Poet's Corner

[midcan5]

'Crossroads'

"The second half of my life will be black
to the white rind of the old and fading moon.
The second half of my life will be water
over the cracked floor of these desert years.
I will land on my feet this time,
knowing at least two languages and who
my friends are. I will dress for the
occasion, and my hair shall be
whatever color I please.
Everyone will go on celebrating the old
birthday, counting the years as usual,
but I will count myself new from this
inception, this imprint of my own desire.

The second half of my life will be swift,
past leaning fenceposts, a gravel shoulder,
asphalt tickets, the beckon of open road.
The second half of my life will be wide-eyed,
fingers shifting through fine sands,
arms loose at my sides, wandering feet.
There will be new dreams every night,
and the drapes will never be closed.
I will toss my string of keys into a deep
well and old letters into the grate.

The second half of my life will be ice
breaking up on the river, rain
soaking the fields, a hand
held out, a fire,
and smoke going
upward, always up."

Joyce Sutphen

 

[midcan5]

Even though I lived through these times, going back and reading the history of the sixties still amazes. I recently talked to a women who said at four, her parents took her to protest marches. Unlike today, youth rose up then, there were so many of us, are we today too comfortable and settled to fight the good fight all over again. Or have the old gained so much power, there can be no fight.

'May 1968'

"When the Dean said we could not cross campus
until the students gave up the buildings,
we lay down, in the street,
we said the cops will enter this gate
over us. Lying back on the cobbles,
I saw the buildings of New York City
from dirt level, they soared up
and stopped, chopped off--above them, the sky,
the night air over the island.
The mounted police moved, near us,
while we sang, and then I began to count,
12, 13, 14, 15,
I counted again, 15, 16, one
month since the day on that deserted beach,
17, 18, my mouth fell open,
my hair on the street,
if my period did not come tonight
I was pregnant. I could see the sole of a cop's
shoe, the gelding's belly, its genitals--
if they took me to Women's Detention and did
the exam on me, the speculum,
the fingers--I gazed into the horse's tail
like a comet-train. All week, I had
thought about getting arrested, half-longed
to give myself away. On the tar--
one brain in my head, another,
in the making, near the base of my tail--
I looked at the steel arc of the horse's
shoe, the curve of its belly, the cop's
nightstick, the buildings streaming up
away from the earth. I knew I should get up
and leave, but I lay there looking at the space
above us, until it turned deep blue and then
ashy, colorless, Give me this one
night, I thought, and I'll give this child
the rest of my life, the horse's heads,
this time, drooping, dipping, until
they slept in a circle around my body and my daughter."

Sharon Olds

 

[midcan5]

'Border Crossing: Corridor, 7:35 p.m.'

"hours after work's close
i stumble from light's drone
from navigating processing information jigsaw
the disappointment of volumes yet to be added
and author name headings still unreconciled

past the cleaning lady in the hall
furrowed over the cart of industrial hygiene
bleach mops cleaners suds powders
soaps toilet paper paper towel
all things familiar yet other on this epic scale

her ankles thickened from long standing
her hands gloveless swollen from scrubbing
her wrists free of ornament
her body wrapped in sack and apron
her hair pulled back in netting

and i remember college jobs of housecleaning
how i relished the solitude the absence of overseer
the peering into the nooks of strangers' secrets
the money for books once even a first edition
the deliverance however fleeting from my father's anguish

and think how different this is for her
these hours days years stretching into endless
of scouring and wiping and rinsing
the waste remnants of these bookish others
of mine this life in not quite shadow

but still the satisfaction or perhaps something like it
the dignity resisting heroic
in task completed
in the sparkle of these 8 p.m. toilets
and the clean of this federal marble

and i wonder about origins
cracked earth crowded rooms
the likelihood of instruction
and the terror of leaving love and language
being nearly buried alive in car trunk

and hope for the kiss of a child
the embrace of a man or woman at dance
cavorting of tiger lily in kitchen window
chorus of cricket on the green
and the cheer of souls clapping in communion

as I sound my evening adieu
and am gladdened by her looking up at me
by her smile suddenly so radiant by her clarity
and think I have been all wrong all wrong maybe
and step on yet unwashed tiles into elevator's arms."

