Potential Titles: Hard

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The hard work of staying alive - Julia Alvarez "Keeping Watch"

Salt my tongue on hardened tears - Maya Angelou "Mourning Grace"

Has caused the moment to harden - Cameron Awkward-Rich "Essay on the Awkward/Black/Object"

Some hard capricious star - Djuna Barnes "From Fifth Avenue Up"

The hard cup of the sky - Stephen Vincent Benet "The Drug-Shop, or, Endymion in Edmonstoun"

A dream hard for the heart to resist - William Rose Benet "Lights Through the Mist"

The promised land's hard comfort - Paul Bernstein "Sideshow"

From the cold hard mouth of the world - Elizabeth Bishop "At the Fishhouses"

Losing isn't hard to master - Elizabeth Bishop "One Art"

Hard with years of thought-spinning - Maxwell Bodenheim "Images of Life and Death: Life"

Their fierce pretense of hardness - Maxwell Bodenheim "Rattle-Snake Mountain Dialogue"

Herein lies the hard pentagonal truth - Bruce Boston "The Canticles of Rage"

Distilled in the hard flesh of the moment - Bruce Boston "When Clock Is Egg"

The hard process of freezing - Elizabeth Bradfield "Notes on Ice in Bowditch"

The cat expects hard knocks - C.S. Calverley "Sad Memories"

The hard symmetry of clocks - Christian Campbell "Sculpture With Fragments of Stuart Hall"

Many the hard and jealous hearts - "Colum Cille's Greeting to Ireland" transl. by Kuno Meyer

Within us a hardened astonishment - Giorgiomaria Cornelio "La specia storta (The Bent Species)" transl. by Moira Egan

This bright, hard, polished stone of rage - Andrea Cote-Botero "Dear Beth" (translated by Sasha Pimentel)

The hard cold knuckle of the year - Barbara Crooker "Ordinary Life"

The small hard teeth of worms - Countee Cullen "The Shroud of Color"

Hard as the descent of hail - H.D. "Garden"

Such acrid fragrance hardened in a leaf - H.D. "Sea Rose"

When we strive so hard to conquer - Danske Dandridge "Wings"

Changing into something even harder to break - Alison Hawthorne Deming "Science"

Undivided by the hard lines of empire - Tarik Dobbs "A Djinn in Sakhnin"

Hailstones galloping across the hard earth - Chris Dombrowski "Strange Lullaby"

Hard by asphodel and rose - Theodore Dreiser "The Spring Recital"

Trying hard to become sense - Cornelius Eady "Charles Stuart in the Hospital"

Where their good luck turned hard - Cornelius Eady "Home (Running Man)"

Hard faces, pinched by starving years - J. Hal. Elliot "What Then?" [The Continental Monthly v.1 no.6, June 1862]

The walk of hard grounds & lost days - Eve L. Ewing "testify"

Trying so hard to outrun this - Camonghne Felix "Thank God I Can't Drive"

Since her heart was still and hard - Annie Finch "Strangers"

Her hardest hue to hold - Robert Frost "Nothing Gold Can Stay"

hard white bones shot with pitchblende - Amanda Gafford "Tigerlily"

No hard straight place to be - Zona Gale "Hokku"

Hard by the hinges of Hell - James Galvin "Little Dantesque"

The pathways of the gods are empty, flat, and hard - Dana Gioia "The Freeways Considered as Earth Gods"

In this hoarse hard sand - Louis Golding "I Seek a Wild Star"

Pause hard by the rose-wreathed gate - Grace Greenwood "The Spanish Princess to the Moorish Knight" [Graham's Magazine v.XXXIII no.3, Sept. 1848]

Because leaving is the hardest way to travel - Kimberly Grey "Heroic Sentences"

Sift memory for the hard lessons - Nikki Grimes "Lessons"

Hard even to the roughest - Ivor Gurney "Pain"

Hard glances of keen despite - Ivor Gurney "The Poplar"

Medicine is bitter and hard to swallow - Han-Shan "[So Han-shan writes you these words]" transl. by Burton Watson

The immortal's ladder is hard to climb - Han Yu "The Girl of Mt. Hua" transl. by Burton Watson

Time ticking hard on midnight - Thomas Hardy "The Collector Cleans His Picture"

