I need to tell you that I loved the site. I spent an hour or so last night (trying to avoid the news) perusing the poems that have been submitted. I loved Ahmatova's poem but she has other better ones for sure.

Thanks, Miko.

Langston Hughes, by LT

Langston Hughes never bothered me/
although I wanted him to/
maybe even needed him to/
the way everyone should be annoyed/
by things that aren't about them

Langston Hughes never sat next to me/
but maybe he should have/
I would have made room for him/
been shy around him, or tried to look at him/
only to stammer, and stumble/
by trying to say things he'd want to hear

Langton Hughes never wrote to me/
although I know that's a lie/
a pretty big one/
a gigantic whopper of a lie/
so huge it should be sold in a fishstand/
next to the flounder and a cod filet/
which I could then cook and serve to/
Langston Hughes when he came over to dine.

Here's a selection from 'The First Book of Rhythms,' a children's book which Langston Hughes wrote in 1954.

This Wonderful World

How wonderful are the rhythms of the world! Poets everywhere write about the drowsy hum of a bee. Farmers everywhere wake up to the cascade of a rooster's crow. In nature the rhythms we hear range from the trill of a bird to the chirp of a cricket, the lonely howl of a coyote to the thunderous roar of a lion, the gurgle of a brook to the boom of the sea, the purr of a cat to the beating of your own heart.

Look at the upward sweep of the horns of the antelope! See the outward curves of the Texas long-horned steer, the antlers of the elk, the stripes of the zebra or the tiger, the graceful neck of the giraffe, the delicate hoofs of a goat on a ledge, the curve of a sea lion on a rock, the scoop of a cat on a pillow, the flicker of a fish, the leap of a monkey, the wiggle of a puppy, the dive of a heron, the balance of hummingburds, and butterflies, and ballet dancers, the drift of clouds across the sky in moving masses of vapor, the ever-spreading rhythms of the circles when you throw a stone into a pool of still water, the unseen rhythms of electronics that come right into your house bringing your favorite programs onto your TV screen! When a radio tower projects its electronic waves in the air, someone in Paris can hear a voice in New York saying, "Good Morning"! Yet you cannot see or hear that voice on its way across the ocean. Such are the seen and unseen, the heard and unheard rhythms of our world.

The earth which is our home moves in its own rhythm around the sun, as do all the planets. Animals, and boys and girls, and men and women, get up in the morning by the sun. Plants live by the sun. The moon moves around the earth as well as the sun. The rhythms of the sun and the moon influence the sea, the seasons, and us, and affect the rhythms of our universe, so immense in time and space that men do not yet understand most of it.

But your hand controls the rhythms of the lines you make with your pencil on a paper. And your hand is related to the rhythms of the earth as it moves around the sun, and to the moon as the moon moves around the earth, and to the stars as they move in the great sky--just as all men's lives, and every living thing, are related to those vaster rhythms of time and space and wonder beyond the reach of eye or mind.

Rhythm is something we share in common, you and I, with all the plants and animals and people in the world, and with the stars and moon and sun, and all the whole vast wonderful universe beyond this wonderful earth which is our home.