POETRY

Happy New Year, Club Readers! My name is Mark and I was asked to be this year's moderator. On this topic thread you can share poems or recommend any poetry collections you have enjoyed. Personally, I love these recommendations. If anyone has any thoughts or suggestions let me know.

-Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver



-The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich

^About a decade ago, a friend steered me into poetry and these were the first two poets he recommended. I have never looked back.

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

By Maggie Smith

Watching Over

This land I watch over
is a place with old stories
and plant medicine.
It is earth a mountain lion walks,
looking into the light of my life
in this little cabin made of stone laid on stone
love labored over love,
and happiness here a hundred years ago
when the fireplace was first made of this quartz,
a baby tooth pushed into the mortar.

It was the year my father was born
when people came from afar to see the new infant,
some walked long distances
from Paul’s Valley.

All were silent in his presence.
It’s the way we lived and live with the newly born.

The bison that lives here now went down the next valley
to hide in great trees.

For a time, that bison has watched over all of us.
Something often does.
Some call it god.
Some call it our ancestors, but the ones I see
in this small cabin are the lion,
the bear in spring
when ghostly wolves, not hungry,
pass by the herd of deer in silence this morning

and even the fox looks in my door
for no other reason
than to watch how I live, to be sure
it is the right way.

-Linda Hogan From The Radiant Lives of Animals

Thanks for two great poems to start 2025, Mark!

Morning After The Election

I can’t control
the vanishing
of bees

but I can control
the honey I swallow
to soothe
the vocal cords

I can’t control boys
bully-tumbling
another boy

in the classroom
like they’re
in a mosh pit

but I can remember
rolling on hills
with boys being the bully

I can’t change my major
from drama to global peace

but I can write
similes of serenity

& poetic sermons
in temples
of matrimonial fanfare

I know the bombs, the explosives,
and Molotovs are overhead

and I can’t control
the lottery, the multiverses,
and tomorrow’s astrology

but whatever tarot card I pick
or whatever
gets thrown
at my face:

Hangman
or Fallen Towers

I can express
my weathering emotions

to sing while hoarse
to control air placement
to find the chakra

the right amount of air
to pass through my throat

oh sing with me
the octave between

blade & nectar
rubble & clouds
ash & mountain

-Regie Cabico From Poem-A-Day

Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

from Words Under the Words, Naomi Shihab Nye

>2 msf59: that Adrienne Riche appeals a lot!
>6 msf59: sounds about right
>7 DAGray08: perfect timing. quite an image, the crackling.

Welcome all and a happy new year.

I am starting my year with Forest of Noise by the Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha and I will share something from that here.

This is from Gaza Notebook (2021-2023) included in Mosab Abu Toha's collection above:

At fifth grade, I visit the school library.
On a wall by the door, a poster claims,
"If you read books, you live more than one life."
Now I'm thirty and whenever I look at faces
around me, old or young, on each forehead I read:
If you live in Gaza you die several times."

Wow, the place looks great, Mark. Congrats on indulging in some moderation for once.😀

Here’s “Instructions for Not Giving Up” from Ada Limon. Despite our being in the middle of winter, the title and sentiment seemed quite appropriate in this Trump-stained beginning:

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

>11 jnwelch: I love that Ada Limón. She's so good at getting to the interface of the natural world and the interior world.

Here's one for today and, also, this time as a whole:

Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me
by Jane Hirshfield

The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?

I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.

Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.

Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.

For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question.

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised.

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.

Today, I woke without answer.

The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend

don’t despair of this falling world, not yet

didn’t it give you the asking

>12 lisapeet: a little helpful today

Scotty and the Rib Tips

So they tell me, get your act together
Write something, make it new for a change
Give up on those errant habits
Go to Chicago
Be there for Birth of Slam
Knock down a few bowling pin icons
Bowling allies, new stain t-shirts
Statues of lint and a make-my-day jockstrap
I’ll sit in with Scotty and the Rib Tips
Watch true brews slide down that mahogany bar
Run it by my man Sergio over at Weeds as we
Wait for the Queen of Poetry to drive in from el Boss Town

So tune up the poems performed to Marsyas’ flute
Keep the meddlesome chthonic wordslingers cranky
Invent a bonus alley, grab the moon
Climb on top of the speaker system and fly
Write a book and get it out
Invent a pseudonym to review it, rave
Rave rave along the Lake
Rehearse the verse all ears radar Michigan
And fall in love a few times so nobody knows about it
Keep it to myself, a few poems quit, quite, and quiet
Outside of so-called competition and the waving blades
Making slow smoky patterns at the old Green Mill

-Bob Holman From Poem-A-Day

^I love this homage to Chicago- my hometown. The Green Mill is an historic jazz club.

Fun stuff. Makes me want to write poetry (and, no, i don’t)

Remember

Remember the sky that you were born under,

know each of the star’s stories.

Remember the moon, know who she is.

Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the

strongest point of time. Remember sundown

and the giving away to night.

Remember your birth, how your mother struggled

to give you form and breath. You are evidence of

her life, and her mother’s, and hers.

Remember your father. He is your life, also.

Remember the earth whose skin you are:

red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth

brown earth, we are earth.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their

tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,

listen to them. They are alive poems.

Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the

origin of this universe.

Remember you are all people and all people

are you.

Remember you are this universe and this

universe is you.

Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.

Remember language comes from this.

Remember the dance language is, that life is.

Remember.

- Joy Harjo

>16 msf59: Love it!

My Kristang Awakening

You sounded like music in my ears
as the elderly sat and chatted away.
I did not understand you
but felt very safe with you.

You started to disappear.
I hardly heard you.
And then you left without any warning.
Life was not the same.

Occasionally, I will hear you.
At family parties, in Malacca, in the bus,
Memories will flow back
and bring a smile to my face.
I know you.

One day I heard that someone
was introducing you to strangers.
I wanted to be one of the strangers.
I wanted to embrace you and say
'I'm sorry. I should have never let you go.'

Today you are a part of me.
I've found you again
and I will never let you go.
Friendly faces help me grow
in strength with you.

A voice inside of me shouts out with pride:
'Awaken Kristang! Awaken!
Speak Kristang! Speak!'
And I feel whole again.

Martha Fernandez

From Poems from the Edge of Extinction. Kristang is a creole language spoken primarily by Eurasians of Portuguese descent particularly around Malacca, West Malaysia, Singapore, and Macau. Thought this one was interesting to post since it's about the language itself.

>18 mabith: I like this one. Thanks for sharing.

>18 mabith: i first read that trying to imagine what Kristang was and assuming it was a god or goddess. Then reread it after reading your note. Explains the sounds, but keeps that sacred feel. A sacred language. Lovely poem M.

>20 dchaikin: That was exactly my experience while reading it! There are multiple poems in the book which address the language they're written in/the fact of language endangerment, but because that one initially felt like it could be about something else (tangible or not), it felt a bit special.

The Angels

As the day turned to dusk, we sensed we could feel
the people we’d loved and lost calling
like a breeze that suggests itself but never
actually awakens the trees. She told me
again about the moment she decided to let
our first child go so she could go on
living herself, and I remembered
how once, as a young man, I’d walked by myself
for a day, until I was lost and came
to a boulder and a creek. She remembered yearning
to comfort our baby after we’d scattered
her ashes, and I remembered that the sun
had been warm; the sound of the creek had filled me
with something as different from thought or song
as a dream. She said she still dreamed of Audrey,
our lost child. And then I told her again
that when dusk fell, a clutch of black birds landed.
Even when I stood up and gestured, there
in that unfamiliar landscape, they refused to fly away.
I think they were hungry. But I had nowhere else to go,
so I lay down under stars so sharp
in that darkness they hurt my eyes, even
when my eyes were closed. All night those black birds
stood watching, waiting for something. Like angels,
she said then and laughed, though I don’t think she was joking.

-Michael Hettich From Poem-A-Day

Sad and sweet to wake up to, and maybe a little mysterious as I don’t see angels merely watching and waiting, or maybe that’s less mysterious than it seems. Thanks Mark.

I have just finished Stag's Leap which was Sharon Olds' Pulitzer Prize winning collection (won in 2013).

The collection is concerned with the breakdown of her marriage. This is "The Flurry"


When we talk about when to tell the kids,
we are so together, so concentrated.
I mutter, 'I feel like a killer.' 'I'm
the killer'—taking my wrist-he says,
holding it. He is sitting on the couch,
the worn indigo chintz around him,
rich as a night tide, with jellies,
I am sitting on the floor. I look up at him
as if within some chamber of matedness
some dust I carry around me. Tonight,
to breathe its Magellanic field is less
painful, maybe because he is drinking
a wine grown where I was born—fog,
eucalyptus, sempervirens—and I'm
sharing the glass with him. 'Don't catch
my cold,' he says,'—oh, that's right, you want
to catch my cold.' I should not have told him that,
I tell him I will try to fall out of
love with him, but I feel I will love him
all my life. He says he loves me
as the mother of our children, and new troupes
of tears mount to the acrobat platforms
of my ducts and do their burning leaps,
some of them jump straight sideways, and for a
moment, I imagine a flurry
of tears like a wirra of knives thrown
at a figure to outline it—a heart's spurt
of rage. It glitters, in my vision, I nod
to it, it is my hope.

The collection is well worth a read.

'The Envoy of Mr. Cogito
By Zbigniew Herbert

Go where those others went to the dark boundary
for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize

go upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important

and let your helpless Anger be like the sea
whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

let your sister Scorn not leave you
for the informers executioners cowards—they will win
they will go to your funeral and with relief will throw a lump of earth
the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography

and do not forgive truly it is not in your power
to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

beware however of unnecessary pride
keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror
repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak

light on a wall the splendour of the sky
they don’t need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you

be vigilant—when the light on the mountains gives the sign—arise and go
as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star

repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand

and they will reward you with what they have at hand
with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls
to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

Be faithful Go'

from Zbigniew Herbert's Mr. Cogito

>16 msf59: Fantastic, I love Joy Harjo's work.

>24 PaulCranswick: Strong stuff, Paul. I will have to get to this collection.

>24 PaulCranswick: Stag’s Leap is a terrific collection. I read it on 2013 and then immediately read a larger (but less cohesive) collection by her.

>25 DAGray08: hmm. I’ll to honor the title and think on that one. Sounds like he sending someone off, someone else, no him, to sacrifice themselves. 🙂

I bought two books earlier today in a bookstore in downtown Santa Cruz CA - You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World - edited by Ada Limón (2024), and, in their used section: Horace: The Odes: New Translations by Contemporary Poets edited by J.D. McClatchy (2002). I’ll share if anything strikes me.

>29 dchaikin: Was that the Bookshop Santa Cruz? I went there many years ago with my best friend from medical school and his wife, and I loved it.

Yes, Darryl, exactly. 1520 Pacific Avenue 🙂 It’s nice to know you’ve been there too.

But Since You Finally Asked

No one asked us…what we thought of Jamestown…in 1619…they didn’t even say…”Welcome”…”You’re Home”…or even a pitiful…”I’m sorry…but we just can’t make it…without you”…No…No one said a word…They just snatched our drums…separated us by language and gender…and put us on blocks…where our beauty…like our dignity…was ignored.

No one said a word…in 1776…to us about Freedom…The rebels wouldn’t pretend…the British lied…We kept to a space…where we owned our souls…since we understood…another century would pass…before we owned our bodies…But we raised our voices…in a mighty cry…to the Heavens above…for the strength to endure.

No one says…”What I like about your people”…then ticks off the wonder of the wonderful things…we’ve given…Our song to God, Our strength to the Earth…our unfailing belief in forgiveness…I know what I like about us…is that we let no one turn us around…not then…not now…we plant our feet…on higher ground…I like who we were…and who we are…and since someone has asked…let me say; I am proud to be a Black American…I am proud that my people laboured honestly…with forbearance and dignity…I am proud that we believe…as no other people do…that all are equal in His sight…We didn’t write a constitution…we live one…We didn’t say “We the People”…we are one…We didn’t have to add…as an after-thought…”Under God”…We turn our faces to the rising sun…knowing…a New Day…is always…beginning

- Nikki Giovanni

>32 msf59: Yes!! That is a fabulous poem, one that sings and resonates deeply within my soul. Thanks for posting it here, Mark!

Terrific!

From Victorian Austin Dobson:

When Phoebus touched the Poet's trembling
Ear
With one supreme Commandment, Be thou
Clear...

>35 m.belljackson: tell more about it. 🙂

As i sat on my now deplaned flight, I read this - the opening of Horace’s ode 4.7 ( 13 bce) translated by A. E. Housman in 1914:

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
    And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
    And altered is the fashion of the earth.

(Now awaiting a new plane)

>36 dchaikin: Words from Victorian Poetry =

A DIALOGUE
TO THE MEMORY OF MR. ALEXANDER POPE
1888

Dobson's quote comes midway to praise Pope for wit, poetry...
and "Satire sparkling tho' severe..."

"12 Poems That Celebrate the Thrill of a Fresh Start": https://reactormag.com/12-poems-that-celebrate-the-thrill-of-a-fresh-start/ (the titles in the article lead to the complete poems; the article has excerpts in it)

Just a few weeks from getting our hands in the dirt, trying to grow what we can in our back yard. I usually find myself reading Wendell Berry in between projects.

'Sabbath VIII, 1979
Wendell Berry

I go from the woods into the cleared field:
A place no human made, a place unmade
By human greed, and to be made again.
Where centuries of leaves once built by dying
A deathless potency of light and stone
And mold of all that grew and fell, the timeless
Fell into time. The earth fled with the rain,
The growth of fifty thousand years undone
In a few careless seasons, stripped to rock
And clay—a “new land,” truly, that no race
Was ever native to, but hungry mice
And sparrows and the circling hawks, dry thorns
And thistles sent by generosity
Of new beginning. No Eden, this was
A garden once, a good and perfect gift;
Its possible abundance stood in it
As it then stood. But now what it might be
Must be foreseen, darkly, through many lives—
Thousands of years to make it what it was,
Beginning now, in our few troubled days.'

from This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems

Healing

Lean into it, the breeze suggests.
Dig deeper, says the dirt.
Sometimes the hurt you feel
means you're standing in the wrong place.
Move over.
This hurt wasn't meant for people.
It wasn't meant to land anywhere.
It's the cosmic ache of the atomosphere
drifting through, the give-and-take,
push-pull flow.
You know when it passes,
the lift of the air.
Hear the held note like
the quiet humming
an orchestra tunes to.
That's for you.

Naomi Shihab Nye in Grace Notes: poems about family

Not Pass Away
I did not "lose" my mother.

The space
where the mother was
is very large.