Or some strange wind whistling hard - Joy Harjo "A Hard Rain"

Your own path of hard turns - K.D. Harryman "Whipping"

Bright silver upon hard morning - F.W. Harvey "That I May Be Taught the Gesture of Heaven"

Ice of this hard two-faced month - Seamus Heaney "Audenesque"

Hard on the skirts of the embittered night - William Ernest Henley "London Voluntaries"

However hard of mouth or wild of whim - William Ernest Henley "London Voluntaries"

I break my heart on your hard unfaith - William Ernest Henley "Or Ever the Knightly Years Were Gone"

And hard hearts to outride them - Maurice Hewlett "The Village Wife's Lament"

Of sparkle and hard blue gleam - Rosalie Dunlap Hickler "January Thaw"

Between summer's sprawling past and winter's hard revision - Edward Hirsch "Fall"

To expend in sighs for this hard doom - Thomas Hood "The Two Swans"

Laughter hardening the dusk - Langston Hughes "Railroad Avenue"

The wind of romance hard against it - Holly Iglesias "I Can Afford Neither the Rain"

Hard and soft sugar playing a supporting role - K. Iver "A Medium Performs Your Visit"

Polished stones hardened from ichor - Cyree Jarelle Johnson "false sonnet embroidered w/four loko empties"

We drank hard water - Daniel Johnson "Inheritance"

A path of hard, open mouths - Saeed Jones "Coyote Cry"

expecting only coldness and hard times - Tanque R. Jones "Fractions"

Our hearts will argue hard - June Jordan "Roman Poem Number Thirteen"

Stare hard enough at the fabric of night - Mary Karr "Field of Skulls"

a distance of hard words hissed - Douglas Kearney "There's no 'sass' in 'dissociation'"

By hard compulsion bent - John Keats "Hyperion"

Working hard to deny the fact of bones - Christopher Kennedy "Ghost in the Land of Skeletons"

A hard, dirty army of hooves - Ted Kooser "Horse"

No matter how hard you nail it down - Andrew Kozma "11th Hour Sonnet"

Hard as my black dawn - Louise Labe sonnet XXIII

The rounding noon hangs hard and white - Archibald Lampman "At the Ferry"

The hard fact of time hauling us forward - Deborah Landau "Flesh"

Gave back the last hard breath - Philip Levine "Joe Gould's Pen"

Even in dreams it's hard to go home - Li Yu "[Since we parted, spring half over]" transl. by Burton Watson

Little thimble of chalk and hard water - Cecilia Llompart "The Barnacle and the Gray Whale"

Hard prose by daylight - James Russell Lowell "Agassiz"

Strike the hard edge of a thought - James Russell Lowell "At the Commencement Dinner, 1866, in Acknowledging a Toast to the Smith Professor"

Their little bites distracting you from harder pain - Alessandra Lynch "Meditation on Rain"

That hard country of his youth - Thomas Lynch "O Canada"

Whose inmost soul hard bondage racks and wrings - Rev. James Gilborne Lyons "A Welcome Sacrifice" [Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, no.428, 13 March 1852]

Prickly, cussed, hard to parse and tough to handle - Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris "gorse"

The hard oracular orifices of tree bark - Aditi Machada "Rhapsody"

By a destiny harder than flint - Arthur Macy "The Book Hunter"

making it hard for your homes to welcome me - Neha Maqsood "Things I Do to Remember Home"

Dreams harden into frosted breath - Jeannette Marks "A Thousand Years"

Finds it hard to love an absence - Maya Marshall "Some Thoughts on Sons in the Winter of My Child-Bearing Years"

Beauty in hardest action - John Masefield "Ships"

hard wrackline of a year's ebb - Pattie McCarthy "outgoing tide--"

Between the lines of such hard edges - Brandy Nālani McDougall "This Island on Which I Love You"

Harder even than knowing the living - Maureen N. McLane "They Were Not Kidding in the Fourteenth Century"

Hollow shells of hard remnants - Erika Meitner "Untitled [and the moon once it stopped was sleeping]"

Hard seeds of hate - Edna St Vincent Millay "Blight"

Worked so hard for my sorrow - Anis Mojgani "Sock Hop"

