Poems with Personification

There's a word for the way your coffee cup still sits on the second shelf where no one else would put it—

My hands still set the table for two. Not every night—just Thursdays, when my hands forget

My father's chair still faces the window where he watched the street as if expecting a delivery

November twilight— the scarecrow still stands alone. Sparrows left in June.

When I was young, the afternoons were countries with no border known, and summer hummed its lazy tunes

The house at three a.m. becomes a throat that hums with all the things we didn't say, and I lie still as someone in a boat

The earth is trying something underneath— you feel it in the softness of the ground, a stirring, like a sleeper holding breath

A preacher who prayed every night for a sign he was living it right heard thunder at ten

August is a thief who comes dressed as a gift: the peach at its most golden

Praise the cracking open of the seed, the blind ambition of the buried root, the robin's first bewildered, breathless creed

The machines keep count of something— not life exactly, more like the argument life makes

There is a jacket on my chair that doesn't belong to me, and this is how you know

Spring doesn't arrive. It trespasses— one crocus first,

Children don't walk anywhere. They haven't learned the adult art of getting from one place to another

Flowers, I have learned, are not about beauty. They are about the argument

The maples don't grieve. That's the first lesson.

June gives us the longest day and we still waste most of it talking about the weather.

The thing about winter is that it's honest. No leaves to hide behind.

The ocean doesn't care that you're watching. This is what makes it worth watching.

The first month you count the days. The second month you count the weeks.

The cat does not love you. Let's be clear about that.

The caterpillar is not trying to teach you anything. It's just eating a leaf.

The score doesn't matter. I know it does. I know there are people who will read that sentence and close the poem.

The dog does not remember your promotion. The dog does not remember your argument with your mother.

The moon has heard every confession ever whispered from a bedroom window.

A book is a door that doesn't need a key.

Time takes the things you thought were permanent.

The roses I remember most are the ones you didn't send.

You dreamed something important last night. I know this because you always do.

The birds don't care that you're trying to sleep. They have a concert.

Home is not the address. It's the sound the lock makes when you've been gone too long.

Missing someone is not an emotion. It's a location.

The world decided to start over last night.

The kettle hisses its slow complaint— ssssssss— like a secret it's been holding since last night.

It's raining again and I have nowhere to be angry about it.

We took the same route. Past the mailbox you always had opinions about.

The caged bird knows things the free bird never has to learn.

At first it was a guest. Showed up uninvited but charming.

Tonight the world gives us permission to be something else.

The body knows things the mind will never admit.

I know you don't want a poem about a spider. But consider.

The tulips don't know it's still cold. Or they know and they don't care.

"Thin" and "slender" mean the same thing except they don't.

Don't start with what it means. Start with how it sounds.

Love is like a house fire— not the kind that starts in the kitchen.

They weren't lying about the green. But they didn't tell you there'd be forty shades.

Wales doesn't shout. Wales hums. It hums in the valleys where the coal used to live.

Ninety feet between the bases. Someone measured this and got it perfectly right.

First: wonder. Something happens that shouldn't— an apple falls, a mold kills bacteria.

He's always there when I arrive—waiting, with my face but not my certainty.

Korea is a peninsula— land reaching into water like a hand trying to touch something.

The mountain doesn't care that you're climbing it. It was here before your species.

Fire knows one thing: how to eat. It eats wood. It eats paper.

I don't know what it means. The museum card says Oil on canvas, 1889.

The horse knows something about running that we've forgotten—how the whole body becomes the verb.

Scotland is not a country. Scotland is a weather system with opinions.

My father's car was a 1987 something—I forget the model but remember the sound: a cough that meant winter.

City of shoulders, Sandburg said, and the shoulders are still here—broader now, more tattooed, still carrying what needs carrying.

Summer is the season that forgets to end on time—it lingers at the shore like a guest who loves your house more than you do.

The trees are undressing in public again—no shame, no apology, just color falling like confessions too beautiful to keep.

After she died, her garden kept going—which felt, at first, like a betrayal.

Alliteration is the poet's parlor trick—the showy sibling of subtlety, the sequined suit at the serious party.

The tree is the same tree—same ornaments, same star, same lights that blink like they don't know someone is missing.

I will sit on your laptop at the worst possible time. I will bring you a dead bird and expect applause.

Monday is the day the world clears its throat and says: again.