Vines still root themselves
in soft dirt

Pink roses pop open
in the cold

Even trees
whole trees
inhabit the space

speckled
light and shadow
a branch's embrace

say
look up
look out
everywhere
her home
now

Naomi Shihab Nye in Grace Notes: poems about family

>39 DAGray08: >40 markon: - not in tune with the freeze and snow expected in Houston next week

>41 markon: beautiful

>39 DAGray08: I like the Berry poem. A good one.

>40 markon: >41 markon: Thanks for sharing the Nye poems. I am a fan of her work but haven't read any of her poetry in awhile.

>41 markon: I love how this poem begins, with that hateful, palliative phrase.

Horace Odes (23 bce) I.11

Don't ask, Clarice, we're not supposed to know
what end the gods intend for us.
Take my advice: dont gamble so
on horoscopes of Babylon. Far better just

to take what heaven might allot us, whether
it's winters galore, and more, until we're stiff,
or only this one wintertime to end all others,
grinding the Tuscany Sea with its pumice of cliff.

Get wise. Get wine, and one good filter for it.
Cut that high hope down to size, and pour it
into something fit for men. Think less
of more tomorrows, more of this

one second, endlessly unique: it's
jealous, even as we speak, and it's
about to split again.

(Translated from Latin by Heather McHugh 2002)

In Celebration of Robert Burns Birthday on January 25th,
here's:

A red red rose
Auld Land Syne
and
My Heart's in the Highlands!

(All performed online.)

This is from Lessons of the War by Henry Reed


Things may be the same again; and we must fight
Not in the hope of winning but rather of keeping
Something alive; so that when we meet our end,
It may be said that we tackled whatever we could,
That battle-fit we lived, and though defeated,
Not without glory fought.

This is how Patrick Hennessey closes his reflections on army life in The Junior Officers' Reading Club.

>45 dchaikin: Good one, Daniel.

>47 PaulCranswick: I like that, Paul.

Ode To Bird Watching

Now
Let's look for birds!
The tall iron branches
in the forest,
The dense
fertility on the ground.
The world
is wet.
A dewdrop or raindrop
shines,
a diminutive star
among the leaves.
The morning time
mother earth
is cool.
The air
is like a river
which shakes
the silence.
It smells of rosemary,
of space
and roots.
Overhead,
a crazy song.
It's a bird.
How
out of its throat
smaller than a finger
can there fall the waters
of its song?

-Pablo Neruda

>49 msf59: ❤️

This is the title poem from the outstanding collection Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza by Mosab Abu Toha, which I just reviewed on my thread:

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear
For Alicia M. Quesnel, MD

i

When you open my ear, touch it
gently.
My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.
Her voice is the echo that helps recover my equilibrium
when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness.

You may encounter songs in Arabic,
poems in English I recite to myself,
or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard.

When you stitch the cut, don’t forget to put all these back in my ear.
Put them back in order as you would do with books on your shelf.

ii

The drone’s buzzing sound,
the roar of an F-16,
the screams of bombs falling on houses,
on fields, and on bodies,
of rockets flying away—
rid my small ear canal of them all.

Spray the perfume of your smiles on the incision.
Inject the song of life into my veins to wake me up.
Gently beat the drum so my mind may dance with yours,
my doctor, day and night.

>51 kidzdoc: Good poem, Darryl. Thanks for sharing.

The Year of the Goldfinches

There were two that hung and hovered
by the mud puddle and the musk thistle.
Flitting from one splintered fence post
to another, bathing in the rainwater’s glint
like it was a mirror to some other universe
where things were more acceptable, easier
than the place I lived. I’d watch for them:
the bright peacocking male, the low-watt
female, on each morning walk, days spent
digging for some sort of elusive answer
to the question my curving figure made.
Later, I learned that they were a symbol
of resurrection. Of course they were,
my two yellow-winged twins feasting
on thorns and liking it.

-By Ada Limón

>51 kidzdoc: I just added that to my collection, Darryl and last month read the excellent Forest of Noise.

Nobody writes more poetically than the Bard of Avon

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

From Macbeth (Act 5 Sc 4)

>55 PaulCranswick: You got that right, Paul. Wow!

>53 msf59: i love this.

>55 PaulCranswick: it’s like William Faulkner, Ikea style. Just need to wrap novels around the lines. It’s a wonderful thing.

The Creek in Shirley Canyon

A long, slow dusk on the day before solstice—
I did it, I did it, I did it: song of the pond frogs.
Shrill piping of the cliff swallows, fluting of a vireo,
Raspy song of the Bewick’s wren. Such commotion
In the trees! These evenings of long light
Must be high festival to them. It’s the time
When the light seems tender in the needles

Of the pine, the shimmer of the aspen leaves
Seems kindly on the cliff face, gleams
On the patches and gullies of snow summer
Hasn’t touched yet. And the creek is flush
With life, streams of snow melt cascading down
The glacial spills of granite in a turbulence
The ouzel, picking off insects in the spray,
Seems thrilled by, water on water funneling,
Foam on foam, existence pouring out
Its one meaning, which is flow. Up here,
In the last light, the vireo’s warble declares,
Repeats, falls silent. The swallows, soaring,
Dipping. They must be feeding their young
The insects they are gleaning from the pond.
And the frogs: I did it, I did it, I did it
Fall silent one by one as dark comes on.

-Robert Hass from Poem-A-Day

^It looks like I have a bird theme going these days. I do love the birdies.

They’re lovely birds. Does a vireo warble? What is a vireo?

Turns out there is a variety called warbling vireo. So, yes.

-Warbling Vireo

^We get several different vireos passing through Northern Illinois during migration, including the very vocal warbling vireo. We also see red-eyed vireos, which are also vocal.

Funk (#49 song)

An eye from the Creator,
a fire, bright, setting slowly
over the cusp of the “new world,”

kissing the Old World, softly
to sleep, it is the kissing that is soft,
not the sleeping.

Under the light of that unwanted dawn there is
a warrior still left standing, we
war-journey them

to the battle and back,
to the battle and back,
to the battle and back,

radiance, felt through the
water that flows blue but runs red,
around and around

that quickly setting sun,

around and around
a circle, there are
songs for the way our warriors
used to honorably drift away

We used to die in battle
but today they ring out
— “whatchu tryna tell me?”
while we slosh a bottle around,
we laugh about how we are singing

Songs from the wrong eagles,
our war journey is through the hills
with the windows down

In a red ford with
the tribal tag torn
and a car battery in the front seat

We are nurtured,
Remembered,
by the birds who fly
around and around

while we hit our hands
on the hoods of clunkers
and when it stops being sacred,

We laugh,
We funk #49,
here we live,
here we are live.

We laugh,
my warrior, we aren’t
the warriors, of anything
like that, anymore.

-Lily Painter From Poem-A-Day

LISTEN

I threw a snowball across the backyard.
My dog ran after it to bring it back.
It broke as it fell, scattering snow over snow.
She stood confused, seeing and smelling nothing.
She searched in widening circles until I called her.

She looked at me and said as clearly in silence
as if she had spoken,
I know it's here, I'll find it,
went back to the center and started the circles again.

I called her two more times before she came
slowly, stopping once to look back.

That was this morning. I'm sure that she's forgotten.
I've had some trouble putting it out of my mind.

-- Miller Williams

>62 msf59: thanks Mark. Good stuff. >63 KeithChaffee: love this, Keith. I might be thinking about it a while too.

Snowy Night

Last night, an owl
in the blue dark
tossed an indeterminate number
of carefully shaped sounds into
the world, in which,
a quarter of a mile away, I happened
to be standing.
I couldn’t tell
which one it was –
the barred or the great-horned
ship of the air –
it was that distant. But, anyway,
aren’t there moments
that are better than knowing something,
and sweeter? Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness. I suppose
if this were someone else’s story
they would have insisted on knowing
whatever is knowable – would have hurried
over the fields
to name it – the owl, I mean.
But it’s mine, this poem of the night,
and I just stood there, listening and holding out
my hands to the soft glitter
falling through the air. I love this world,
but not for its answers.
And I wish good luck to the owl,
whatever its name –
and I wish great welcome to the snow,
whatever its severe and comfortless
and beautiful meaning.

by Mary Oliver

Love that Oliver poem. Thanks Mark!

My Heart
Kim Addonizio

That Mississippi chicken shack.
That initial-scarred tabletop,
that tiny little dance floor to the left of the band.
That kiosk at the mall selling caramels and kitsch.
That tollbooth with its white-plastic-gloved worker
handing you your change.
That phone booth with the receiver ripped out.
That dressing room in the fetish boutique,
those curtains and mirrors.
That funhouse, that horror, that soundtrack of screams.
That putti-filled heaven raining gilt from the ceiling.
That haven for truckers, that bottomless cup.
That biome. That wilderness preserve.
That landing strip with no runway lights
where you are aiming your plane,
imagining a voice in the tower,
imagining a tower.

>67 DAGray08: I like that one. Thanks for sharing.

Theft

A nightly spell of sleep falls
heavy on the sea.
Blue whales undulate their slow song,
while soft-bellied mollusks are carried
down, sand-ways like a wound.

These swaying underwater breezes,
this gentle flotsam of an oceanic dream
are all for me, querida – a keepsake
of my savage grief.
Artifacts of deaths that no one died,
ashes brimming with unnamed souls.
I hate this disconnected dream,
this crystalline suburbia,
this history without light.
You are the machine, I make and
remake in my sleep.

We could not save
each other or ourselves in this forgetfulness.
Yet, in the making, we disappeared
into sound dressed in gray,
where they said our hearts lived.
Where the sword decides and
Foucault lectures to the ghosts of crows
about sex and the biopolitic.
And what of colonialism? they squawk,
Y que del negro atado?
The sea distanced itself and sang
of its guilty blood, of the bodies
consumed in its salty lather.
Forgive these ravenous waves
for demanding sacrifice, a buffet of
flesh and fat spread thick and fragrant.
Pain is a difficult animal to domesticate.

-Mónica Alexandra Jiménez From Poem-A-Day

Wow! Lots of poetry activity here.

May Sarton

Rinsing the Eye

There is a thin glass
Between me and everything I see.
The glass is pain.
How to slide it away,
Unblur my vision?

“We must rinse the eye,”
My old friend, the poet,
Used to say.
But that was in Belgium
Many years ago.

Raymond is dead
And I am in exile,
Old and ill.

My eye turns inward
To rest on three poplars
And a lost garden.
The delphinium is very blue.
The columbine, purple and white,
Trembles in the breeze
And there are tall yellow daisies.

“We must rinse the eye,”
The poet reminds me
While his wife calls out
To the children to hurry.
The garden must be watered
Before dark,
And we run for the pails.

Nothing is blurred now,
Everything is quite clear
In the poignant evening light.
An explosion of memory
Has rinsed my eye.

Thom Gunn

My Sad Captains

One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!
but before they fade they stand
perfectly embodied, all

the past lapping them like a
cloak of chaos. They were men
who, I thought, lived only to
renew the wasteful force they
spent with each hot convulsion.
They remind me, distant now.

True, they are not at rest yet,
but now that they are indeed
apart, winnowed from failures,
they withdraw to an orbit
and turn with disinterested
hard energy, like the stars.

The Lord is American

The world undresses
its wounds. It wounds. This Father—
His memory, torn
clouds: forgetful weather.
God’s goodness licks
bowls bone-clean. Our fingers
twist crumbs from air.
We are hungry children
abandoned by our country
for bombs. For Rockets’ Red glare. How
could we ever be patriots?
My father is my flag.
The national anthem is
every word, every single word
my mother could not whisper—
could not say,
could not say:
her father colonized her.
Made her mother nasty with jealousy.
Could not say: she can’t stay
In this world of touching.
It maims.
It elects evil.
It is two gendered.
It kneels on Sunday.
The Lord is
American &
aims His rifle
at us, His children
once beggars
rise into guerrillas.

-W. J. Lofton From Poem-A-Day

Reader, if you desire flight on diaphanous wings into brightest clearest Worth,
be attentive to sky.
and once you spy your target, kick forever away from earth.

Oh night-sung bird, draw the canopy of thorns
to shield your bones - spring arrives before too long.
The rose prince shall claim his green throne.

What firmly hides, hard in winter's bud, you may never see. Yet,
Keep hope fresh.
Within that stilled sap, towards life, stir subtle chemistries.

In the shadow of night, a breeze journeys to whisper You,
to me.
I yield this heart, too, to go as that wind - whatever must be, Be.

HAFEZ

>73 m.belljackson: Good one, Marianne. Thanks for sharing.

>67 DAGray08: >69 msf59: >70 dianeham: >71 dianeham: >72 msf59: >73 m.belljackson: great stuff. Enjoying this.

I especially love the 1st ten lines of the Lofton poem - “ God’s goodness licks/bowls bone-clean. Our fingers/twist crumbs from air.” !! ( >72 msf59: ) and the 1st stanza of the Hafez which makes me want to start kicking (>73 m.belljackson: )

>71 dianeham: Thanks for posting this. I do like Thom Gunn's work.

Hummingbird Abecedarian

Arriving with throats like nipped roses, like a tiny
bloom fastened to each neck, nothing else
cuts the air quite like this thrum to make the small
dog at my feet whine and yelp. So we wait—no
excitement pinned to the sky so needled and our days open
full of rain for weeks. Nothing yet from the ground speaks
green except weeds. But soon you see a familiar shadow
hovering where the glass feeders you brought
inside used to hang because the ice might shatter the pollen
junk and leaf bits collected after this windiest, wildest of winters.
Kin across the ocean surely felt this little jump of blood, this
little heartbeat, perhaps brushed across my grandmother’s
mostly grey braid snaked down her brown
neck and back across the Indian and the widest part of the Pacific
ocean, across the Mississippi, and back underneath my
patio. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve been silent in my lungs,
quiet as a salamander. Those times I wanted to decipher the mutter
rolled off a stranger’s full and beautiful lips. I only knew they
spoke in Malayalam—my father’s language—and how
terrific it’d sound if I could make my own slow mouth
ululate like that in utter sorrow or joy. I’m certain I’d be
voracious with each light and peppered syllable
winged back to me in the form of this sort of faith, a gift like
xenia offered to me. And now I must give it back to this tiny bird, its
yield far greener and greater than I could ever repay—a light like
zirconia—hoping for something so simple and sweet to sip.

-Aimee Nezhukumatathil

^Because I am not the brightest bulb I had to look up Abecedarian. It is defined- as arranged alphabetically or related to the alphabet. It makes this poem even more awesome.

From Langston Hughes LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN:

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed -
Let it be that great strong land of love

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

>77 msf59: terrific!