When it's hard to find stars in this daily sky - Feliz Lucia Molina "Paról"

A difficult problem of hard meaning - "The Monk and His Pet Cat" transl. by Kuno Meyer

To bear the hardness coming - Kamilah Aisha Moon "Mercy Beach"

And hardens its slow liquid light - Pablo Neruda "Atacama" transl. by Jack Schmitt

Fist of hardened oats - Pablo Neruda "Bombardment/Curse" translated by Richard Schaaf

Resting on the hard secret of power - Pablo Neruda "Cordilleras" transl. by Maria Jacketti

Between the teeth of the hard earth - Pablo Neruda "The Disinterred One" translated by Donald D. Walsh

Stooped in the hard ash - Pablo Neruda "Hunger in the South" transl. by Jack Schmitt

A hard star which pierced the jungle - Pablo Neruda "Loves: Terusa (I)" transl. by Alastair Reid

With the salt of hard stars - Pablo Neruda "Night" transl. by Alastair Reid

The hard thread that will uphold the dawn - Pablo Neruda "Song to the Red Army on its Arrival at the Gates of Prussia" translated by Donald D. Walsh

Swordfish armed with hard arguments - Pablo Neruda "To Those at Odds" transl. by Alastair Reid

Hard road of knives - Pablo Neruda "The Unburied Woman of Paita" transl. by Maria Jacketti

The hard mountains walked with time - Pablo Neruda "The Unburied Woman of Paita" transl. by Maria Jacketti

A hard road and thorny - E. Nesbit "The Will to Live"

Hard to regret beauty and easy to lie - Caroline Harper New "The Bioluminescent Bays of Vieques"

Singing with a hard fist - Precious Okoyomon "The animal that is most vulnerable is usually the most cruel / It is impossible to separate it from what it remembers"

Hard ground and hard sky - Sharon Olds "Take the I Out"

Friends with the hard white stars - Mary Oliver "Stars"

And only hard furrows remain - Gregory Orr "River Inside the River"

The errors of an hardened prince - James Parkerson "The Convict's Farewell: with Advice to Criminals, before and after Trial"

The hard edge of historical light - Ed Pavlic "from "all along it was a fever: a what poem""

To a life worth the hardness - Carl Phillips "But Waves, They Scatter"

More permanent than hard distraction - Carl Phillips "So the Edge of the World"

The little souls that are so hard to find - Marjorie L.C. Pickthall "Mary Shepherdess"

Silver dust of a hard freeze - Emily Pittinos "A Cloud of Drench Bearing Down"

Trying to fly with hard little feet for wings - Miriam Clark Potter "The Two Little Flocks"

Teardrops of rosin harden and shine - Minnie Bruce Pratt "The Subway Entrance"

Used up on hard ground - Khadijah Queen "Anodyne"

Amber hardened into gold - Noel Quiñones "Orange"

The harder it will be to kill me - Gabriel Ramirez "Learn Your Song"

Feverish light flung hard upon their faces - Paisley Rekdal "Bats"

The hard crooked flying of buzzards - Lynn Riggs "The Arid Land"

Sets hard at its heart - Rainer Maria Rilke "Pieta"

Harder than agates against an egg-shell - Edwin Arlington Robinson "Late Summer"

Fresh tears wet upon the hard cold face - Rennell Rodd "Imperator Augustus"

Some hard dark shadow - Lee Ann Roripaugh "#to my mother's dementia #kaze no denwa"

Earth stood hard as iron - Christina Rossetti "A Christmas Carol [In the bleak mid-winter]"

Guide you from the edge of hard things - E.F. Schraeder "Procrastination (A Lullaby)"

The hardest knife ill-us'd doth lose his edge - William Shakespeare "Sonnet XCV"

How hard true sorrow hits - William Shakespeare "Sonnet CXX"

The hard shadow of the moon - Matthew Shenoda "Traces"

Hard on the track of passion - Dora Sigerson Shorter "The Blow Returned"

As if death were the hardest battle - Effie Smith "The Test"

Harbingers of hard wisdoms - Patricia Smith "10 Ways to Get Ray Charles and Ronald Reagan into the Same Poem"

With its hard spine & dog-eared corners - Tracy K. Smith "Sci-Fi"

Hard revelations - Wallace Stevens "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together"

