Friday Poetry Blogging: Earth Day Extravaganza

Because it's National Poetry Month, you're getting three poems this week. Because it's Earth Day, they're all ... er ... environmental. Or something. Anyway: Happy Earth Day!

Ragwort, by Anne Stevenson
They won't let railways alone, those yellow flowers.
They're that remorseless joy of dereliction
darkest banks exhale like vivid breath
as bricks divide to let them root between.
How every falling pace concocts their smile,
taking what's left and making song of it.

Stars and Planets, by Norman MacCaig
Trees are cages for them: water holds its breath
To balance them without smudging on its delicate meniscus.
Children watch them playing in their heavenly playground;
Men use them to lug ships across oceans,through firths.

They seem to twinkle-still, but they never cease
Inventing new spaces and huge explosions
And migrating in mathamatical tribes over
The stepps of space at their outrageous ease.

It's hard to think that the earth is one -
This poor sad bearer of wars and disasters
Rolls-Roycing round the sun with its load of gangsters,
Attended only by the loveless moon.

Wet Evening in April, by Patrick Kavanagh
The birds sang in the wet trees
And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him
The melancholy.