Poet's Corner

[midcan5]

'Potato Soup'

"I set up my computer and webcam in the kitchen
so I can ask my mother’s and aunt’s advice
as I cook soup for the first time alone.
My mother is in Utah. My aunt is in Hungary.
I show the onions to my mother with the webcam.
“Cut them smaller,” she advises.
“You only need a taste.”
I chop potatoes as the onions fry in my pan.
When I say I have no paprika to add to the broth,
they argue whether it can be called potato soup.
My mother says it will be white potato soup,
my aunt says potato soup must be red.
When I add sliced peppers, I ask many times
if I should put the water in now,
but they both say to wait until I add the potatoes.
I add Polish sausage because I can’t find Hungarian,
and I cook it so long the potatoes fall apart.
“You’ve made stew,” my mother says
when I hold up the whole pot to the camera.
They laugh and say I must get married soon.
I turn off the computer and eat alone."

Daniel Nyikos

 

[midcan5]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umZIiLYnfzs]Poetry Everywhere: "The Dancing" by Gerald Stern - YouTube[/ame]

 

[midcan5]

'Everything I Wanted I Had'

"a dime to sit through a Fred Astaire movie
twice, kids to play with after school,
parents who loved me, and four sisters.
June, in college, juggling boyfriends, May,

just two years behind, sang
at all the ladies’ clubs. Eleanor,
way ahead of me too. Thirteen.
I tried imagine being so grownup.

Sure, we quarreled, but sometimes
we had such fun making fudge, dancing
to Glen Miller’s Boogie Woogie,
in the upstairs hall.

It was my birthday, my first party ever.
We played musical chairs, upset the fruit basket.
And for once, I was the center of attention.
I remember two presents,

a tiny glass vase of jeweled flowers
that shone blue and red on my hand.
The best one, a real diary. It even had
a little gold key to lock up my secrets.

After everyone left, I went up to my room,
closed the door and told my diary,
I can’t believe it. At last.
I am ten years old."

Phyllis M. Teplitz

 

[midcan5]

'Twelve Sticks of Dynamite'

"I want a jury of my peers, twelve angry women, who hate housework.

I want you to look into their eyes and tell them how I drive you mad
when I haphazardly toss clothes into draws with disregard
to the system you keep trying to enact. Shirts should be with shirts,
grouped together according to sleeve length, pants with pants, socks with socks.

I want a jury of my peers, twelve angry women, who gave birth.

I want you to tell them how you tried to convince me that I was not going into labor,
even after my water broke. I want you to explain how the nurses wheeled you in a bed,
so you could sleep while I waited hours for an epidural. I want you to tell them about
how two nurses were telling you to sit down, put your head between your legs
and breathe while I pushed our daughter out into this world.

I want a jury of my peers, twelve angry women who were told that breastfeed babies
are proven to be more intelligent and that the torn tip of their nipples
would eventually heal and strengthen. I want you to look at them
and tell them the truth, that I gave up after three days to self-medicate.

I want a jury of my peers, twelve angry women who know I am guilty,

but will exonerate anyway."

Rebecca Schumejda

 

[midcan5]

'The Logic of Centrifugal Force'

"The shopkeeper spun the top-like toy on the counter and waited. The toy made a click sound when she spun it. Clay watched the five-armed star spin, its motion blurring the toy’s shape. “You come in for puzzles all the time,” the shopkeeper said. “It’s a puzzle with a secret answer.” The toy stopped and the five metal balls that had to rest in holes at the end of each arm were in place. “If you try to get the balls in each hole by themselves, you’ll never make it. It’s got to spin.” Clay liked the shopkeeper. She was plump, sprayed her graying hair, and wore an excess of powder beneath her arms. He’d come into her flea market every other week to spend money he’d get from bottle returns. Today he had no money and came in to steal. “What do you think?” the shopkeeper asked as she spun the top again. Clay thought of his mother’s slurred speech as she hopped onto the back of Carl Wilson’s bike and peeled from their street, air ballooning beneath her windbreaker, of his father two thousand miles away in California, macramé bracelets on his arms, his beard filling in, of his grandparents’ flat, empty after their move east, paint softly feathering, of the walks through the snow with his sister to spend food stamps on Coke and Little Debbies before the start of Good Times, of the perfectly shaped circle in the living room window where he’d heaved the baseball months earlier, wind now rushing in the hole. The top slowed, then stopped, the balls firmly in their separate arms."