Last Sky World Burn

what the birds know is the way home

it begins with a door that cannot find its own name

the bird who stitches together the last sky must sing the name into existence

and the door opens into the burning of the world

through the door we find each other

and in the wholeness the birds

collective rupture into species being

the last sky world burn sings itself into our feet

soles imbued with prophecy of dirt

good lord last sky world burn there is something beyond you

the birds are taking us to find it

you are singing the door open for us

and through it streams the flood of the people

the feet of the flood of the people burn the world as they run

the last sky world burn is desperate to open the door for us

there are birds making treaties with the sky to facilitate its arrival

there are feet conspiring with the land to ensure the world burn is total

last sky will empty itself of airplanes and war jets to make room for our spirits

the last sky world burn is a sketch of a coming dream

it is our duty to believe in its inevitable birth

the last sky world burn asks a question

it is our responsibility to make the answer

-Fargo Nissim Tbakhi From Poem-A-Day

^Lots to chew on here.

Lots of wonderful poems here! I'm sharing two more I like from Audre Lorde's first book of poetry, The last cities.

Coal

I
Is the total black being spoken
From the earth's inside.
There are many kinds of open.
How a diamond comes into a knot of flame
How a sound comes into a word, coloured
By who pays what for speaking.

Some words are open
Like a diamond on glass windows
Singing out within the crash of passing sun
Then there are words like stapled wagers
In a perforated book-¬ buy and sign and tear apart-
And come whatever wills all chances
The stub remains
An ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.
Some words live in my throat
Breeding like adders. Others know sun
Seeking like gypsies over my tongue
To explode through my lips
Like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Some words
Bedevil me.

Love is a word another kind of open –
As a diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am black because I come from the earth's inside
Take my word for jewel in your open light.

First appearance of this poem in print.

also from The last cities
ETA: I took screen cap of the poem to get the spacing to show.

>81 markon: >82 markon: Thanks for sharing both of these.

Given that the USA is composed of immigrants in addition to its now small native peoples, the harsh rhetoric on closing borders does jar a little. Reminded me of this one:

What Johnny Cash Sang

Johnny sang from sea to shining sea -
and the ships sailed into Ellis Island
and a melting pot melted
and Armenians, Paddies, Italianos,
and Jews and Poles and Russians
came and placed their stamp on unwashed
city streets;
making a beehive of workers with no Queen.

Johnny sang from sea to shining sea
and the ships sailed into San Francisco
with the Coolies and the Asiatics
and their trade and their actors
sweated on the railways,
not always cross-legged on the casting couches.

Johnny sang from sea to shining sea
and the wagons rolled across the plains
and the prairies -
Germanic and Nordic ploughing a furrow
and energising a rice bowl and a wheat field
from unpromising circumstances.
And the Hamish and the Quakers and
the Mormons and the Shakers
were not shook from their belief
as they trod unorthodox pathways.

Johnny sang from sea to shining sea
and the slave ships entered
chains and locks cutting through skin
into bone
and the cotton fields were plucked
on the backs of unpaid labour
and America awoke slowly through
the paining cannons of Gettysburg
and the white hoods a-burnin'
and the bus seat of Rosa Parks
to a nation to be proud of
and where woman and man
and black and white and yellow and red
could call each other brother and sister.

>84 PaulCranswick: That is a keeper, Paul. Who is the poet?

>84 PaulCranswick: The poet is me, Mark. That is one of mine.

>81 markon: So many diamonds in this poem. 'Some words live in my throat/Breeding like adders' ... Always loved Audre Lorde's work - need to pull her book back off the shelf.

In Perpetual Spring
by Amy Gerstler

Gardens are also good places
to sulk. You pass beds of
spiky voodoo lilies
and trip over the roots
of a sweet gum tree,
in search of medieval
plants whose leaves,
when they drop off
turn into birds
if they fall on land,
and colored carp if they
plop into water.

Suddenly the archetypal
human desire for peace
with every other species
wells up in you. The lion
and the lamb cuddling up.
The snake and the snail, kissing.
Even the prick of the thistle,
queen of the weeds, revives
your secret belief
in perpetual spring,
your faith that for every hurt
there is a leaf to cure it.

_____

I read an article recently about how regions with four seasons are increasingly seeing only two - spring and fall are being lost to climate change. It put me in mind of spring poems.

>86 PaulCranswick: Very impressive, Paul. Nice work.

>88 rasdhar: I really like that one.

A Beautiful House with a Hot Tub and Pool

I miss my magnolias, miss my maples, think
where did they go, think, oh yes, to the past,
that place where everything goes and can I visit?
No, but also yes. And can I stay away? Also yes,
but also no. And in the same way that languages
only get simpler, people only get sadder. Yesterday
at the dentist I thought Thank god for nitrous oxide
and I thought Thank god for Dr. Rachel drilling away
in my tooth but wanting nothing she does to hurt me.
I wish that were true all the time. That we all wanted
nothing we did to hurt anyone at all. My friend

with a beautiful house insists that we call his pet
a companion animal, which I don’t think changes
very much, but I want nothing that I do to hurt him,
so I call his dog a companion animal, and then
I think Is that what my trees were? Not really
my trees, but companion trees, offering me
their flowers and then their leaves, offering me
their oxygen in exchange for my carbon dioxide,
not exactly grateful for my copious applications
of neem oil to kill the parasites invading their branches
but flourishing in the absence of those pests, the flowers
and leaves all I really wanted in return. I miss
my companion trees, my flowering Jane,
my flowering Brown Beauty, my flowering Star,
my leafy red maples, scarlet and feathery
all summer. My friend’s companion animal is licking
my face and my friend asks Could you be content
anywhere? And I say Yes, I can be content anywhere,
but then I think Is that true? Of course it’s easy to be content
at my handsome friend’s beautiful house, by his
heated pool, in what might be a physical manifestation
of contentment if ever there was one. So I think it again
on the subway, think it again writing emails, think it again,
but alas sadly: No. It’s not true. I can’t be content here
in my uncomfortable present, in my uncomfortable chair,

on the uncomfortable subway, at this uncomfortable desk,

in this uncomfortable classroom. But oddly, I am content

to visit the past, to say Hello everything I’ve lost,

to say I wish you could come here to the present,

my lost companion trees. I wish you could meet

everything I’ve found.

-Jason Schneiderman From Poem-A-Day

Mark - Trees, definitely Yes! The Willows, Maples, Elms, Oaks, Arbor, Lilac, Hickory...

Dictators, definitely No.

From Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

...

>91 m.belljackson: So many great lines in that Yeats poem. A classic that still resonates.

What I Carried

I carried my fear of the world
to my children, but they refused it.

I carried my fear of the world
on my chest, where I once carried
my children, where some nights it slept
as newborns sleep, where it purred
but mostly growled, where it licked
sweat from my clavicles.

I carried my fear of the world
and apprenticed myself to the fear.

I carried my fear of the world
and it became my teacher.
I carried it, and it repaid me
by teaching me how to carry it.

I carried my fear of the world
the way an animal carries a kill in its jaws
but in reverse: I was the kill, the gift.
Whose feet would I be left at?

I carried my fear of the world
as if it could protect me from the world.

I carried my fear of the world
and for my children modeled marveling
at its beauty but keeping my hands still—
keeping my eyes on its mouth, its teeth.

I carried my fear of the world.
I stroked it or I did not dare to stroke it.

I carried my fear of the world
and it became my teacher.
It taught me how to keep quiet and still

I carried my fear of the world
and my love for the world.
I carried my terrible awe.

I carried my fear of the world
without knowing how to set it down.

I carried my fear of the world
and let it nuzzle close to me,
and when it nipped, when it bit
down hard to taste me, part of me
shined: I had been right.

I carried my fear of the world
and it taught me I had been right.
I carried it and loved it
for making me right.

I carried my fear of the world
and it taught me how to carry it.

I carried my fear of the world
to my children and laid it down
at their feet, a kill, a gift.
Or I was laid at their feet.

-Maggie Smith

Catching up, guys. Here and everywhere

>77 msf59: i had to read this twice, the second time paying attention to the alphabet. But i find it quite beautiful

>84 PaulCranswick: whoa! Paul, thank you. Fanatic! ❤️ (timely). I’m so glad to know you write poetry and have gifted us this poem

>88 rasdhar: gosh, I love this.

>90 msf59: companion trees! Also i’ve been listening to Humphry Davy’s experiments with Nitrous Oxide (laughing gas). Unfortunately he didn’t consider anesthesia in roughly 1815.

>91 m.belljackson: one to be reminded of. Especially now

>93 msf59: those 1st two stanzas are especially powerful

>94 dchaikin: Thank you for that, Dan. Poetry may be a dying art but it is not yet dead!

>91 m.belljackson: Robert B. Parker, Rennie Airth, Woody Allen and of course Chinua Achebe mined that poem for titles. Anybody else?

Discovered this one in one of my home territory newspapers, The River Reporter, published in Narrowsburg, NY, for the last 50 years.



"Somebody has to believe in the saving of things...
for the wild holiness of noticing"

Montague has a Substack newsletter worth subscribing to.

HOPE IS NOT A BIRD, EMILY, IT'S A SEWER RAT

Hope is not the thing with feathers
That comes home to roost
When you need it most.

Hope is an ugly thing
With teeth and claws and
Patchy fur that's seen some shit.

It's what thrives in the discards
And survives in the ugliest parts of our world,
Able to find a way to go on
When nothing else can even find a way in.

It's the gritty, nasty little carrier of such diseases as
Optimism, persistence,
Perseverance and joy,
Transmissible as it drags its tail across your path and
Bites you in the ass.

Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird,
Emily.
It's a lowly little sewer rat
That snorts pesticides like they were
Lines of coke and still
Shows up on time to work the next day
Looking no worse for wear.

--Caitlin Seida

>97 laytonwoman3rd: Thank you for this - I'm typing it on today's LT Review of Only One You - got permission from author!

Election Day, 1984

Did you ever see someone cold-cock a blind nun?
Well. I did. Two helpful idiots
Steered her across the tarmac to her plane
And led her smack into the wing.
She deplaned with two black eyes & a crooked wimple,
Bruised proof that the distinction is not simple
Between ineptitude and evil.
Today, with the President's red button playing
Such a prominent role,
Though I can't vote for it, I wonder
If evil could be safer, on the whole.

Carolyn Kizer from Harping On (1996)

From Life by Shane McCrae

I came from life from living I arrived

Nowhere in the midst of God in the midst of God

God is a city in which no one has ever lived

We live in houses like the houses we once had

Some in their first some in their last

I live in the house I lived in with my wife

The first year we were married a small white

House at the edge of campus it’s as if

We never graduated never left

Except she isn’t here and none of our

Friends but the friends who died so long ago

They aren’t our friends anymore

I do what old friends do

And love them anyway we eat together at the Waf-

fle House on Saturdays and wait all week to die

How many weeks now I don’t know

Except it can’t be more than three

Thousand I guess about three thousand sixty years or so

Or how long do young people live

Seems like it’s longer every day three thousand or

She would be here with me I have

Thought hard about it and I’m sure

But sometimes I feel like I’ve thought about

Her life for longer than she could have lived it

And mean to ask an angel why we can see

Everything but Earth from Heaven

But I don’t ask I don’t think I could stand to not

Be answered but I don’t think I could stand the answer

From Paris Review issue no. 227 (Winter 2018)

Sad and beautiful, Diane

"Inside me is a black-eyed animal"
from American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin
by Terrance Hayes

Inside me is a black-eyed animal
Bracing in a small stall. As if a bird
Could grow without breaking its shell.
As if the clatter of a thousand black
Birds whipping in a storm could be held
In a shell. Inside me is a huge black
Bull balled small enough to fit inside
The bead of a nipple ring. I mean to leave
A record of my raptures. I was raised
By a beautiful man. I loved his grasp of time.
My mother shaped my grasp of space.
Would you rather spend the rest of eternity
With your wild wings bewildering a cage or
With your four good feet stuck in a plot of dirt?

>103 rasdhar: interesting title of the collection. Terrific poem

High Stakes

Listen, I promise you, I have
no stake in this world. No
political affiliations unless
love is a political tool, unless
my body is a political tool,
unless my comrades are a
political tool. I have no
high stake in this world, no
children to want to leave
a better world to, nothing
but fucking & bookmaking
that is my legacy & it is as
undeniable as smoke; yet
may disappear like it too. I
turn on the news & not
owning pearls, I clutch my
fancy juicer to my chest
I gather around me my art
& my mirrors, my plants &
my price of the ticket—a bible.
I think they’re coming for
me. For it. For all my
million little nothings they
consider stakes in this world.
I got no gun, I got no pickup
I got no desire to burn the
world; I don’t own the world
I own stand mixers & an
eggplant colored Le Creuset
a tiny apartment with bad pipes
& creaking floors. I have
no stakes. I barely got health,
I barely got muscle. I want
a garden near an ocean
that won’t eventually swallow
me. I want my only job to be this:
clawing at a white page until Black
appears. & suddenly, in that moment
I got something—

-Yesenia Montilla From Poem-A-Day

>98 KeithChaffee: Brutal poem but I love it. Thanks for sharing.

>101 dianeham: I like the McRae poem.

>103 rasdhar: Good one. Thanks! I like Hayes.

* I see a darker trend in these latest poems. Reflection of the times? Hmmmmmm...

Going along with the prevailing theme, here is "Blood and Lead" from James Fenton:

Listen to what they did.
Don't listen to what they said.
What was written in blood
Has been set up in lead.

Lead tears the heart.
Lead tears the brain.
What was written in blood
Has been set up again.

The heart is a drum.
The drum has a snare.
The snare is in the blood.
The blood is in the air.

Listen to what they did.
Listen to what's to come.
Listen to the blood.
Listen to the drum.

>107 m.belljackson: that is excellent.

>107 m.belljackson: Good one, Marianne. Very fitting...

>108 dianeham: >109 msf59: Thank you both.

I recently discovered James Fenton in Joseph Anton -
and have listened to him reading his poems online in The Poetry Archive -
"Wind" is memorable.

>107 m.belljackson: Fantastic, and thank you for the introduction to James Fenton.

"my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell"
By Gwendolyn Brooks

I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry. I am incomplete.
And none can tell when I may dine again.
No man can give me any word but Wait,
The puny light. I keep eyes pointed in;
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out to their last dregs and I resume
On such legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can manage, remember to go home,
My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love.

>112 rasdhar: Good one, RV.

>112 rasdhar: Thank you for this - an echo of the old Russian Salt and Bread.

One more for when you have time - I was checking this quote to see if it was from Cervantes or Zafon THE CITY OF MIST

and entered it online: "A poet is the only being whose eyesight improves with age."

and found this poem added: "I arrived home to find the large Red Tailed Hawk..."