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub

 

[midcan5]

'Hush, Little Baby, Don't Say A Word'

"My mother’s older sister calls me three times a year: Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day, my birthday in July. Always works into the conversation how I should be grateful for the “choice” my mother made not to abort me, her Catholic pride inflating the link between us. The frothy fervor over my birth is quickly followed with rebuke: stinging stories of my mother’s incompetence as a woman, how little she knew about sex, how stupid she was, getting pregnant out of wedlock; and how unfit a mother she was, feeding me raw potatoes as a toddler and letting me run around for hours on end in soggy diapers. My pious aunt wanted to take me away from her, she tells me, to rescue me. But she just couldn’t. Her own family duties and all. My mother, the Madonna-whore, dead now some twenty years, and me still here, mascot for the cause, a grown-up fetus with tape over its mouth."

Maureen Kingston

 

[midcan5]

'Father's Song'

"Yesterday, against admonishment,
my daughter balanced on the couch back,
fell and cut her mouth.

Because I saw it happen I knew
she was not hurt, and yet
a child's blood so red
it stops a father's heart.

My daughter cried her tears;
I held some ice
against her lip.
That was the end of it.

Round and round: bow and kiss.
I try to teach her caution;
she tried to teach me risk."

Gregory Orr

 

[midcan5]

'Heartland M.I.A.'

1
"He won't come out of his apartment,
my friend's brother, where 'Nam
rages every day and night. Our war.
He's cut off most of the family, the ones
who did the intervention, accusing him
of drinking to self-destruction.

The family prays for a miracle.

2
The man lets his younger brother
pick him up for lunch one Sunday afternoon.
The brother is alarmed that the whites of his eyes
have yellowed, his legs now too weak to walk.

Which brother is more fearful of the sense
of death in the air? Which one expects
a miracle?

3
The brother who is ill
opens his door to a total stranger, a friend
a vet, a friend of Bill W's—a man
who's ridden out his need to drink.

The stranger works a miracle.
(What does he say to the brother? Does he
ask to only touch the hem of your garment?)
No matter. The brother who is ill goes with him
to the V.A., agrees to stay (if only for a day).

The family prays for a miracle.

4
Is it a miracle if you are comforted
by a stranger's love? Is it enough
of a miracle if you recognize that another
has suffered as you, before you die?
Is it a miracle if you are touched by love only
for one day?

5
In the evenings, I walk in my neighborhood.
I, also, pray for miracles.
Pray to let go of my anger at the universe
because miracles didn't arrive on demand.
Pray that if one comes, I'll recognize it.
Such faint Scottish faith. July 4th or 5th,
I stop at the day lilies who glow stain-glass
at sundown, much better than fireworks,
along with wild roses, blue bells. The house
where the P.O.W.-M.I.A. flag still flies—

6
Pray for the P.O.W.s still lost
in the hospital down the river road,
our war, and the soldiers from the new wars,
their wars, which are also ours."

Roseann Lloyd

 

[midcan5]

'Chemotherapy Lessons'

Chemo introduces you
to entropy:
the tensions of your hot pursuits
must slacken; passion
must become anathema.

Faces behind
closed eyes, like images in film,
replay your plot--
you, now, a creature in a time
that's ending, choked
by tubes that flow with licensed poisons.

Chemotherapy decides
an old debate—
mind and body are not two, but you."


"Life and the World Are One" Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus

"Dear loving and beloved, though my pace
is growing slow, I ask you not to cry.

As I go forward into dying, the world
is slowing from its fury to a crawl.

A film is forming on the silver moon,
promising the end of tides, romance.

Nothing now can rescue Newton's laws.
When finally my breath ceases, they will lapse.

Now that the world is ending, I can speak
the uttermost of love and not hold back.

I don’t expect to speak from another world.
This is my only world—don’t wait for word.

As I embraced the world, so it did me.
As it of me, so I of it, will soon be free."

Richard P. Richter

 

[midcan5]

When I was in Alaska zero would sometimes feel warm. I have never found a good thanksgiving poem, after you read lots of history you become aware that Disneyland is more than an amusement park, it becomes a way of thinking, a way to forgive and forget and a way to tell the children good things. Maybe I have a poem here, as Isiah Berlin once wrote, even in the midst of turmoil he had a wonderful life, hope yours is too - happy thanks day.

'The Same Cold'

"In Minnesota the serious cold arrived
like no cold I'd previously experienced,
an in-your-face honesty to it, a clarity
that always took me by surprise.
On blizzardly nights with wires down
or in the dead-battery dawn
the cold made good neighbors of us all,
made us moral because we might need
something moral in return, no hitchhiker
left on the road, not even some frozen
strange looking stranger turned away
from our door. After a spell of it,
I remember, zero would feel warm-
people out for walks, jackets open,
ice fishermen in the glory
of their shacks moved to Nordic song.
The cold took over our lives,
lived in every conversation, as compelling
as local dirt or local sport.
If bitten by it, stranded somewhere,
a person would want
To lie right down in it and sleep.
Come February, some of us needed
to scream, hurt ourselves, divorce.
Once, on Route 23, thirty below,
My Maverick seized up, and a man
with a blanket and candy bar, a man
for all weather, stopped and drove me home.
It was no big thing to him, the savior.
Just two men, he said, in the same cold."

