Poet's Corner

[Amelia]

I WILL LEAVE THIS HOUSE


I will leave this house, being tired of this house
And too much talk;
I will walk down to the sea where the wind blows
The waves to chalk,
And the sand scratches like a silver mouse...
I will leave everything here and walk.

I do not know why grass like golden leather
Whipped into strings
Should quiet the heart, or why this autumn weather,
This salt that stings
My eyes and eyelids should heal me altogether -
I do not know the reason for such things.
I only know that here are walls that harden
The eyes and brain;

I only know words hiss and hurt and pardon -
Only to hurt again;
And that the sea is like Death's emerald garden
Dripping with silver wind and silver rain.


Joseph Auslander

 

[Sky Dancer]

Is my soul asleep?

Have those beehives that labor

at night stopped? And the water

wheel of thought,

is it dry, the cups empty,

wheeling, carrying only shadows?

No my soul is not asleep.

It is awake, wide awake.

It neither sleeps nor dreams but watches,

it’s clear eyes open,

far off things, and listens

at the shores of the great silence.

from Antonio Machado (translated by Robert Bly):

 

[derk]

She often cried when happy. Never stopping
feelings of love that kept growing an
endless showing of a garden bloomed with
caring and gently coaching me with her glaring.
O' mother inside my heart we will never part.
These are the drops of words for the endless
longing your memory starts. Gentle was
your life a comfort to mine now adding
to my broken hearts strife and these empty
feelings that are dealings to my days now
grow as moments that cause me to pay
a prayer for you. Your absence, is a constant
gloom. Leaving me, lone- ‘alone, way to soon.
O’ mother inside my heart we will never part.

 

[midcan5]

'In Childhood'

"In childhood Christy and I played in the dumpster across the street
from Pickett & Sons Construction. When we found bricks, it was best.
Bricks were most useful. We drug them to our empty backyard
and stacked them in the shape of a room. For months
we collected bricks, one on top another. When the walls
reached as high as my younger sister’s head, we laid down.
Hiding in the middle of our room, we watched the cycle
of the sun, gazed at the stars, clutched hands and felt at home."

Sarah A. Chavez

 

[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

---------------------------

check out: Disabled American Veterans

 

[midcan5]

'To The Daughter I Never Had'

"I saw you today at the playground.
You were wearing a little dress
that reminded me of all the dresses

I never bought for you,
all the sundresses and twirly skirts,
all the Hanna Anderssons.

You were on the swing, leaning back,
reaching up with your candy-striped legs,
as if to reinsert yourself

into an imaginary heaven,
into the realm of possibility.
You didn’t see me watching you

from a future in which you don’t exist,
but sometimes you smile at me
from the face of another man’s daughter—

a smile that contains all the mornings
we never baked bread together,
all the cartwheels you never turned,

all the stories you never told me
about all the things that never happened.
You are six, or nine, or fifteen, and always

as beautiful as I imagined, growing up
smart and graceful and strong, and I am glad,
and it breaks my heart

that you have become all this without me.
I have spent what would have been
your entire life breaking up

fights between the boys,
scrubbing the floor around the toilet,
trying to get them to change their underwear,

and knowing that I could not love anyone more—
not even you.
Perhaps someday you will understand

how it’s possible to regret
the life that never was, and still love nothing
more than the life that is."

Rob Hardy

 

[Sky Dancer]

A Silly Poem

Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
I'll draw a sketch of thee,
What kind of pencil shall I use?
2B or not 2B?


Spike Milligan

 

[Sky Dancer]

Let Me Die A Youngman's Death


Let me die a youngman's death
not a clean and inbetween
the sheets holywater death
not a famous-last-words
peaceful out of breath death

When I'm 73
and in constant good tumour
may I be mown down at dawn
by a bright red sports car
on my way home
from an allnight party

Or when I'm 91
with silver hair
and sitting in a barber's chair
may rival gangsters
with hamfisted tommyguns burst in
and give me a short back and insides

Or when I'm 104
and banned from the Cavern
may my mistress
catching me in bed with her daughter
and fearing for her son
cut me up into little pieces
and throw away every piece but one

Let me die a youngman's death
not a free from sin tiptoe in
candle wax and waning death
not a curtains drawn by angels borne
'what a nice way to go' death