It is complete with a beautiful photograph.

My Number

Is Death miles away from this house,
reaching for a window in Cinncinati
or breathing down the neck of a lost hiker
in British Columbia?

Is he too busy making arrangements,
tampering with air brakes,
scattering cancer cells like seeds,
loosening the wooden beams of roller coasters

to bother with my hidden cottage
that visitors find so hard to find?

Or is he stepping from a black car
parked at the dark end of the lane,
shaking open the familiar cloak,
its hood raised like the head of a crow,
and removing the scythe from the trunk?

Did you have any trouble with the directions?
I will ask, as I start talking my way out of this.

– Billy Collins

>115 m.belljackson: "A poet is the only being whose eyesight improves with age." That is lovely, Marianne.

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale
Dan Albergotti

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

https://poetry.auburn.edu/featured-poems/things-to-do-in-the-belly-of-the-whale....

>118 rasdhar: Good one, RV!

Crying

by Galway Kinnell

Crying only a little bit
is no use. You must cry
until your pillow is soaked!
Then you can get up and laugh.
Then you can jump in the shower
and splash-splash-splash!
Then you can throw open your window
and, “Ha ha! ha ha!”
And if people say, “Hey
what’s going on up there?”
“Ha ha!“ sing back, "Happiness
was hiding in the last tear!
I wept it! Ha ha!”

The Spring Rain

Spring rain:
Everything just grows
More beautiful.

Chiyo-ni

Easter

Let all the flowers wake to life;
Let all the songsters sing;
Let everything that lives on earth
Become a joyous thing.

Wake up, thou pansy, purple-eyed,
And greet the dewy spring;
Swell out, ye buds, and o’er the earth
Thy sweetest fragrance fling.

Why dost thou sleep, sweet violet?
The earth has need of thee;
Wake up and catch the melody
That sounds from sea to sea.

Ye stars, that dwell in noonday skies,
Shine on, though all unseen;
The great White Throne lies just beyond,
The stars are all between.

Ring out, ye bells, sweet Easter bells,
And ring the glory in;
Ring out the sorrow, born of earth—
Ring out the stains of sin.

O banners wide, that sweep the sky,
Unfurl ye to the sun;
And gently wave about the graves
Of those whose lives are done.

Let peace be in the hearts that mourn—
Let “Rest” be in the grave;
The Hand that swept these lives away
Hath power alone to save.

Ring out, ye bells, sweet Easter bells,
And ring the glory in;
Ring out the sorrow, born of earth—
Ring out the stains of sin.

-Fannie Isabelle Sherrick From Poem-A-Day

The Writer by Richard Wilbur (~1976)

In her room at the prow of the house

Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,

My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing

From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys

Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff

Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:

I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,

As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.

A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,

And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor

Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling

Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;

How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;

And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,

We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature

Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove

To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,

For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits

Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back, 

Beating a smooth course for the right window

And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,

Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish

What I wished you before, but harder.

https://poets.org/poem/writer

Catching up is very rewarding. Wonderful stuff everyone.

"Asphodel" by A.E. Stallings

Our guide turned in her saddle, broke the spell:
“You ride now through a field of asphodel,
The flower that grows on the plains of hell.

Across just such a field the pale shade came
Of proud Achilles, who had preferred a name
And short life to a long life without fame,

And summoned by Odysseus he gave
This wisdom, ‘Better by far to be a slave
Among the living, than great among the grave.’

I used to wonder, how did such a bloom
Become associated with the tomb?
Then one evening, walking through the gloom,

I noticed a strange fragrance. It was sweet,
Like honey—but with hints of rotting meat.
An army of them bristled at my feet.”

_____

In Greek mythology, asphodel flowers are associated with death, and mourning. I remember reading Tennyson's The Lotos Eaters ("Till they perish and they suffer—some, ’tis whisper’d—down in hell / ⁠Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell, / ⁠Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.). I include a visual aid of asphodel flowers for those who have never seen them in person, like myself.

A dead whale can feed an entire ecosystem

but in this poem nothing dies.

Alone in the poem, I make myself
brave. No—I show brave
to my body, take both to the ocean.

Come hurricane, come rip current,
come toxic algal bloom.

In March, I drift past the estuary
to watch an eight-foot dolphin
lap the Mill River

like a cat pacing a bathtub,
sick and disoriented.

Biologists will unspool her empty intestines,
weigh her gray cerebellum.
She swam a great distance to die

alone. I’m sorry—I lied. I can’t control
what lives or dies. I need a place

to stow my brain. To hold
each moment close as a sand flea
caught in my knuckle hairs.

Please, someone—
tell me a poem can coax

oil from a sea bird’s throat.
Tell me what to do
with my hands—my hands—

what can my hands do now?

-Rachel Dillon From Poem-A-Day

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

-Billy Collins. From Sailing Around the Room: New & Selected Poems, which I just finished.

>125 rasdhar: Thanks for the visual. I've never seen them either.

>126 msf59: Ouch!

>127 msf59: This one made me laugh out loud.

Thanks everyone.

The Early Bird, By Ted Kooser (13th Poet Laureate of US)

Still dark, and it was raining hard

on a cold May morning

and yet the early bird

is out there chirping,

chirping its sweet sou-sour

wooden-bully notes,

pleased, it would seem,

to be given work,

hauling the heavy

bucket of dawn

up from the darkness,

note over note,

and letting us drink.

Madrigal

Minnesota, I hardly know you anymore.
Who knows when grief ends—
if ever. The two who preoccupied me
have turned and gone through the door.
The land grand, the land wide, the land gold.
I knew them here. They were strong
and the man adored the woman.
They waved to me from a red barn
with hay inside, and there was an auburn field,
yes, I am sure of that, then, perhaps,
a bank of blue-brown trees. And didn’t I see
a man on his knees? Didn’t I see that?
Such is the powder-blue business of heaven.
Beautiful woman, ample as the country,
you stood and sighed at a simple sink.
Whatever her wish, he attempted to fulfill it.
A golden woman with a golden look.
O God, the wheat and the oak and the loon!
The substantial suburbs, then the land,
open and bright and empty.
There was much promise in those days.
The young woman wore a Dr. Zhivago fur hat,
and laughed in a contagious way.
Burgundy lips, bright teeth, tea-rose perfume.
Snow fell. I will see them both soon enough.
Minnesota, I hardly know you anymore.

-Spencer Reece

>129 markon: Perfect way to kick off the month, Ardene!

This is a poem of my life in foster care and shortly before, with a little help from someone I made a poem
In Shadows of the Past

In February’s cold, the year twenty-twenty struck,
Just weeks past my tenth birthday’s sweet luck,
Dad’s voice silenced, gone too soon, too fast,
Left echoes in a house that couldn’t last.

My brother, sixteen, took on burdens deep,
In a world where hope was hard to keep,
He fought with shadows, sold what he could,
To feed us, pay, do what he would.

Mom’s heart fractured, her silence grew,
Lost in her grief, she withdrew,
While I, a child with dreams unspoken,
Fought silent battles, hopes broken.

In sixth grade, darkness crept inside,
Suicidal thoughts I couldn’t hide,
Four times I was pulled from the dark,
A fragile soul, seeking a spark.

We moved to Greensburg, a town so small,
Where whispers and stares made me feel small,
Being different, humor out of line,
Felt like a curse, a thin, fragile vine.

CPS came with open hands,
Plucked me from familiar lands,
To farms and foster homes I went,
Each step a scar, a silent lament.

A stroke took Margie’s gentle care,
I moved in with my ex, caught in despair,
Speedway’s streets became my stage,
Smoking, cutting, trapped in rage.

Help was fleeting, shelter’s door closed tight,
Ran away into the night,
A boy’s betrayal, a nightmare’s face,
Fallen deeper into that lonely place.

Shelter’s walls, then Joanne’s grace,
Shared vapes, laughs, a fleeting space,
But chaos brewed beneath the cheer,
Water in gas, a mirror’s sneer.

Jail’s cold grip, the fighting’s toll,
Yet somewhere in the dark I found a soul,
Trusted, loved, a flicker bright,
A chance to turn from endless night.

Now in a group home, I stand,
Stronger than I thought I’d planned,
Humor sharp, a shield, a sword,
My voice rising, no longer ignored.

My name is Ziva, fifteen years spun,
A life of battles, lost and won,
With brownish hair, alternative style,
A story written in every mile.

Mac, my brother, cowboy tall,
Minda’s love, through it all,
Joanne, Margie, names I hold,
Stories of a heart grown bold.

From project house to shining stars,
Memories stitched into my scars,
I carry pain, I carry grace,
A warrior’s smile upon my face.

In shadows past, I found my light,
A soul reborn from endless night,
This is my story, raw and true—
A testament to what I do.

>132 zivawise:
Memories stitched into my scars,
I carry pain, I carry grace,
A warrior’s smile upon my face.

That's the best most of us can do. Thanks for sharing.

>132 zivawise: Writing poetry, creating art, making music - those are the most profound healing tools that we have. Brava for you!

Over in icepatton's thread, he's been commenting on the prevalence of crows in the haiku he's been reading, which reminded me of this unusual formal hybrid:

A Quarrel of Crows: A Villahaikunelle

A quarrel of crows
glean treasure from torn trash bags
on a rural road,

strut and cakewalk with
raspy-throated posturing.
A quarrel of crows

strip away limp gray rind
like coyotes feasting on doe.
On a rural road,

coon-toppled barrels,
bequeath uneaten orts to
a quarrel of crows

who caw, grateful for
this dessicated banquet
on a rural road.

On the first Friday
of the last month of the year,
a quarrel of crows
on a rural road.

-- Bruce Pratt

Waiting for the Barbarians
By C. P. Cavafy
Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

Edit: The formatting is hard to preserve on LT so here's a link to the properly formatted original. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51294/waiting-for-the-barbarians

>136 rasdhar: I really like the "Barbarians" poem. Timely.

The Sea / Is Sacred Still

Sip the sea. Its salt stays on the tongue.
It burns like wine
the open wound.
It heals.
Do you have the heart to say
the truth? That it is full of strange bacteria,

indifferent to your pain. I move toward spilling out

but I will not. I will let you think the sea
is sacred still.
Perhaps, then,
you will try to save it.

Perhaps you’ll stand with me at the shore,
the sky now darkening, watching
the waves eat back the blueblack dunes,
shadowhills of sand, watching each wavecrash
reverberate, a drum that sounded
centuries ago, each crash a spoon scoop
more of sand, a cat’s rough tongue scraping
land back to waves, thinking, how long
until the world is sea again?
With every stone it swallows,
the ocean grows. When it laps at our
peninsulas, we take it for affection,
quiet in its claws, saying to ourselves,
this is just another sort of love, to wait
to see what happens, to stand there watching
as our feet sink in the sand, arms around each others’
waists, hoodies flapping black in the wind, our mouths
unmoving, patient, tired, only just now widening our eyes.

-Andrew Calis From Poem-A-Day

Lines Lost Among Trees

These are not the lines that came to me
while walking in the woods
with no pen
and nothing to write on anyway.

They are gone forever,
a handful of coins
dropped through the grate of memory,
along with the ingenious mnemonic

I devised to hold them in place-
all gone and forgotten
before I had returned to the clearing of lawn
in back of our quiet house

with its jars jammed with pens,
its notebooks and reams of blank paper,
its desk and soft lamp,
its table and the light from its windows.

So this is my elegy for them,
those six or eight exhalations,
the braided rope of syntax,
the jazz of the timing,

and the little insight at the end
wagging like the short tail
of a perfectly obedient spaniel
sitting by the door.

-Billy Collins

should I make another poem?

>140 zivawise: Once you start writing poetry there is no way that you'll be able to stop.

Marie Howe just won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry with her New and Selected Poems.

This is called Postscript

What we did to the earth, we did to our daughters
one after the other.

What we did to the trees, we did to our elders
stacked in their wheelchairs by the lunchroom door.

What we did to our daughters, we did to our sons
calling out for their mothers.

What we did to the trees, what we did to the earth,
we did to our sons, to our daughters.

What we did to the cow, to the pig, to the lamb,
we did to the earth, butchered and milked it.

Few of us knew what the bird calls meant
or what the fires were saying.

We took of earth and took and took, and the earth
seemed not to mind

until one of our daughters shouted: it was right
in front of you, right in front of your eyes

and you didn’t see.
The air turned red. The ocean grew teeth.

>132 zivawise: I thought "In Shadows of the Past" was very good, Ziva. Dark and soul-bearing. Please share more, if you like.

>142 PaulCranswick: That is excellent, Paul. I don't think I have read Howe before.

A poem about how I felt losing my dad
In a house where laughter used to play,
Silence now clouds each passing day.
At ten years old, my heart was torn,
The light of my dad had suddenly worn.

Mom drifted into a world apart,
Her warmth faded, she lost her heart.
The hugs that once calmed my fears,
Replaced by shadows and silent tears.

My brother, brave, took on a load,
Finding ways to lighten our road.
With heavy choices and nights so long,
He fought for survival, though it felt wrong.

We’d sit at the table with empty plates,
Hunger gnawing as hope abates.
Yet in the darkness, a flicker remains,
The bond of family, despite all the pains.

Through grief and struggle, we found our way,
In the silence of night, we learned to pray.
Though love may bend, it never breaks,
Together we stand, whatever it takes.

>145 zivawise: A direct, dark and sad confessional.

>145 zivawise: Your poems echo the deeper ones in a just released book - Our Ultimate Destination.

Written by Dr. Tapasi Saha, all profits will go to The National Kidney Foundation.

I never even noticed😅

From the butterfly poems
by Jacqueline Woodson -

When I write the first words
Wings of a butterfly whisper...

no one believes a whole book could ever come
from something as simple as
butterflies that don't even, my brother says,
live that long.

But on paper, things can live forever.
On paper, a butterfly
never dies.

Future History of Earth’s Birds

Among them, a common language of alarm.

Also, rapture.

Know that when zebra finches felt the first pinch
of climate change, they chirped to their offspring, still shelled,
to warn, to insist, they hatch
smaller and fiercer.
Dawn’s chorus is a peace-making operation.
The birds with the biggest eyes sing first.
Thus light
is the first part of song.

Some birds create barriers
of pinging notes—golden bells dangling

in the air, alarms and warnings. Does it matter

what kind of birds did this? They’re all dead now.

In bird language, there’s a call for mobbing, a call for fleeing.

To avoid danger, sometimes you must approach it.

In the shell, a bird recognizes its parents’ voices.
In love, mates sing duets they invent together.
On death, the survivor must learn a new tune.

There are such things as universal truths.

Some kites drop fire onto the earth to scare
up dinner. Some kites,

dropping fire, taught humans their first warm meal.