Stephen Dunn

 

[PoliticalChic]

Tomorrow is the birthday of Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander McCrae (November 30, 1872 – January 28, 1918) was a Canadian poet, physician, author, artist and soldier during World War I and a surgeon during the battle of Ypres. He is best known for writing the famous war memorial poem In Flanders Fields.

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch, be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

 

[Meister]

HIGH FLIGHT

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor even eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

John Gillespie Magee


John Gillespie Magee, Junior (June 9, 1922 – December 11, 1941) was an aviator and poet who died as a result of a mid-air collision over Lincolnshire during World War II.

 

[midcan5]

'The Silence'

for RJ

"You always called late and drunk,
your voice luxurious with pain,
I, tightly wrapped in dreaming,
listening as if to a ghost.

Tonight a friend called to say your body
was found in your apartment, where
it had lain for days. You'd lost your job,
stopped writing, saw nobody for weeks.
Your heart, he said. Drink had destroyed you.

We met in a college town, first teaching jobs,
poems flowing from a grief we enshrined
with myth and alcohol. I envied the way
women looked at you, a bear blunt with rage,
tearing through an ever-darkening wood.

Once we traded poems like photos of women
whose beauty tested God's faith. 'Read this one
about how friendship among the young can't last,
it will rip your heart out of your chest!'

Once you called to say J was leaving,
the pain stuck in your throat like a razor blade.
A woman was calling me back to bed
so I said I'd call back. But I never did.

The deep forlorn smell of moss and pine
behind your stone house, you strumming
and singing Lorca, Vallejo, De Andrade,
as if each syllable tasted of blood,
as if you had all the time in the world. . .

You knew your angels loved you
but you also knew they would leave
someone they could not save."

Philip Schultz

 

[midcan5]

'Dear Kevin,'

"Remember when we were ten and pricked our index fingers, strangled them, breathless, until they became a bloody Cyclops and sloppily bonded them together? You moved four years later, and I never saw you until the other day, bored at work succumbing to Facebook again. Your shaved head, mosaic skull tattoos, and double birds made it difficult to recognize my friend. I recalled that day in Ms. Barrett's class when we straightened and sharpened staples becoming family: —The two-story, built-in pool, white boy—The two bedroom, blow-up pool, Latino "Brothers Forever…" However the emblazoned swastika branded on your left wrist, broadcast we lost touch long ago."

'Your friend,
Danny'


Daniel Romo

 

[midcan5]

'Monotony of Machines'

"The air is filled with
the smell of rotting fruit.

Men and women hunch over,
backs aching in unison,
their hair stuffed into hairnets,
beneath the plastic, yellow hardhats.

The continuous clanging of cackling machines,
steel snarls sharply at their guarded eardrums.

The rhythms ricochet off the cold
metal walls, like bullets they take a life.

The hands of the clock,
circle round and round, busy hands
move along the conveyor belt.

Stepfather is nowhere to be found.
Mother, who works in the factory,
is more of a man than he is;
the children are hungry, six mouths are waiting.

Her preoccupied hands
shove the peaches into cans.
The hours get longer each year,
until she never sees the sun.

The chemicals, the blood hemorrhaging,
the hospital bed, the bills, the late night visits,
the lawyers won't take the case.

Twenty seven years
and the factory disappears,
retire early and get a new job.

Mama, take the hush money."

Victor Inzunza

 

[Wicked Jester]

The law of the fish.

By the band "The Radiators"

The big ones eat the little ones
the little ones got to be fast
That's the law of the fish now mutha
you gots to move your ass!

 

[Wicked Jester]

Where do they go when the bad people die?
They don't go to heaven where the angels fly
They go to a lake o' fire and fry
That's where they go when the bad people die!