Roger McGough

 

[midcan5]

'Elena'

"My Spanish isn't good enough
I remember how I'd smile
Listening my little ones
Understanding every word they'd say,
Their jokes, their songs, their plots
Vamos a pedirle dulces a mama. Vamos.
But that was in Mexico.
Now my children go to American High Schools.
They speak English. At night they sit around the
Kitchen table, laugh with one another.
I stand at the stove and feel dumb, alone.
I bought a book to learn English.
My husband frowned, drank more beer.
My oldest said, ‘Mama, he doesn't want you to
Be smarter than he is’ I'm forty,
Embarrased at mispronouncing words,
Embarrased at the laughter of my children,
The grocery, the mailman. Sometimes I take
my English book and lock myself in the bathroom,
say the thick words softly, for if I stop trying, I will be deaf
when my children need my help."

Pat Mora

 

[Sky Dancer]

Paris and Helen

By Judy Grahn


He called her: golden dawn
She called him: the wind whistles


He called her: heart of the sky
She called him: message bringer


He called her: mother of pearl
barley woman, rice provider,
millet basket, corn maid,
flax princess, all-maker, weef


She called him: fawn, roebuck,
stag, courage, thunderman,
all-in-green, mountain strider
keeper of forests, my-love-rides


He called her: the tree is
She called him: bird dancing


He called her: who stands,
has stood, will always stand
She called him: arriver


He called her: the heart and the womb
are similar
She called him: arrow in my heart.

 

[Sky Dancer]

For the Record

The clouds and the stars didn't wage this war
the brooks gave no information
if the mountain spewed stones of fire into the river
it was not taking sides
the raindrop faintly swaying under the leaf
had no political opinions

and if here or there a house
filled with backed-up raw sewage
or poisoned those who lived there
with slow fumes, over years
the houses were not at war
nor did the tinned-up buildings

intend to refuse shelter
to homeless old women and roaming children
they had no policy to keep them roaming
or dying, no, the cities were not the problem
the bridges were non-partisan
the freeways burned, but not with hatred

Even the miles of barbed-wire
stretched around crouching temporary huts
designed to keep the unwanted
at a safe distance, out of sight
even the boards that had to absorb
year upon year, so many human sounds

so many depths of vomit, tears
slow-soaking blood
had not offered themselves for this
The trees didn't volunteer to be cut into boards
nor the thorns for tearing flesh
Look around at all of it

and ask whose signature
is stamped on the orders, traced
in the corner of the building plans
Ask where the illiterate, big-bellied
women were, the drunks and crazies,
the ones you fear most of all: ask where you were.

adrienne rich

 

[Sky Dancer]

All blood is menstrual blood


by Judy Grahn


(An excerpt from the poem, women are tired of the ways men bleed)


Images of blood are all around us, everywhere

in our modern urbanized society blood is
depicted, spoken of, displayed:

The blood of wound, of death and to a tiny extent
birth, is part of daily viewing in television
and films; we are completely familiar
with the bloodlines of kinship, and with the blood
of violence, of murder and vengeance, of sacrifice,
suffering, and of IV drug users; the blood
of warning, of wounding, of threat; the danger
attached to the blood of AIDS; the blood of life, of
transfusions, of redemption; the blood of Christ;
the blood of martyrdom, of St. Sebastian, of the prize
fighter depicted in the movies. Blood is
genealogy in bloodlines, family blood,
the blood that is thicker
than water.

Blood is in name and in common
expression, in the blood of the lamb, in the blood
of blood, sweat and tears, in the blood of the Sangre
de Christo Mountains, in the blood of blood brothers,
the blood of the stigmata, the blood on the moon,
the blood that cannot be squeezed from turnips,
the blood dripping from the mouth of the vampire,
the bloodstain on Lady Macbeth's hands, the blood
gurgling down the shower drain in horror films.

Real blood is everywhere in our society, Saturday-
night blood, drive-by-shooting blood, the blood he was
covered in after he was shot, or stabbed
or blown up; the pencil- thin line like a necklace
across her throat, the great spread of it when she was
chopped up, the bloody nose, the bleeding ulcer,
the sting of hemorrhoids, the blood on the surgeon's
gown and the butcher's apron, the many rivers of
battle and massacre that have run with blood,
the battlefield soaked, the sand reddened,
the blood on the child's ear and the wife's
mouth and the young man's cheek.

