheses all clicking shut behind you.
          The way we move through time and space, or only time.
The way it's night for many miles, and then suddenly
                                     it's not, it's breakfast
   and you're standing in the shower for over an hour,
                   holding the bar of soap up to the light.
I will keep watch. I will water the yard.
      Knot the tie and go to work. Unknot the tie and go to sleep.
                            I sleep. I dream. I make up things
   that I would never say. I say them very quietly.
                      The trees in wind, the streetlights on,
          the click and flash of cigarettes
being smoked on the lawn, and just a little kiss before we say goodnight.
      It spins like a wheel inside you: green yellow, green blue,
                                  green beautiful green.
   It's simple: it isn't over, it's just begun. It's green. It's still green.

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