 

[midcan5]

'Failure'

"To pay for my father's funeral
I borrowed money from people
he already owed money to.
One called him a nobody.
No, I said, he was a failure.
You can't remember
a nobody's name, that's why
they're called nobodies.
Failures are unforgettable.
The rabbi who read a stock eulogy
about a man who didn't belong to
or believe in anything
was both a failure and a nobody.
He failed to imagine the son
and wife of the dead man
being shamed by each word.
To understand that not
believing in or belonging to
anything demanded a kind
of faith and buoyancy.
An uncle, counting on his fingers
my father's business failures—
a parking lot that raised geese,
a motel that raffled honeymoons,
a bowling alley with roving mariachis—
failed to love and honor his brother,
who showed him how to whistle
under covers, steal apples
with his right or left hand. Indeed,
my father was comical.
His watches pinched, he tripped
on his pant cuffs and snored
loudly in movies, where
his weariness overcame him
finally. He didn't believe in:
savings insurance newspapers
vegetables good or evil human
frailty history or God.
Our family avoided us,
fearing boils. I left town
but failed to get away."

Philip Schultz

 

[Wicked Jester]

Obama and his Momma

By Wicked Jester:

Oh Barack Obama
how i'd love to smack yo' momma
for raising such a douchebag
with the mind of a Lama

 

[midcan5]

'The Feast of Lights'

"Kindle the taper like the steadfast star
Ablaze on evening's forehead o'er the earth,
And add each night a lustre till afar
An eightfold splendor shine above thy hearth.
Clash, Israel, the cymbals, touch the lyre,
Blow the brass trumpet and the harsh-tongued horn;
Chant psalms of victory till the heart takes fire,
The Maccabean spirit leap new-born.

Remember how from wintry dawn till night,
Such songs were sung in Zion, when again
On the high altar flamed the sacred light,
And, purified from every Syrian stain,
The foam-white walls with golden shields were hung,
With crowns and silken spoils, and at the shrine,
Stood, midst their conqueror-tribe, five chieftains sprung
From one heroic stock, one seed divine.

Five branches grown from Mattathias' stem,
The Blessed John, the Keen-Eyed Jonathan,
Simon the fair, the Burst-of Spring, the Gem,
Eleazar, Help of-God; o'er all his clan
Judas the Lion-Prince, the Avenging Rod,
Towered in warrior-beauty, uncrowned king,
Armed with the breastplate and the sword of God,
Whose praise is: "He received the perishing."

They who had camped within the mountain-pass,
Couched on the rock, and tented neath the sky,
Who saw from Mizpah's heights the tangled grass
Choke the wide Temple-courts, the altar lie
Disfigured and polluted--who had flung
Their faces on the stones, and mourned aloud
And rent their garments, wailing with one tongue,
Crushed as a wind-swept bed of reeds is bowed,

Even they by one voice fired, one heart of flame,
Though broken reeds, had risen, and were men,
They rushed upon the spoiler and o'ercame,
Each arm for freedom had the strength of ten.
Now is their mourning into dancing turned,
Their sackcloth doffed for garments of delight,
Week-long the festive torches shall be burned,
Music and revelry wed day with night.

Still ours the dance, the feast, the glorious Psalm,
The mystic lights of emblem, and the Word.
Where is our Judas? Where our five-branched palm?
Where are the lion-warriors of the Lord?
Clash, Israel, the cymbals, touch the lyre,
Sound the brass trumpet and the harsh-tongued horn,
Chant hymns of victory till the heart take fire,
The Maccabean spirit leap new-born!"

Emma Lazarus

 

[editec]

Homage

A snowy night in December
as I remember

Shall I ponder weak and weary?

There's tradition.
There's Poe...
and
I know.
I know.

It was trick of light I guessed
that some bricks seemed newer than the rest.

The demeanor the place
conjured up his face

Eyes looking their last look
as brick is mortared into nook

Disbelieve
turned to pleading.
Pleading
turned to screams.

I was reading when the screaming stopped
I...

listened at the wall
but...
that was all

That was all.

It was a snowy night in December
and I remember...

Fourteen rooms we're told, this house is very old.

 

[editec]

For those of you who like to listen to poetry (and after all, isn't poetry meant to be heard?) you might be interested to know that yesterday we procured funding to add audio files to the Poetry Ed website we're building.

So in about six months or so, I'll be able to direct ya'll to a site where you'll be able to review and listen to a collection of 550 poems, as well as learn something about the meter and structure of poetry, as well as view the art which I choose to accompany this collection.

As I'm particualrly fond of of landscape impressionism and classical nudes, too, and as finding the right image to accompany a poem is a damned difficult thing to actually do (I know... it sounds so easy, too, doesn't it?) I hope that you will take some time to ask yourselves why I choose that image for that poem.

Honestly, folks...so far I think I put more hours into matching images to the poetry than it took us to compile the collection and accompanying data about it.

I'll let you know when it's ready for prime time.

Probably sometime in June 2011.