Neither ice nor snow lived long enough
to hear the last bird sing—just wind,

which carried those notes as far as it could
before they slipped from its palms—

There is a common language of alarm.

-Amie Whittemore From Poem-A-Day

Future History of Earth’s Birds

Among them, a common language of alarm.

Also, rapture.

Know that when zebra finches felt the first pinch
of climate change, they chirped to their offspring, still shelled,
to warn, to insist, they hatch
smaller and fiercer.
Dawn’s chorus is a peace-making operation.
The birds with the biggest eyes sing first.
Thus light
is the first part of song.

Some birds create barriers
of pinging notes—golden bells dangling

in the air, alarms and warnings. Does it matter

what kind of birds did this? They’re all dead now.

In bird language, there’s a call for mobbing, a call for fleeing.

To avoid danger, sometimes you must approach it.

In the shell, a bird recognizes its parents’ voices.
In love, mates sing duets they invent together.
On death, the survivor must learn a new tune.

There are such things as universal truths.

Some kites drop fire onto the earth to scare
up dinner. Some kites,

dropping fire, taught humans their first warm meal.

Neither ice nor snow lived long enough
to hear the last bird sing—just wind,

which carried those notes as far as it could
before they slipped from its palms—

There is a common language of alarm.

-Amie Whittemore From Poem-A-Day

My poem, About needing to fart but accidentally sharting
The pressure builds, a shart unknown,
A rumbling herald of discomfort grown.
My stomach churns, a tempest in its hold,
A noxious bubble, tales of shame unfold.

I clench my ass and pray, a silent, desperate plea,
To find release, and simply just be free.
A subtle shift, a loosening of the gate,
A hopeful whisper, sealing fate.

But then it comes, a tremor unexpected,
A dark betrayal, utterly rejected.
There was no fart, light and swift and clean,
But something thicker, a horrifying scene.

A warmth descends, a stain begins to bloom,
A fragrant shart filling up the room.
The walls close in, the air grows thick,
A heavy silence, a twisted trick.

My mind unravels, sanity takes flight,
Consumed by my fat shart, swallowed by the night.
This isn't happening, it can't be real,
This public shame, the agony I feel.

The world collapses, laughter turns to scorn,
I am undone, forever I am torn.
Echoes of giggles, whispers in the air,
A cacophony of mockery, too much to bear.

My dignity eroded, washed away with shame,
Forever branded with this awful name.
A sharting monster, exiled and alone,
My social life, a seed that’s never sown.

I sink like shit, never known before,
Do I really just lock myself in a cupboard now?
Oh woe to me, woe to my broken shell,
Condemned to wander the bowels of hell.

Each glance a dagger, each breath a quake,
A living nightmare, a heart that aches.
With every step, the weight of dread,
The specter of horror, a life misled.

Oh, cruel fate, why must you conspire?
To turn my laughter into funeral pyre.
In crowded halls where joy should reign,
I’m trapped in terror, lost in this pain.

I dream of freedom, a world unchained,
Where shame is forgotten, and laughter regained.
But here I stand,this shart in my pants is holding it uptight,
A prisoner of my own, swallowed by night.

The pressure builds, yet hope flickers dim,
A fight for redemption, though chances are slim.
In the depths of despair, a whisper remains,
Perhaps through the chaos, new strength can be gained.

So I gather the pieces, though shattered they be,
And vow to rise, to reclaim my decree.
For even in a fat ass shart, a spark can ignite,
And from my asses cruel grip, I shall take flight.

>152 zivawise: I am glad you have been sharing a few of your poems with us, Ziva but I think this one is inappropriate. Would you mind deleting it and sharing another poem that you really appreciate. Thank you.

The Last Act

When the sun takes a final bow, its luminous gown glittering as it leaves the stage, and the audience stands, stretches, files out of the theater, only then do the fireflies enter, lighting their delicate lamps to show us the way out, and they hover over the edges of the grass like our smallest hopes, evening’s fading beacons. We drive past the fields in our rented sedans, windows sealed against the heat, we stretch our feet in our stiff shoes, the lights flying past, those tiny flares floating above the grass, we roar by, our engines, our wheels, our windows sealed, the fields aspark under that lowering curtain, and we strain to see them, wait for that slight hint, as if someone is whispering the word: fire. So quietly, so gently, so brief, it’s almost as if we imagined that bit of air, we crane our necks, waiting for the next flash, holding our breath, hoping, hoping, remembering those moments, when we caught them inside the globe of our clasped hands, put them in a jar, and screwed on a lid with holes in the top, a starry sky for the jar of the world, and we carried the world into our room, and we peered through its glass walls, the pulsing lights, the glimmering hopes, which we hold in our hands, which we watch in the dark, those flashes, each like a star shorting out and out.

-Lauren K. Watel From Poem-A-Day

A poem for Memorial Day.

the sonnet-ballad (1949)

Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
They took my lover’s tallness off to war,
Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess
What I can use an empty heart-cup for.
He won’t be coming back here any more.
Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew
When he went walking grandly out that door
That my sweet love would have to be untrue.
Would have to be untrue. Would have to court
Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange
Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort)
Can make a hard man hesitate—and change.
And he will be the one to stammer, “Yes.”
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?

—Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

>155 kidzdoc: Such a good one.

>155 kidzdoc: Very good, Darryl. Thanks for sharing.

>155 kidzdoc: So sharply done. Thanks for sharing this.

Sleeping on My Side

Every night, no matter where I am
when I lie down, I turn
my back on half the world.

At home, it's the east I ignore,
with its theatres and silverware,
as I face the adventurous west.

But when I'm on the road
in some hotel's room 213 or 402
I could be pointed anywhere,

yet I hardly care as long as you
are there facing the other way
so we are defended in all degrees

and my left ear is pressing down
as if listening for hoof beats in the ground.

-Billy Collins

^For all you side-sleepers out there. I am one too...😴

He Mele Aloha no ka Niu

I’m so tired of pretending
each gesture is meaningless,

that the clattering of niu leaves
and the guttural call of birds

overhead say nothing.
There are reasons why

the lichen and moss kākau
the niu’s bark, why

this tree has worn
an ahu of ua and lā

since birth. Scars were carved
into its trunk to record

the mo‘olelo of its being
by the passage of insects

becoming one to move
the earth, speck by speck.

Try to tell them to let go
of the niu rings marking

each passing year, to abandon
their only home and move on.

I can’t pretend there is
no memory held

in the dried coconut hat,
the star ornament, the midribs

bent and dangling away
from their roots, no thought

behind the kāwelewele
that continues to hold us

steady. There was a time
before they were bent

under their need to make
an honest living, when

each frond was bound
by its life to another

like a long, erect fin
skimming the surface

of a sea of grass and sand.
Eventually, it knew it would rise

higher, its flower would emerge
gold, then darken in the sun,

that its fruit would fall, only
to ripen before its brown fronds

bent naturally under the weight
of such memory, back toward

the trunk to drop to the sand,
back to its beginnings, again.

Let this be enough to feed us,
to remember: ka wailewa

i loko, that our own bodies
are buoyant when they bend

and fall, and that the ocean
shall carry us and weave us

back into the sand’s fabric,
that the mo‘opuna taste our sweet.

-Brandy Nālani McDougall

April 21st

It’s the birthday of John Muir and Charlotte Brontë,
born just 18 years apart,
she in Yorkshire and he somewhere in Scotland,
both in their basinets under the same gray clouds,
but then their lives diverge so radically
you might begin to question the claims of astrologers,
if you haven’t had the sense to do that already.

Muir heads off to Wisconsin (with his parents I guess),
whereas Charlotte is placed in a nearby boarding school.
Muir then stomps all over North America,
exulting in Nature and writing it all down,
while Charlotte stays mostly indoors composing poems
with her sisters, Emily and Anne.
He leaves us Picturesque California, she Jane Eyre.

I don’t have much on my calendar for today,
another April 21st featuring a walk around the lake,
then boxing up the cat and driving her to the vet.
It’s overwhelming to think of all the things
I’m not doing today, including being born.
But I will say that my life, maybe like yours,
falls somewhere between John Muir’s and Charlotte Brontë’s.

My morning walk takes under an hour,
but I do pay attention to the water and the birds,
and here I am writing a poem, just like the Brontë sisters. Muir was blinded for a spell,
Charlotte married then died still pregnant,
and I’ve had the same headache for more than a month.
And if that’s what ends up killing me,

would someone please slide this poem
into a side pocket of the coat they bury me in?
Until then, let us picture John Muir
on a windy mountaintop in Oregon
waving in the direction of the coastal dunes,
while Charlotte Brontë lifts her head
from her morning prayers, recalling that it’s her birthday.

-Billy Collins



^I just finished Whale Day and quite enjoyed it.

>161 msf59: Nice choice, Mark.

>162 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl. You really can't go wrong with Collins.

Postscript

What we did to the earth, we did to our daughters
one after the other.

What we did to the trees, we did to our elders
stacked in their wheelchairs by the lunchroom door.

What we did to our daughters, we did to our sons
calling out for their mothers.

What we did to the trees, what we did to the earth,
we did to our sons, to our daughters.

What we did to the cow, to the pig, to the lamb,
we did to the earth, butchered and milked it.

Few of us knew what the bird calls meant
or what the fires were saying.

We took of earth and took and took, and the earth
seemed not to mind

until one of our daughters shouted: it was right
in front of you, right in front of your eyes

and you didn’t see.
The air turned red. The ocean grew teeth.

-Marie Howe



^I just started her latest collection New and Selected Poems, which recently won the Pulitzer for best poetry. It grabbed me immediately.

Song: Let Us Go Back

Let us go back together to the hills.
Weary am I of palaces and courts,
Weary of words disloyal to my thoughts,—
Come, my belovèd, let us to the hills.

Let us go back together to the land,
And wander hand in hand upon the heights;
Kings have we seen, and manifold delights,—
Oh, my beloved, let us to the land!

Lone and unshackled, let us to the road
Which holds enchantment round each hidden bend,
Our course uncompassed and our whim its end,
Our feet once more, belovèd, to the road!

-Vita Sackville-West From Poem-A-Day

>161 msf59: fantastic Billy!

>166 dchaikin: Here's another one...

Going for a Walk as the Drugs Kick In

It’s Friday, and the sun’s all over everything
aſter a long week of steady rain.
The clouds have moved on
to hover over other counties.
The irises are showing their white faces
streaked with yellow and purple.
The bees are out again
making their floral visitations.
The beaver swims with a sick in his mouth.
The over is looking out his window.
The butterfly doesn’t seem to know where it’s going.
So ample and worthy is the air around me,
I am only able to take in one bird at a time.
A fruit tree has started to sing.
The little town is farther away than ever.
I have my arm around the over,
holding him by the shoulder.
The scene out his window is so plentiful
and everything is billowing with our love

-Billy Collins

>168 msf59: that makes me smile 🙂

on superstitions

i was raised reading a bible
of conditional statements

& sometimes the good book.
before bed, mom recited proverbs.

if you play with your shadow,
then it will eat you. but i never did

believe her, flipped a switch
after she turned the lights off

& left, my flashlight beaming
an O across my bedroom wall,

my fingers bending & twisting
into black foxes that escaped

into my room. i didn’t play
with my shadows. i made theater

of skepticism & let them star
in the show. but once, half-awake,

i caught them scaling the wall,
stretching into a maw. i feared

becoming their meal & screamed
for mom. what did i tell you?

i stopped playing with my shadows
& started ignoring the pastor

when he’d call superstitions the devil’s
proverbs. i still believed in God

but also my bible. my bible a game
of telephone that first rang across

the ocean or inside a sugar cane field
or in the still air after a hurricane.

my bible an insurance policy
against what God won’t cover.

my bible an instruction manual
on how to collar the uncontrollable

& teach it to come running
when i call its name

-Mckendy Fils-Aimé From Poem-A-Day

Turtle

Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
she can ill afford the chances she must take
in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
a packing-case places, and almost any slope
defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
she's often stuck up to the axle on her way
to something edible. With everything optimal,
she skirts the ditch which would convert
her shell into a serving dish. She lives
below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
the sport of truly chastened things.

-Kay Ryan

Of Small Boats and Migrants

Why the collective numbness
of the humanity gene
when it comes to considering those
in situations barely comprehensible?

They are an inconvenience,
they are a mirror to our selfishness,
to our tendency for closing an eye,
shuttering a heart,
buttoning a pocket,
closing our doors,
barricading our borders.

They are shoveled into makeshift
encampments, without the benefit
of the dignity of belonging;
without the regard of having value;
told without words they are unwanted -
and should leave by any means possible.

They have a coastal view that
on a clear day shows a different horizon
where they may be treated kindly
where they hold hope for the future,
where bricks will replace canvas,
where the gangs are absent,
where the manipulators are elsewhere,
where a new start is enabled.

The icy swells of a Northern sea
Are to be braved to get there
and not all of them will make it.
Some will fill their lungs with salted waters
and end their journey there
as others debate whose territory
they should be permitted to drown in.

Some will make it and receive
treatment that has more official decorum
but no less public disfavour.
People talking about living space
and public welfare
and different skins
and different clothes -
Looking at and judging
Without seeing that they are as human
as you or I.

One of mine written after reading Vincent Delecroix's novel Small Boats. Needless to say I rate the novel.

>172 PaulCranswick: This is an excellent poem, Paul. Very impressive. Thanks for sharing.

The Unknown Bird

Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang
In the great beech-wood all that May and June.
No one saw him: I alone could hear him
Though many listened. Was it but four years
Ago? or five? He never came again.

Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off—
As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
As if the bird or I were in a dream.
Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes
Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
He sounded. All the proof is—I told men
What I had heard.
I never knew a voice,
Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told
The naturalists; but neither had they heard
Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,
I had them clear by heart and have them still.
Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then
As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:
Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say
That it was one or other, but if sad
'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
For me to taste it. But I cannot tell
If truly never anything but fair
The days were when he sang, as now they seem.
This surely I know, that I who listened then,
Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering
A heavy body and a heavy heart,
Now straightway, if I think of it, become
Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.

-Edward Thomas

I love to come over here and read the poetry.

I hate to come over here because it adds so many books to my wish list . . .

The Way the Language Was

The day the deer died,
I was alive in my house.
I was alive in a watery field
of glaciers. In the realm
of birchwood in my throat.
The day the robins wept, the day
foxes ran from the woods on fire.
I was alive in a decade. Sometimes
dreaming of another region
was my religion. It was
a place before trees, prior
to the flame. When the deer died,
I was in my house dreaming. Then
the drought came. Cessation
of sound. Flames as red as apples
lodged inside my throat hissing.