C. Vincent Samarco

 

[midcan5]

'Swing'

"Simply by pumping
my thin arms & legs
I could tip the world up
on its lip
like a penny

& rock it

back down
shift the wind so my bangs blew
back. stopped.
washed back
over my eyes.

stopped.

& my house & the trees
& my father & mother
& the sun in the sky
would jump up
& down

at my whim

as I leaned
back & pointed my toes so
my skirt would
bloom wide
as a daylily’s red

mouth

then shut like night
& the neighborhood
boys would
cry out,
"I see France!""

Suzume Shi

 

[midcan5]

'Fixing Cars'

"I like the argument that man is alone in the universe,
and ipso facto its most intelligent being.
It proves there is no God, or if there is,
it’s the god of low SAT scores.

Astronomers debate the dark matter between stars.
I picture a conversational pause with a Bush apologist,
each party wondering, What planet?

If I read the moon right tonight, there is no reading it.
If I tell my kid sister the stars are eyes twinkling,
why do their cold winks give me the shivers?

The smartest kid on our block couldn’t jump-start
his engine if he was stuck in the wrong end of town
and his life depended on it. I can’t read my tax form.
I fix his cars, he interprets the IRS,
and under Earth’s starry hood,
we solve the problems of the universe."

Kent Newkirk

 

[midcan5]

'Facing It'

"My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way--the stone lets me go.
I turn that way--I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair."

Yusef Komunyakaa

 

[Sky Dancer]

As I Grew Older


It was a long time ago.
I have almost forgotten my dream.
But it was there then,
In front of me,
Bright like a sun--
My dream.
And then the wall rose,
Rose slowly,
Slowly,
Between me and my dream.
Rose until it touched the sky--
The wall.
Shadow.
I am black.
I lie down in the shadow.
No longer the light of my dream before me,
Above me.
Only the thick wall.
Only the shadow.
My hands!
My dark hands!
Break through the wall!
Find my dream!
Help me to shatter this darkness,
To smash this night,
To break this shadow
Into a thousand lights of sun,
Into a thousand whirling dreams
Of sun!


Langston Hughes

 

[midcan5]

Over fifty thousand views, amazing, please make sure you support poetry and the poets quoted here. I have over 400 posts in this thread, a record.

'The Power Of Light'

"can turn a white
dog black
a silhouette

on the horizon
sunlight unfolds
every new leaf

pulls a sumac
sprout through
four inches of asphalt

a red light stops a chain
of fast-moving cars
at an intersection

light you spend
all day every day
at the end of the tunnel

nine missing miners
on the windowsill
nine candles

widow’s walk
a lantern for
a late boat

the moon
is your proxy
interrogating

the night sky
you can make
mud shine

any student
of the stars
knows the sky

can be any color"

Ken Letko

 

[Sky Dancer]

Late in darkness
shadows fall
to cast their gloom
on every wall
the foe of light
its sickness spreads
it floods my eyes
and clouds my head
the blackness stays
to spread with time
resolve grows weak
a clock gives chime
a flood of ink
to wash my soul
abyss of time
beyond control
within this space
no sight to glimpse
of life before
or ever since
falling blind
assassin’s breath
cold and still
my heart’s own death

Mark Fisher

 

[Sky Dancer]

The Moon And The Yew Tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky --
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness -
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence.

Sylvia Plath

 

[Sky Dancer]

Acquainted with the Night

by Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
O luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

 

[Sky Dancer]

Crossing the Water

by Sylvia Plath

Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.
Where do the black trees go that drink here?
Their shadows must cover Canada.

A little light is filtering from the water flowers.
Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:
They are round and flat and full of dark advice.

Cold worlds shake from the oar.
The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.
A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;

Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls.

