A Summer Love Poem

Clouds float by on a summer sky
I hop scotch over to you

Rainbows arch from ground to gold
I climb over to you

Thunder grumbles, lightning tumbles
And I bounce over to you

Sun beams back and catches me
Smiling over at you

Written by Nikki Giovanni

from Song of Myself (50 & 52)

by Walt Whitman

50

There is that in me . . . . I do not know what it is . . . . but I know it is in me.

Wrenched and sweaty . . . . calm and cool then my body becomes; I sleep . . . . I sleep long.

I do not know it . . . . it is without name . . . . it is a word unsaid, It is not in any dictionary or utterance or symbol.

Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on, To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.

Perhaps I might tell more . . . . Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters.

Do you see O my brothers and sisters? It is not chaos or death . . . . it is form and union and plan . . . . it is eternal life . . . . it is happiness.
52
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me . . . . he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed . . . . I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the word.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadowed wilds.
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air . . . . I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

The Sloth

by Theodore Roethke

In moving-slow he has no Peer.
You ask him something in his Ear,
He thinks about it for a Year;

And, then, before he says a Word
There, upside down (unlike a Bird),
He will assume that you have Heard—

A most Ex-as-per-at-ing Lug.
But should you call his manner Smug,
He'll sigh and give his Branch a Hug;

Then off again to Sleep he goes,
Still swaying gently by his Toes,
And you just know he knows he knows.