-Andrea Rexilius From Poem-A-Day

Summering in Wildwood, NJ

in a few days, i’ll be on a beach
so bright i can see the sun through my fingers,

each thin vein lit
up blue like a heron’s leg.

this poem is not so much about a beach
as it is about arriving,

blowing stop signs
until the coast affirms

that lines are always changing,
and the tide tells me

my body can morph
as many times as it needs.

-Kayleb Rae Candrilli

Black Pastoral

Alone outside ain’t nil, but to be it
scares my mother so. I explain
to her what mountains mean
are crowds and staggering
Carolina Wrens, crows and stone walls
licked like moss wrung out at their heels.
If only the day’s door slid open
like the cap yawning in my hands, my
summit-hair slick-wet as the day I arrived
through my mother’s mingling blood,
where outside meant outhouse
meant a ravine brimmed with spiders
and midnight shits. I put away my pride
at my own chosen suffering, green
as a hard candy sucked into my jaw.
The house she was born in: bulldozed
by whites, and I’ve nerve to call this costly
valley holy. Snow like sawmill dust
sails down, and the ice shoves me
like a bad bully on a trip. I cling
to rope and rock, one tree copies
another: no words but whispers.
To have a piano in your house,
my mother always said, meant you was
A Somebody. Tuned or not she always
had one even if nothing else to chew on.
The wind won’t hide its oblivion arrow
and on the trail I lose one black
glove to frozen mud, trip over my own
spikes. What am I trying to heal up
this way, where any tree unredeemed
may haw and toss me down? To understanding
I come round late as a missed note,
flat as a month of Sundays, or so my mother says.
I believe in the small writ large, writ impossible
as an unlit canoe silvering beneath the Milky Way
scattered above this lake mirrorless as a gulp.
Look at me, this somebody choosing
to squat outside and piss from this earth
into the next and the next. What must
my mother think of such wealth.

-Lillian-Yvonne Bertram From-Poem-A-Day

Catching up. Enjoying these, Mark. Maybe especially:

blowing stop signs
until the coast affirms

that lines are always changing,

Because sometimes we need that.

>172 PaulCranswick: this was an amazing response to the book. Thanks for sharing.

I'm reading and enjoying A. E. Stallings's Archaic Smile which was her first collection, and not as polished as her later verse. Here is a more recent one by her. For those unfamiliar, Alicia Stallings is a classicist, poet, and translator and currently Oxford's Professor of Poetry.

A Postcard from Greece
A. E. Stallings

Hatched from sleep, as we slipped out of orbit
Round a clothespin curve new-watered with rain,
I saw the sea, the sky, as bright as pain,
That outer space through which we were to plummet.
No guardrails hemmed the road, no way to stop it,
The only warning, here and there, a shrine:
Some tended still, some antique and forgotten,
Empty of oil, but all were consecrate
To those who lost their wild race with the road
And sliced the tedious sea once, like a knife.
Somehow we struck an olive tree instead.
Our car stopped on the cliff's brow. Suddenly safe,
We clung together, shade to pagan shade,
Surprised by sunlight, air, this afterlife.

>180 rasdhar: I like this one. Thanks. I don't think I have read any of Stalling's poetry.

Enjoying catching up here, I particularly liked >177 msf59:

Our Side of the Creek

We piled planks, sheets of tin,
& sandbags across the creek
till the bright water rose
& splayed both sides,

swelling into our hoorah.
Our hard work brought July
thrashers & fat June bugs
in decades of dead leaves.

Water moccasins hid in holes
at the brim of the clay bank
as the creek eased up pelvic
bones, hips, navel, & chest,

to eye level. When the boys
dove into our swim hole
we pumped our balled fists
to fire up their rebel yells.

The Jim Crow birds sang
of persimmon & mayhaw
after a 12-gauge shotgun
sounded in the deep woods.

If we ruled the day an hour
the boys would call girl cousins
& sisters, & they came running
half-naked into a white splash,

but we could outrun the sunset
through sage & rabbit tobacco,
born to hide each other’s alibis
beneath the drowned sky.

-Yusef Komunyakaa

>180 rasdhar: good stuff. Zip fast to “That outer space through which we were to plummet.”

>183 msf59: summer… I wonder what was happening on the other side of that creek…

How the Worst Day of My Life Became the Best

When I realized the storm
was inevitable, I made it
my medicine.

Took two snowflakes
on the tongue in the morning,
two snowflakes on the tongue
by noon.

There were no side effects.
Only sound effects. Reverb
added to my lifespan,
an echo that asked—

What part of your life’s record is skipping?
What wound is on repeat?
Have you done everything you can
to break out of that groove?

By nighttime, I was intimate
with the difference
between tying my laces
and tuning the string section

of my shoes, made a symphony of walking
away from everything that did not
want my life to sing.

Felt a love for myself so consistent
metronomes tried to copyright my heartbeat.

Finally understood I am the conductor
of my own life, and will be even after I die.
I, like the trees, will decide what I become:

Porch swing? Church pew?
An envelope that must be licked to be closed?
Kinky choice, but I didn’t close.

I opened and opened
until I could imagine that the pain
was the sensation of my spirit
not breaking,

that my mind was a parachute
that could always open
in time,

that I could wear my heart
on my sleeve and never grow
out of that shirt.

That every falling leaf is a tiny kite
with a string too small to see, held
by the part of me in charge
of making beauty
out of grief.

-Andrea Gibson

^Sadly, Andrea Gibson just passed. She was only 49. She has been a favorite poet of mine. If you are not familiar with her- check her out.

"Andrea Gibson, a master of spoken-word poetry who cultivated legions of admirers with intensely personal, often political works exploring gender, love and a personal four-year fight with terminal ovarian cancer, died on Monday in Longmont, Colo. Gibson, who used the pronouns they and them and did not use an honorific, was 49.

Megan Falley, their wife, confirmed the death."

>186 msf59: how sad. Too young!

>185 msf59: that’s terrific. My 1st by her.

>185 msf59: That's such a good one. They will be so missed.

Seven Steps to Heaven Haiku

If every bomb
Appeared in the sky a dove
Shrapnel into rain

If vengeance vanquished
From the cursed lips of weak men
An idea never taking root

If every tank vanished
If by chance a miracle
Peace reclaims the land

If laughter broke out
Like wars fought with satire’s
Pugilist punning

What room would there be
For anger what bitter root
Not allowed to stretch

Its tentacles
Through the hearts of men hardened
By indifference

What will we bequeath
Our children if not a world
Evermore human

-Tony Medina

Instead of Depression

try calling it hibernation.
Imagine the darkness is a cave
in which you will be nurtured
by doing absolutely nothing.
Hibernating animals don’t even dream.
It’s okay if you can’t imagine
Spring. Sleep through the alarm
of the world. Name your hopelessness
a quiet hollow, a place you go
to heal, a den you dug,
Sweetheart, instead
of a grave.

-Andrea Gibson 1975 –2025

Paying Attention

You learn the timing,
who arrives first, who goes last
when the dark days close in
and October declares its rules of leaves.
The juncos search the ground;
you learn the order of things,
where you fit,
how each must devise a strategy.
In town, portents go unnoticed.
Made light masks the stars,
lures sparrows and chickadees,
into the trap of big-box stores.
Deft inventors, the birds are crucial
because the gods brought them first.
You become an augur,
observe an intent
displayed in the sky,
how blackbirds
rush apart like beads of water
blown across glass.
You see the courtesy of wrens,
sit outside at dusk listening
to the owl ask whose turn it is.
When a murmuration of starlings
pulses like a giant heart in the sky,
you divine a prophecy;
you will learn to sing without breaking
and that she will want you.
See how they morph across the open air,
how the swirling sheet
compresses into a spinning ball
and bursts into a thousand sparks.

-Mark Anthony Burke From the collection Birds and the Trick of Time: Poems.

>179 dchaikin: Thanks Dan.

The Pond at Dusk

A fly wounds the water but the wound
soon heals. Swallows tilt and twitter
overhead, dropping now and then toward
the outward-radiating evidence of food.

The green haze on the trees changes
into leaves, and what looks like smoke
floating over the neighbor’s barn
is only apple blossoms.

But sometimes what looks like disaster
is disaster: the day comes at last,
and the men struggle with the casket
just clearing the pews.

-Jane Kenyon

Here’s one by the recently passed Andrea Gibson, called “The Madness Vase”:

The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables.
Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day
I would be grounded, rooted.
Said my head would not keep flying away
to where the darkness lives.

The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight.
Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do.
I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling.
You will find a good man soon.”

The first psycho therapist told me to spend
three hours each day sitting in a dark closet
with my eyes closed and ears plugged.
I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking
about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.

The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth.
Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness
when they care more about what they give
than what they get.

The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.”

The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me
forget what the trauma said.

The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry
about the grief inside your bones.”

But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped
from the George Washington Bridge
into the Hudson River convinced
he was entirely alone.”

My bones said, “Write the poems”.

A short one from Andrea Gibson:

GRAVITY

We wear our traumas
the way the guillotine
wears gravity.

Our lovers’ necks
are so soft.

>194 jnwelch: I love this poem.

>196 kidzdoc:. Oh, good to hear, Darryl, thanks. Her death from the cancer she was fighting is a big loss. The Madness Vase is from her collection of the same name.

>197 jnwelch: Thanks, Joe. I'll be on the lookout for The Madness Vase.

>127 msf59:. “Introduction to Poetry” is one of my favorite Billy Collins poems. It need not be a grim ordeal, people. 😀

For You, Sweetheart, I’ll Sell Plutonium Reactors

For you, sweetheart, I’ll ride back down
into black smoke early Sunday morning
cutting fog, grab the moneysack
of gold teeth. Diamond mines
soil creep groan ancient cities, archaeological
diggings, & yellow bulldozers turn around all night
in blood-lit villages. Inhabitants here once gathered seashells
that glimmered like pearls. When the smoke clears, you’ll see
an erected throne like a mountain to scale,
institutions built with bones, guns hidden in walls
that swing open like big-mouthed B-52s.
Your face in the mirror is my face. You tapdance
on tabletops for me, while corporate bosses
arm wrestle in back rooms for your essential downfall.
I entice homosexuals into my basement butcher shop.
I put my hands around another sharecropper’s throat
for that mink coat you want from Saks Fifth,
short-change another beggarwoman,
steal another hit song from Sleepy
John Estes, salt another gold mine in Cripple Creek,
drive another motorcycle up a circular ice wall,
face another public gunslinger like a bad chest wound,
just to slide hands under black silk.
Like the Ancient Mariner steering a skeleton ship
against the moon, I’m their hired gunman
if the price is right, take a contract on myself.
They’ll name mountains & rivers in my honor.
I’m a drawbridge over manholes for you, sweetheart.
I’m paid two hundred grand
to pick up a red telephone anytime & call up God.
I’m making tobacco pouches out of the breasts of Indian maidens
so we can stand in a valley & watch grass grow.

-Yusef Komunyakaa



Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. I am currently enjoying this collection. A perfect discovery.

>194 jnwelch: >195 jnwelch: Thanks for sharing the Gibson poems, Joe. I particularly liked The Madness Vase. She will be missed but at least she left behind some fine poetry, that we can remember her by.

38. Shedding the Old

Such as the lobster
cracking loose
from its exoskeleton
after moons of moulting,
or the viper that squeezes
out of the skin
of its remembrance,
this oracle invites you
to rewild yourself,
to unbox, detox, and de-
clutter your blood.
Break free from the mold
you made for yourself,
for the animal
in you that craves
routines like sugar,
addicted to the stress
of your comforts. Sling
your arm around the waist
of your discomfort
like it’s a new lover
in these uncharted
seas and distances
untraversed. Take
and give glee.
Summon surprise.
Something whim-
sical this way comes.
It smells something
like wishes wrapped
in wind as you
trod the winding path
through
the forests
of your interior.
Be warned. You will
bewilder beloveds.
Hush. Some
events are better
experienced than
explained. Take soul.
Your joy is your job;
and yours alone.
Hire your
self every day.
Climb into your traveling
shoes knowing that
there, too, will
be dancing.

-Samantha Thornhill From Poem-A-Day

I have just read Girlhood a collection by the splendid British poet, Julia Copus.



This is "The Grievers" which opens the collection.

At length we learned what it meant to “come to” grief.
As if grief lay in wait for us all along,
a barricade or boulder in the road.
What was it pulled us to it – led as we were
to its cold, stone smell, its granite skin?
We knew it by the way the light had shrunk
to a frayed corona; slowly, we understood
there was nothing to do but swallow it whole
and inch our way forward again. But to find we were able –
that was the miracle. It was as if the soul,
which has no definite shape, consisted simply
of a flexible cell wall, for the journey taught us
that in the face of grief the soul distorts
and forms a seal around the loss.
The bits we can’t absorb we carry in us,
a lumpish residue. It is truly a wonder
we manage to move at all; let alone
as freely as this, with the ease at times
of our old and lighter selves. And when I say we . . .
Look out into the street – we are everywhere:
on bikes, at bus stops, among the crowds
of those who have not happened yet on grief.
We steady our own like an egg in the dip of a spoon,
as far as the dark of the hallway, the closing door.
Some are there now, in the measling light
that gathers behind doors. We are catching our breath,
certain we won’t be joining you again,
confounding ourselves at the last because we do.

>203 PaulCranswick: I really like this poem, Paul. I had not heard of this poet. Thanks for sharing.

Rise and Shine by Richmond Lattimore
Poems from Three Decades.

At the big trumpet, we must all put on
our dentures, tie old strings to knees, adjust
shank upon socket, wig to cranium, bust
on ribbed architrave, fastidiously don
our properties, and blink to face the sun.
Farewell, dream image, cankered to our dust,
and sweets shrunk in the brain, farewell we trust.
Uprise, O fragment brethren! We have won--
For, hallelujah, these dry graves are torn!
Thin bugles crash the valley of our bones
to rock the vultures wide away and scare
the griffin from his precipice as, worn
and damp, we crawl like grubs from under stones
to scarf our loves in paradisical air.

>205 Kristelh: Welcome, Kristel. I like that poem. Thanks for sharing.

Elegy for Thelonious

Damn the snow.
Its senseless beauty
pours a hard light
through the hemlock.
Thelonious is dead. Winter
drifts in the hourglass;
notes pour from the brain cup.
damn the alley cat
wailing a muted dirge
off Lenox Ave.
Thelonious is dead.
Tonight's a lazy rhapsody of shadows
swaying to blue vertigo
& metaphysical funk.
Black trees in the wind.
Crepuscule with Nellie
plays inside the bowed head.
"Dig the Man Ray of piano!"
O Satisfaction,
hot fingers blur on those white rib keys.
Coming on the Hudson.
Monk's Dream.
The ghost of bebop
from 52nd Street,
footprints in the snow.
Damn February.
Let's go to Minton's
& play "modern malice"
till daybreak. Lord,
there's Thelonious
wearing that old funky hat
pulled down over his eyes.

