Poems

Good writing is like balm to my soul. So is a good plum.

To a Poor Old Woman
by William Carlos Williams

munching a plum on
the street a paper bag 

of them in her hand 

They taste good to her 

They taste good   

to her. They taste 

good to her 

You can see it by 

the way she gives herself 

to the one half 

sucked out in her hand 

Comforted
a solace of ripe plums 

seeming to fill the air 

They taste good to her

A Strange New Cottage in Berkley

by Allen Ginsberg

     All afternoon cutting bramble blackberries off a tottering brown
fence
     under a low branch with its rotten old apricots miscellaneous under
the leaves,
     fixing the drip in the intricate gut machinery of a new toilet;
     found a good coffeepot in the vines by the porch, rolled a big tire out
of the scarlet bushes, hid my marijuana;
     wet the flowers, playing the sunlit water each to each, returning for 
godly extra drops for the stringbeans and daisies;
     three times walked round the grass and sighed absently:
     my reward, when the garden fed me its plums from the form of a
small tree in the corner,
     an angel thoughtful of my stomach, and my dry and lovelorn tongue.