More than I know of fear's hard presence - Keith Taylor "Three Springs"

Hard my path on earth is closed - Miguel Teurbe Tolón "Last Song of the Exile" transl. by Francisco Javier Vingut

Getting past the hardest places - Tu Fu "Song of P'eng-ya" transl. by Burton Watson

Were set to labour hard and long - Florence Tylee "A Song of Rest" [Chambers' Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, 5th series, no.138-v.III, 21 Aug. 1886]

a hard rain cancelled this existential parade - upfromsumdirt (Ron Davis) "As The Universe Yawns Brer Rabbit Spins A Yarn"

And the hard sunlight entered like a sword - Mark Van Doren "The Spring in the Pantry"

So hard and harsh the midnights chime - Emile Verhaeren "Les Villages Illusoires: The Fishermen" transl. by Alma Strettell

Where the history is harder to bear - Derek Walcott "Arkansas Testament XVIII"

The hard flint flaked to form - Bertrand N.O. Walker [Hen-toh] "Arrow-Heads"

Hard to learn forgiving - John Greenleaf Whittier "Barclay of Ury"

Hard in his heart's thought - "Wife's Lament" transl. from Old English by Kemp Malone

I've become a hard star out of focus - Keith S. Wilson "there aren't enough idioms about the stars"

Before the senses harden - Humbert Wolfe "Sometimes When I Think of Love"

Since no years can harden - Humbert Wolfe "V.D.F. (Ave atque Vale.)"

From the planet's hard side - Valerie Worth "Bull"

To walk hard in the bright places - Charles Wright "Bitter Herbs to Eat, and Dipped in Honey"

Surplus hardening to archive - Jenny Xie "Memory Soldier"

Until the hard daybreak - Jenny Xie "Ongoing"

Counting's hard in half-sleep - Jenny Xie "Rootless"

Hard tide of shame - Jenny Xie "Zazen"

Fistfuls of rain fall hard - Yi Lei "Nature Aria" transl. by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi

Still as gravestones and as hard - Jane Yolen "Baba Yaga Has Tea with Kostchai the Deathless"

Grows harder by sullen degrees - "You'll Come to Our Ball" [Mirror of Literature v.13 issue 358, Feb. 1829. Credited to London Magazine]


The hammer-hard heels of noon - Louise Imogen Guiney "The Serpent's Crown"


Beneath the hardback hour - Lucie Brock-Broido "Spain"


These mottled green and hard-bottled mineral songs - Catherine Bowman "Pears"


Not tears by a hard-bought mirth - Faith Baldwin "The Last Demand"


On our hard-bound soil - Margaret Fuller Ossoli "To Miss R. B."


Hard Luck.


Bars they can hardly lift - Hilda Conkling "Hills"

Little orange willow switches hardly bending - Mona Gould "Colour in the Willows"

The threads are so fine you can hardly see - "Grandmamma Spider" [A Tale of Two Monkeys, Project Gutenberg]

With hardly a glimmer of light or life - Kerry Hardie "Acceptance"

Arson is hardly required to set your body burning - Mark Jarman "Dispatches from Devereux Slough"

One can hardly blame the artist - Jane Miller "A Young Poet"

Hardly more than imagined - Kay Ryan "The Museum of False Starts"

Hardly now we see the flowers - Edward Shanks "A Night-Piece"


In our hardscrabble dreams - Cyrus Cassells "Caesars and Dreamers"


Hardship is a limit not a failing - Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris "thrift"

How I in harsh days hardship endured - "The Seafarer" transl. from 'the early Anglo-Saxon' by Ezra Pound


Teach us the hard-truths and hurt - Catherine Bowman "Pears"

Unfolded into the hard truths - Sharon Olds "Voices"


A mutation of myth hardwired - Ann K. Schwader "Quiet in Her Mind"


Hard won by cosmic art - Charles Bertram Johnson "Negro Poets"

On some hard-won eminence of hope - Don Marquis "The Comrade"


Without a single bounce hitting the hardwood - Edward Hirsch "Fast Break"


The terrible stillness of the adamant core and the steel-hard chain - Aldous Huxley "The Burning Wheel"


Your mind un-hardened by heart - Rebecca G. Biber "Little Portrait"


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