-Yusef Komunyakaa

>207 msf59: Great choices of Komunyakaa's poems, Mark. I have yet to read anything by him, including the two(?) collections of his I own, so I'll have to get started on that.

>208 kidzdoc: Glad you like him, Darryl. I am not sure how I missed this guy for so long. Joe is a big fan too. I highly recommend starting with Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, which I am still working through.

>209 msf59: Thanks, Mark. I'll see if I can request that collection from my local library system.

The Sieve
AE Stallings

I bought an antique sieve of hammered tin
For its decorative holes

Patterned like a flower, or a star exploding
At one of the poles.

I think of all it has sifted: flour and sugar,
Dust and light,

What must be ground so fine, so fine! to pass through –
Milled, contrite.

Light and time it has sifted, like a metal welkin
Of punctual stars,

The cold hieroglyphs of the constellations,
The raised scars

On one side of the thin disk, stigmata
Nubby as braille.

I hang it up like an arrow-pierced shield
In the hall, on a nail.

Or rather it is a deep tambourine
That shaken makes no

Music, but sifts the silence down like powdered
Sugar, like snow.

Even now something is falling, falling, dust
And Time, infinitive,

Through perforations that ought to sound like ‘grieve’
But rhyme with ‘give’.

>211 rasdhar: Nice.

>211 rasdhar: I also like this one. A new poet for me. Thanks for sharing.

The modernity of this way back Chinese poem surprised me:

The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
Li Bai
translated from the Chinese by Ezra Pound

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-Yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden,
They hurt me.
I grow older,
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you,
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

>214 jnwelch: I don't know if translation is the right word. From what I recall, Pound knew little to no Chinese: he worked from Japanese translations prepared by a scholar whose own speciality was Japanese drama, and so part of the modern feel is because this version was written quite recently. Even the original title is different (this one was invented by Pound) - Li Bai called it "Changgan Song". The many liberties he took are why his translations tend to be controversial. I think it's better described as a recreation or a rewrite.

There's a nice essay about the difficulty in translating Li Bai here..https://agnionline.bu.edu/blog/on-translating-li-bais-parting-at-changgan/

Some of the literature I've read on Pound's mistranslations note that he tries to "decontextualise" the Chineseness of these poems to make them more palatable to Western audiences. It's ashame because Li Bai's poetry is very contemporary - he is still taught in schools in China and his parting/drinking poems are quoted regularly in social situations..

>214 jnwelch: I like the Li Bai poem too, Joe. Thanks for sharing.

>215 rasdhar:. Good comments, thank you. Maybe “an interpretation”?

Modern tone: Pound feels ancient now, but not as ancient as Li Bai.😀

P.S. Is the a good Li Bai translation you recommend, or one you can post here? I’m encouraged to hear that he is still taught and quoted in China.

Can we keep the joy of being a kid alive?

August 11, 2025

Sehnsucht
Michael Dumanis from poem-a-day

My daughter says six is her favorite year ever
though she suspects that seven will be better.
Her dress spins down the corridor.
It’s made of butterflies and billowing
like the memory of a chocolate souffle.
Was I ever more like her than like me,
shoulders not flagging, breath hot
with awe as I sidestepped each stone,
the promise of age like a helium balloon
dragging me behind it on a flouncy string?
My daughter tries to show me everything
she’s left a mark on: painted clay,
a smiley-faced cotton ball perched on a stick.
her name in all-caps on an envelope.
Does she already somewhere in her spleen
or pancreas, in the soft tissues and marrow, sense
that the impossible goal is, for all of us,
just to keep going? No, she is not grieving
over Goldengrove whatever. Six is her favorite
year ever, I feel not so much nostalgia
as Sehnsucht, the desire for something
missing, vertigo under the infinite sky.
We crane our twin heads as a falcon or drone
pierces the cloud cover into the future.
How to get closer to the mystery.
Older, she will do whatever: name a new nation,
isolate a microbe, hear the whales mutter
the muscadine water. Every time the regimes change
she will dance Swan Lake, bending her knees
at the requisite intervals. Attagirl, daughter!
The economy continues to show resilience
in the face of despair and mass depredation.
My daughter is swan. Is crab grass run riot.
Meanwhile, I am becoming unrecognizable
to everyone except myself, and it does not matter:
before it is time to resemble no one
I have had the mixed fortune to resemble most things.
My shadow lingers in the corner of the photo of the painting.
I may not know more than a bedraggled llama
craning its neck past the impregnable fence. Still,
I participated in the world. I wore the ceremonial
knee breeches required by protocol.
Led her through ferry boats and Ferris wheels,
this ardent daughter clinging to my hand
as though it was God’s hand on a church ceiling.
We took turns licking the strawberry ice cream.
In this knowledge, I feel content.

Some great work being posted! Here's one from the collection I'm slowly working through (Small Hours of the Night).

Terrible Thing

My tears, even my tears
have hardened.

I who believed in everything.
In everyone.

I who asked only for a little tenderness
which costs nothing
but heart.

It's late now
and tenderness is no longer enough.

I've had a taste of gunpowder.

Roque Dalton

>218 jnwelch: Wow, Joe. That one really dazzles. Lots to chew on there. Thanks for sharing. Sadly, nothing by Dumanis is available in my library system.

>219 mabith: Good one. Simply said- but packs a punch.

Tu Do Street

Music divides the evening.

I close my eyes & can see

men drawing lines in the dust.

America pushes through the membrane

of mist & smoke, & I’m a small boy

again in Bogalusa. White Only

signs & Hank Snow. But tonight

I walk into a place where bar girls

fade like tropical birds. When

I order a beer, the mama-san

behind the counter acts as if she

can’t understand, while her eyes

skirt each white face, as Hank Williams

calls from the psychedelic jukebox.

We have played Judas where

only machine-gun fire brings us

together. Down the street

black GIs hold to their turf also.

An off-limits sign pulls me

deeper into alleys, as I look

for a softness behind these voices

wounded by their beauty & war.

Back in the bush at Dak To

& Khe Sanh, we fought

the brothers of these women

we now run to hold in our arms.

There’s more than a nation

inside us, as black & white

soldiers touch the same lovers

minutes apart, tasting

each other’s breath,

without knowing these rooms

run into each other like tunnels

leading to the underworld.

-Yusef Komunyakaa

Komunyakaa served in Vietnam. Several poems in this collection, touch on those experiences.

>217 jnwelch: I think 'interpretation' is the right word. By the way, this version by Pound was my introduction to Li Bai's work too and I have a great fondness for it, even though I no longer consider accurate to the original.

I read the novelist Ha Jin's biography of Li Bai, titled The Banished Immortal last year. It contains some original translations of Li Bai's work along with some wonderful additional contextual notes. Highly recommended, and very accessible to anyone not super familiar with the field, too.

One last Stallings poem

Fairy-tale Logic
by AE Stallings

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:
Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
Select the prince from a row of identical masks,
Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks
And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,
Or learn the phone directory by rote.
Always it’s impossible what someone asks—

You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe
That you have something impossible up your sleeve,
The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,
An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,
The will to do whatever must be done:
Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.

I wanted to plug nature writer Rob Cowen's book of poems The Heeding which is beautifully illustrated by Nick Hayes. Love, lock down and the beauty and cruelty of the Yorkshire landscape in an award nominated collection.

This is "Moon over Skipton". Skipton is a small market town in North Yorkshire

'It's not rising', you said,
Voice like a glass-blown note;
Fingers finding mine and gripping
'We're turning and tipping to meet it'.

So young and confident,
So capable of thought.
So entranced and fascinated
By that book we bought.

You were right, of course; we were
Tipping to meet that expectant face
As it crested terraces with its ghostly light
And silvered a sea of dirty slates.

Then it hung, in stillness, blackness,
Right there, for a moment alone.
As though arranged entirely for us
A perfect dish of polished bone.

And before the clouds hurried to hide it,
Like a secret, there was just us three;
The moon, you and me.
And in that second I remember thinking:

Should these measures prove useless
And I be torn from you,
If it turns out my life
Held no other purpose

But to hold your hand
For a second or two,
It was all worth living for, my love.
You were still worth living for.

"And silvered a sea of dirty slates" - what a brilliant line.

>226 PaulCranswick: This is lovely, thank you for introducing me to Rob Cowen's work.

>226 PaulCranswick: I love this poem too, Paul. I am still trying to track down this collection.

Boxer Aria

When no one’s around, a man could go
all day, in the woods, and down by the lake,
and into the house and back out in the garden,
without zipping his pants. The belt
holds them up, around his hips,
secure as any loin cloth
or lava-lava, the man is free
and unobserved, observing the land
and its creatures, each aware of him,
but not of his costume,
or the partial uncostume of his liberty,
but only of the actions of his homemaking art,
his music of earth’s caretaking—
forest trails blazed with ribbon,
pitcher plants transplanted, wood
sawn and split, stacked or scattered,
and part of the pleasure is to be unfettered,
a hem of a leg of the boxers sometimes
showing through the open fly
like a flag of home. And someone who loves him
loves that flash of carefreeness, that
hanky peeking out of an eden pocket,
an eden with no God or Eve in it,
but only the original Adam. But someone
who loves him had better not sing it, it is no one’s
business but his. If someone sings him—
the way his labors are singing nature—it might
seem as if the scenery spoke,
or as if some Lilith, her work of words
no less at home than his work of creation,
sang him as he sings the earth,
language escaping her lips as a corner of
fabric escapes his jeans like the jousting
favor of one who is in thrall to no one,
only to freedom.

-Sharon Olds From Poem-A-Day

>230 msf59: I love that Mark.

>231 PaulCranswick: Yep, Bilston really nailed it.

Leap Before You Look

The sense of danger must not disappear:

The way is certainly both short and steep,

However gradual it looks from here;

Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep

And break the by-laws any fool can keep;

It is not the convention but the fear

That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,

The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer

Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;

Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear

Will not be either sensible or cheap,

So long as we consent to live like sheep

And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savoir-faire,

But to rejoice when no one else is there

Is even harder than it is to weep;

No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep

Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:

Although I love you, you will have to leap;

Our dream of safety has to disappear.

-W. H. Auden (1940)

>233 msf59: I really like this one Mark. (Though there isn't a bad one in the bunch.)

>226 PaulCranswick: Paul, I think the correct link for The Heeding is https://www.librarything.com/work/26665051/book/294272064.

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

-W.H. Auden

>234 markon: Another Auden favorite.

For Once , Then , Something

Others taunt me with having knelt at well - curbs
Always wrong to the light , so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven , godlike ,
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs .
Once , when trying with chin against a well - curb ,
I discerned , as I thought , beyond the picture ,
Through the picture , a something white , uncertain ,
Something more of the depths — and then I lost it .
Water came to rebuke the too clear water .
One drop fell from a fern , and lo , a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom ,
Blurred it , blotted it out . What was that whiteness ?
Truth ? A pebble of quartz ? For once , then , something .

-Robert Frost

^Not an easy poem but well worth pondering.

>236 msf59:, Frost is one of the poets that I like. I like this one.

>236 msf59: Not an easy poem but well worth pondering
Indeed!

I tend to lurk on this thread because I don't have much to contribute, but I really like it :-)

I have just read a selection of Van Morrison's song lyrics (Lit Up Inside and some of them a simply excellent poetically. This is his "Coney Island" (the one in Northern Island not in the US)

Coney Island

Coming back from Downpatrick
Stopping off at St John's Point
Out all day bird-watching
And the craic was good

Stopped off at Strangford Lough
Early in the morning
Drove through Shrigley taking pictures
And on to Killyleagh
Stopping for Sunday papers at the
Lecale district just before Coney Island

On and on over the hill to Ardglass in the jam jar
Autumn sunshine magnificent and all shining through
Stopping off at Ardglass for a couple of jars of
Mussels and some pickled herrings in case
We get famished before dinner.

On and on, over the hill, and the craic is good
Heading towards Coney Island
I look at the side of your face
As the sunlight comes streaming through the window
In the autumn sunshine
And all the time going to Coney Island I'm thinking
'Wouldn't it be great if it was like this all the time?'

>234 markon: Ardene thanks for spotting that....I have amended it.

>236 msf59: Lovely. I thought I had a great deal of Frost, but this is the first time I'm reading this one.

>237 Kristelh: >238 Dilara86: >241 rasdhar: Glad you like the Frost poem. I had not read that one before.

>239 PaulCranswick: Well, we knew Mr. Morrison was a poet, right? That is beautiful. Thanks for sharing.

I was thinking about this one earlier today.

Personal Helicon
- Seamus Heaney

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

>243 rasdhar: Thank you for sharing that one. How I miss not being able to look forward to a new collection by the great man.

>243 rasdhar: Reminds me of something I wrote on the day I heard that Heaney had died.

WHERE ARE THE POETS?

Where are the poets
Who raised the standard, now fallen
Tattered and degrading upon the ground?

Whose is the voice to be found
To set the calumnies before us
Such that the call is worth the sound?

Who now holds the mantle
In order to find the magic in the commonplace
To wade through weeds to waiting shore -

Whence the pen’s nib dries and the sword sharpens
And eloquence is placed in little store?

Who will stand with lyric of love and longing
Now that Heaney breathes no more?

"Down the Years a Murmur Runneth"

Down the years a murmur runneth,
Bleeding hearts that wince in pain,
While the boasting politicians
Vaunt the claims of man in vain.

Building cities, stone on stubble,
Seeking safety in their might,
Till they grind the men to rubble
With their bombers of the night.

Through the earth there runs a challenge
Clearer than the trumpet call:
“Oh, forsake your ancient folly,
Build the Brotherhood of all.

“Seek the city that God buildeth,
City of the heart and hand,
Not beyond the grave of shadow,
Here on earth, in your own land.”

Philip Britts (1944)

Allison Benis White is an incredibly underrated contemporary poet. I have repeatedly re-read her collection Please Bury Me in This and have been blown away every time. Heartbreakingly beautiful stuff, highly recommend. You can check out some of the poems from the collection here.

Arthur Sze has been chosen as the new poet laureate of the United States:

Arthur Sze Will Be the Next U.S. Poet Laureate

>248 kidzdoc: Thanks! This is a new name to me. I particularly like the fact that

As poet laureate, he said he plans to focus on poetry that has been translated into English from other languages.

I do not know this poet either....exploration underway!

Well, Sight Lines was available on Everand, and so I downloaded and read it last night (it's quite short and I couldn't sleep). I absolutely loved it. His poetry is so evocative.