 

[Sky Dancer]

Burning the Letters

by Sylvia Plath

I made a fire; being tired
Of the white fists of old
Letters and their death rattle
When I came too close to the wastebasket
What did they know that I didn't?
Grain by grain, they unrolled
Sands where a dream of clear water
Grinned like a getaway car.
I am not subtle
Love, love, and well, I was tired
Of cardboard cartons the color of cement or a dog pack
Holding in it's hate
Dully, under a pack of men in red jackets,
And the eyes and times of the postmarks.

This fire may lick and fawn, but it is merciless:
A glass case
My fingers would enter although
They melt and sag, they are told
Do not touch.
And here is an end to the writing,
The spry hooks that bend and cringe and the smiles, the smiles
And at least it will be a good place now, the attic.
At least I won't be strung just under the surface,
Dumb fish
With one tin eye,
Watching for glints,
Riding my Arctic
Between this wish and that wish.

So, I poke at the carbon birds in my housedress.
They are more beautiful than my bodiless owl,
They console me--
Rising and flying, but blinded.
They would flutter off, black and glittering, they would be coal angels
Only they have nothing to say but anybody.
I have seen to that.
With the butt of a rake
I flake up papers that breathe like people,
I fan them out
Between the yellow lettuces and the German cabbage
Involved in it's weird blue dreams
Involved in a foetus.
And a name with black edges

Wilts at my foot,
Sinuous orchis
In a nest of root-hairs and boredom--
Pale eyes, patent-leather gutturals!
Warm rain greases my hair, extinguishes nothing.
My veins glow like trees.
The dogs are tearing a fox. This is what it is like
A read burst and a cry
That splits from it's ripped bag and does not stop
With that dead eye
And the stuffed expression, but goes on
Dyeing the air,
Telling the particles of the clouds, the leaves, the water
What immortality is. That it is immortal.

 

[Sky Dancer]

Implosions

The world's
not wanton
only wild and wavering

I wanted to choose words that even you
would have to be changed by

Take the word
of my pulse, loving and ordinary
Send out your signals, hoist
your dark scribbled flags
but take
my hand

All wars are useless to the dead

My hands are knotted in the rope
and I cannot sound the bell

My hands are frozen to the switch
and I cannot throw it

The foot is in the wheel

When it's finished and we're lying
in a stubble of blistered flowers
eyes gaping, mouths staring
dusted with crushed arterial blues

I'll have done nothing
even for you?

Adrienne Rich

 

[Sky Dancer]

North American Time

I

When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
when walking in the street I found my
themes cut out for me
knew what I would not report
for fear of enemies' usage
then I began to wonder

II

Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill.

We move but our words stand
become responsibly
for more than we intended

and this is verbal privilege

VII

I am thinking this in a country
where words are stolen out of mouths
as bread is stolen out of mouths
where poets don't go to jail
for being poets, but for being
dark-skinned, female, poor.
I am writing this in a time
when anything we write
can be used against those we love
where the context is never given
though we try to explain, over and over
For the sake of poetry at least
I need to know these things

Adrienne Rich

 

[Sky Dancer]

Alone

Over the fence, the dead settle in
for a journey. Nine o'clock.
You are alone for the first time
today. Boys asleep. Husband out.

A beer bottle sweats in your hand,
and sea lavender clogs the air
with perfume. Think of yourself.
Your arms rest with nothing to do

after weeks spent attending to others.
Your thoughts turn to whether
butter will last the week, how much
longer the car can run on its partial tank of gas.


Deborah Ager

 

[Sky Dancer]

SNOW FILLS IN THE LANDSCAPE

Visibility has traveled down the highway
This is a good reason to stop in the next town
and kill a few hours reading a book
in the local cafe while the storm blows by
Two hours later the Mounties have decided
to close the highway to Moose Jaw
Outside blue and yellow gas station lights
sizzle in the slanted gloom
Snow dances in the air in the frantic
moth-like trance of soft wings

I hold out my glove, catch a handful
and put it against my lips to taste
the bitterness of winter passage
My footsteps across the parking lot
fill in as fast as I walk away
snowflakes melting in my mouth
leave no trace here or there
Everything pure white and fragile
made of wispy hair and brittle glass bones
winter's smoky fire burns around my body


Allan Safaryk

 

[Sky Dancer]

Insomniac
by Sylvia Plath

The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole ---
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue ---
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.
Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.