Inside A Letter Box

The dark eagles, sleep and death,
Rustle all night around my head:
The golden statue of man
Is swallowed by the icy comber
Of eternity. On the frightening reef
The purple remains go to pieces,
And the dark voice mourns
Over the sea.
Sister in my wild despair
Look, a precarious skiff is sinking
Under the stars,
The face of night whose voice is fading.

— Georg Trakl, Mourning, trans. James Wright and Robert Bly

The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

— Robert Frost, The Oven Bird  

Forbidden Fruit a flavor has
That lawful Orchards mocks -
How luscious lies within the Pod
the Pea that Duty locks -

— Emily Dickinson, 1482, 1879 ed. R.W. Franklin, The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998)

They jumped from the burning floors—
one, two, a few more,
higher, lower.

The photograph halted them in life,
and now keeps them
above the earth toward the earth.

Each is still complete,
with a particular face
and blood well hidden.

There’s enough time
for hair to come loose,
for keys and coins
to fall from pockets.

They’re still within the air’s reach,
within the compass of places
that have just now opened.

I can do only two things for them—
describe this flight
and not add a last line.

— Wisława Szymborska, “Photograph from September 11”, tr. Clare Cavanagh and Stanislav Baranczak 

(Source: poetryfoundation.org)

   Between your love for me and mine for you
—air of stars and tremor of plant—
a thicket of anemones raises
with a dark moan an entire year.

— Federico García Lorca, from Sonnet of the Garland of Roses, p. 831.