The Shapes of Leaves
By Arthur Sze

Ginkgo, cottonwood, pin oak, sweet gum, tulip tree:
our emotions resemble leaves and alive
to their shapes we are nourished.

Have you felt the expanse and contours of grief
along the edges of a big Norway maple?
Have you winced at the orange flare

searing the curves of a curling dogwood?
I have seen from the air logged islands,
each with a network of branching gravel roads,

and felt a moment of pure anger, aspen gold.
I have seen sandhill cranes moving in an open field,
a single white whooping crane in the flock.

And I have traveled along the contours
of leaves that have no name. Here
where the air is wet and the light is cool,

I feel what others are thinking and do not speak,
I know pleasure in the veins of a sugar maple,
I am living at the edge of a new leaf.

>245 PaulCranswick: >246 PaulCranswick: Thanks for sharing both of those, Paul.

>252 rasdhar: I like this one a lot. I appreciate you sharing it with us.

A Bookshelf

My father read a mountain aloud.

Opened to a page
where a green bird lands on a thunderclap.

Named for the billowing hands of
brittle blue flowers.

As if the unfinished poetry of the paraffin

is pulled aside like scenery,
so that I may write by the only light I know.

My father read only his one life and recited
the last line over and over.

The book is written in giant letters of fog
that wander like goats across the alpine pastures.

The moon is dog-eared as if the treetops looking up
have studied the idea of love too much.

On a page with some scattered pine needles,
a voice goes on calling out to me.

My father learned to read
in a one-room schoolhouse,

and never read a poem.

A little herd of lightning
gets spoken out loud in the dark.

Change
is scenic and sudden.

One year, I came home
and all the leaves fell off my father.

After that,
he was winter.

-Hua Xi From Poem-A-Day

Immigrants

(translated from the Spanish by Anthony Geist)

White valleys
left behind:
they begin to turn into
rocks,
pine trees
and eagles.
Hundreds of years on the road.
On the way
my parents died.
On the way
my children will be born.

-David Cruz From Poem-A-Day

Elegy of Hands
by Gbenga Adesina

It is that my hands
are also my father’s hands,
and where the lines meet on the palm
both of us have met
and sat, each with his own silence
not speaking.
It is not that we are fighting
It is the shape of love we have come to.
He keeping to his script of being dead
and I, doing the pose of the living in retaliation.
It is the shape of love we have come to.
On my way to the train this morning,
I cut through a small field of elms
and birches and thought I saw from afar
a white cluster, a crown of egrets
that had landed on the ground.
But really it was a cemetery.
It was as though the gravestones were holding hands.
It was the kind of thing that would have made him laugh:
gravestones holding hands.
I say this to him as
he sits beside me
And yes, he laughs.
He reaches out his hands toward me.
I pretend to not see the hands
I keep to the pose of the living.

___

I came across a review of Gbenga Adesina's book Death Does Not End at the Sea and looked up some of his work. He's a Nigerian poet and essayist. I enjoyed this one.

>256 rasdhar: Excellent poem. I will be seeking this poet out. I requested that collection from the library. They are ordering it. Thanks.

The Problem With Us

Scant pickings this afternoon. Nothing, but rot
and bones in this endless mockery of a year.

And the knowledge that a human being somewhere
is sitting down to write stories about how vaccines

sicken and deform, knowing them to be untrue.
Changing words, mutating facts and meanings,

inventing figures and quotes. Shock-tactic simplicity.
Uploading multiple conspiracies, intending to confuse,

to undermine and reduce efficacy. The objective being
to seed doubt in people half a world away. To destabilise

and sentence to death. To win a hand in the old game of
politicking. And today, at the garage, I saw the way it
spreads

as a man spat out in rage:‘They’re all in it together. I’ll never
get one. Things I’ve read! Give me your email and I’ll send it on.’

What chance do we have? What right to call anything
‘insidious’ when such malignancies seem a habit of our species?

When the same human being who writes such lies can
rise, weary from a day’s murder, go downstairs and cook dinner for
their children?

-Rob Cowen

From the collection The Heeding. Thanks to Paul for turning me onto to this excellent collection.

>256 rasdhar: Love that one! I'll also be seeking out that collection.

Qiviut by Arthur Sze

A dog’s bark has use, and so does honey
and a harpoon. The Inuit use the undercoat
wool of the musk ox, qiviut, to make
scarves and hats. The unexpected utility
of things is a calculus: a wooden spoon,
in a ceramic jar by the stove, has flavors
and stains from tomatoes and garlic,
cilantro and potato broth: it has nicks
and scorch lines, the oil of human hands.
Aspirin may be sifted out of willow bark,
but of what use, other than to the butterfly,
are a butterfly’s wings? The weight
of a pin is equivalent to a hundred
postage stamps, and words, articulated
with care, may heal a rift across waters.
An unspoken pang may, like an asymptote,
approach visible speech: it runs closer
and closer but does not touch. As it
runs out of sight, words are mulled:
Venus, a black speck, flies across the sun.

From the book Compass Rose. It's maybe not been the right collection for me. I find most of it a little too hard to grasp for my personal poetical tastes (but that's the joy of poetry really, there's so much variety and I do believe there's something for everyone). This is the first in the book that I could really hold on to.

>260 mabith: I like that one. Still puzzling out the complete meaning of it. I had to look up the word "asymptote", which means "a line that continually approaches a given curve but does not meet it at any finite distance." It is actually explained in the next line. LOL.

>258 msf59: Wow. That really speaks to the present, doesn't it?

>261 msf59: Yes, even that poem is one I have to squint at and just let myself feel about without thinking too hard. Poets do love making us look up words!

Here's the National Book Award finalist for Poetry
Poetry
The New Economy - Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Becoming Ghost: Poetry - Cathy Linh Che
Scorched Earth: Poems - Tiana Clark
I Do Know Some Things - Richard Siken
The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems - Patricia Smith

>264 Kristelh: Thanks for posting the list!

>264 Kristelh: Thanks, Kristel. Plenty to check out there.

Contemplating “Mistress,” Sally in 2017


I was so much more because I was so much less—

list of lewd comments and epithets.

I was currency, chattel, animal

when he came to me mammal—

craving the odor I secreted,

biting my flesh with his teeth.

He would have had to put me first

to have named me in earnest—

scared of how someone with my skin

would have been seen by his kin.

Others took the liberty—made me

the Dusky Sally of drawings and songs.

None of them to ever know me:

girl, child, woman, mother;

confused, scared, alone

bone to bone

with the only man

I’d ever know—

in a teen dream fantasy

where I chose

to return to land I called home.

Not imagining daughter turned stranger,

dust of children abandoned on a mountain

to which I cannot return,

that I would become

reconstructed

versions of someone I don’t know

in converted closets, movies, poems,

because a sliver of pigment

kindled his ardent,

because I let a child make a decision

for this extraordinary privilege.

-Chet'la Sebree

>267 msf59: Love that one

Here's another from the Roque Dalton book I read, Small Hours of the Night.

Old Woman with Small Boy

Frightened hunched over
looking for the last secrets of life
in the ground she walks on
infinitely tired of not being able
to even make an effort
all her spirit dimmed by the teasing of the light
with nothing to forget and everything present
weighing her down more each day
and she blaming her jitters on the earthquake

but he’s all dolled up in his spotless sailor suit
absolutely taken with the birds flying past

I came across Isabelle Baafi because she's shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize this year. Here is one of her works:

The Scarecrow
Isabelle Baafi

if I turn away from light, head bowed from the sun’s
admonishing glare, peel off from this crucifying
wood and soil punished by a plough’s claw;

if I stalk the village shadows, past the schoolhouse,
through the mire, ascending walls like ivy,
dodging moonglow and priests’ flambeaux;

if I wrestle with the dark, obey the adder wrapped
around my wrist, dance with spirits in the graveyard,
stain my lips with the menses of a witch;

if I succumb to the pull of a milkmaid’s braid, the trembling
of a rabbit underfoot, the frailty of fontanelle, the skin
of a child locked and wailing in a basement;

if I catch a rag doll by the dress, tear its seams,
hold it face down in a pail, pile its hair in the gut of a
wheelbarrow, shove its innards down the gullet of a well;

if I keep a duck’s beak in my boot, a chicken feather
behind my ear, halt death with the hoof of a pig,
watch my enemies sleep in the eyeballs of an owl;

if I conjure a murmuration in the figure
of a scythe, and taunt the crows
who rule the sky but peck at dirt to cling to life;

will you adorn me with dandelions, paint my cheeks
with mulberries’ blood?

will you offer up the bones of your dead when the straw
in your barns catches fire?

will you give to me your withered grass, your grain
that refuses to bud?

will you still say that I know nothing of you? will you still
say that I am not a man?

>269 mabith: >270 rasdhar: I enjoyed both of these. I was unfamiliar with these poets.

SoMa

Even though it stands: the biggest sky of my life
remains above that strip mall parking lot,
I don’t think I could ever go back.
The blurry drives with no destination,
reaching for something, who knows what, beyond
the sunroof. Dragged a couch onto a frozen lake.
Chased small things into the corners.
Swiped at it with a broom. Dreamt
of my dead & was made of that dreaming.
If asked now what keeps my attention,
I’d point to the stage where some queen
trapped in time, mouths the words

to a song only she knows.
Something gray saps the back of my throat.
What saves my teeth from my teeth
is a piece of gum older, I think, than millennia.
Before I even realize he’s gone, my lover returns
& hands me a cup of water.
More & more it means something to be alive.

It’s important that I write this now before I forget,
this now which has happened so suddenly
I have to rub my eyes to join it, this now which might
seem insignificant for those of you reading
over my shoulder as I type this out on my phone
in the middle of the dance floor.
The rude & sudden light, for which I apologize.

-Hieu Minh Nguyen From Poem-A-Day

PITY THE NATION

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture

Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own

Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed

Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away

My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!

– Lawrence Ferlinghetti (after Khalil Gibran)

^I have posted this poem before and will again...

Dead Stars

Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.
Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels
so mute it’s almost in another year.

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.

It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.

And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full
of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—

to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,
if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,

rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?

-Ada Limon This one is from The Carrying: Poems.

^One of my very favorite poets.

American History

We laid our leather boats in a stream,
steered north for bream and bank martin,
fattish brooks and honeyed roots.
We followed the scent of pitcher plants
cast across the river, past
plumes of bees in orange blooms,
emerald streamers, hanging moss
where storks at rest, secure in their nests,
tossed upon us tassels of gold,
what appeared to be various
species of Gordonia, what the inhabitants call
the White Lily of the Swamp.

After we came to the land
of the inhabitants themselves,
holding their jugs in the water-drum of clouds,
waist-high, patient, in fields of floating plants
where trout passed freely,
rainbowed by the force of fresh water,
we removed their phlox-like entrails,
placed their carcasses in forked
roads of trees, so they appeared as mere
stems, killed by winter frost.

A gift, we thought, from our benevolent god,
the sheen of wet grass in early morning light, like
the minds of those inhabitants, which we had wanted
for our own. As long as this was our dream,
no one would know what was lost.

We laid our leather boats in a stream,
steered north for bream and bank martin,
fattish brooks and honeyed roots.
We followed the scent of pitcher plants
cast across the river, past
plumes of bees in orange blooms,
emerald streamers, hanging moss
where storks at rest, secure in their nests,
tossed upon us tassels of gold,
what appeared to be various
species of Gordonia, what the inhabitants call
the White Lily of the Swamp.

After we came to the land
of the inhabitants themselves,
holding their jugs in the water-drum of clouds,
waist-high, patient, in fields of floating plants
where trout passed freely,
rainbowed by the force of fresh water,
we removed their phlox-like entrails,
placed their carcasses in forked
roads of trees, so they appeared as mere
stems, killed by winter frost.

A gift, we thought, from our benevolent god,
the sheen of wet grass in early morning light, like
the minds of those inhabitants, which we had wanted
for our own. As long as this was our dream,
no one would know what was lost.

-Jennifer Elise Foerster From Poem-A-Day

Against Dying
by Kaveh Akbar

if the body is just a parable
about the body if breath
is a leash to hold the mind
then staying alive should be
easier than it is most sick
things become dead things
at twenty-four my liver was
already covered in fatty
rot my mother filled a tiny
coffin with picture frames
I spent the year drinking
from test tubes weeping
wherever I went somehow
it happened wellness crept
into me like a roach nibbling
through an eardrum for
a time the half minutes
of fire in my brainstem
made me want to pull out
my spine but even those
have become bearable so
how shall I live now
in the unexpected present
I spent so long in a lover’s
quarrel with my flesh
the peace seems over-
cautious too-polite I say
stop being cold or make
that blue bluer and it does
we speak to each other
in this code where every word
means obey I sit under
a poplar tree with a thermos
of chamomile feeling
useless as an oath against
dying I put a sugar cube
on my tongue and
swallow it like a pill

___
I recently read a collection by Akbar and accordingly looked up some of his other works, and enjoyed this one in particular.

>274 msf59: I like this one, Ada Limon is great.

Everything is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

-David Whyte

>279 msf59: Oh I love that one.

Everything You Need to Know in Life You’ll Learn at Boarding School

Speak English. Forget the language of your grandparents. It is
dead. Forget their teachings. They are ignorant and unGodly.
Cleanliness is next to Godliness. Indians are not clean. We will
teach you to be clean. You will never amount to anything. Stand in
line. You will practice proper hygiene. This is a toothbrush.
Hang it on the hook next to the others. Do not allow the bristles
to touch. This spreads the disease that you bring to school
from your families. Make your bed with mitered corners. A
bed not properly made will be torn apart. Start over. The boarding
school feeds and clothes you. Remember and be grateful.
Say grace before meals. In English. Don't cry. Crying never
solved anything. Write home once every month. In English.
Tell your mother that you are doing very well. You'll never
amount to anything. Answer when the teacher addresses you.
In English. We do not recommend visits to your family. If you
visit your family in the summer, report to the matron's office
immediately upon your return. You will be allowed into the
dormitory after you have been sanitized and de-loused. Busy
hands are happy hands. Keep yourself occupied. You'll never
amount to anything. Books are our friends. Reading is your key
to the world. In English. Forget the language of your grandparents.
It is dead. We forbid you to speak it. If you are heard
speaking it you will kneel on a navy bean for one hour. Don't
cry. Crying never solved anything. We will ask if you have
learned your lesson. You will answer. In English. Spare the
rod and spoil the child. We will not spare the rod. We will
cut your hair. We will shame you. We will lock you in the
basement. Learn from that. Remember and be grateful.
Speak English. You'll never amount to anything.

-Linda LeGarde Grover

From the Native anthology collection When the Light of the World was Subdued Our Songs Came Through