In the cities the gutters are streaming
and sidewalks pooled and car seats puddled and
emergency rooms smeared and police clubs stained.

When gangster John Dillinger's body fell on the street
shot by the FBI and spouting
from numerous holes
passersby instantly leaped as though
to a holy stream, to dip
a handkerchief, newspaper, even
a sleeve into the blood of his wounds, to take
a bit home with them.

Blood is magic
Blood is holy
And wholly riveting of our attention.

Menstrual blood is the only source of blood
that is not traumatically induced.
Yet in modern society, this is the most
hidden blood, the one rarely spoken of
and almost never seen
except privately by women, who shut themselves
in little rooms to quickly and perhaps disgustedly
change their pads and tampons,
wrapping the bloodied cotton so it won't be seen
by others, wrinkling their faces at the odor,
flushing or hiding the evidence away.
Blood is everywhere
and yet the one
the only
the single name
it has not had publicly
for many centuries
is menstrual blood.

Menstrual blood, like water
just flows.
Its fountain existed
long before knives or flint.
Menstruation
is the original source of blood.
Menstrual is blood's secret name.


Judy Grahn

 

[Sky Dancer]

They say she is veiled

They say she is veiled
and a mystery. That is
one way of looking.
Another
is that she is where
she always has been, exactly in place,
and it is we,
we who are mystified,
we who are veiled
and without faces.

From The Queen of Wands

 

[Sky Dancer]

Be Ahead of All Parting

I lay on Emily's grave
I lay on Chief Seattle
as though they were behind me
as though now were that night

For among winters one is so endlessly winter
I fled my love in Lourmarin and found
Albert Camus. I brought back to my love the lavender
that covers him and Madam Camus. All things
double on one another especially our hearts. I sat on Sartre
and De Beauvoir, "ensemble!" the guard shouted,
one on top the other. I was looking for Vallejo
but found in the slot Jean Seberg. (I didn't find
Joan of Arc or Romain Gary). On Gertrude Stein
among the pebbles and Alice B. Toklas
I left my White-Out, there being no pebbles left
in Paris

We walked across London to Karl Marx
miles covered by asphalt and cement. My Marxist love
had a fit for fear I'd pee on even his cement. Systems
impossible in time, I am forever dead
in the women's section
of the Moravian Cemetery
in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Hilda Doolittle
as "Mrs. Richard Aldington"
beneath the towering phallus
or was that the omphalos? the now that is night, glacier

cloud drifting but mostly
the unknown
when I was going I stopped
at every death
I saw the movies the dead see.


By Sharon Doubiago

 

[Sky Dancer]

“How do we know that the panthers

will accept a gift from

white — middle — class — women?”



Have you ever tried to hide?

In a group

of women

hide

yourself

slide between the floor boards

slide yourself away child

away from this room

& your sister

before she notices

your Black self &

her white mind

slide your eyes

down

away from the other Blacks

afraid — a meeting of eyes

& pain would travel between you –

change like milk to buttermilk

a silent rage.

SISTER! your foot’s smaller,

but it’s still on my neck.

 

[Sky Dancer]

A Brave and Startling Truth


We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.


Maya Angelou

 

[Sky Dancer]

How to Dress Like a Scary Dyke

She said, Wear my leather jacket, a looser
sweater. Take off that lipstick,
don’t fuss with your hair. Wear
jeans and boots. That ought to do it.

I still had stockings stuffed like
seaweed in packages, and nylon pants
that made my crotch itch without desire.

I still had black high heels
I bought to make me look all business,
but I couldn’t get to the business
of not dressing for men.

She told me what they’d like,
those scary dykes.
I took these notes.
Wanted to learn real bad.

1977

How to Dress like a Femmy Dyke

Go with a perm or a duck tail
– low maintenance.
Heavy on the eye paint, a little hard.
Blood-red lips. Develop a swagger
in your fuck-me shoes, or wear
expensive cowboy boots, the kind
that go with gypsy clothes.

Get three holes in one ear
and pour on the gold.
Use tons of Yes, the new perfume.
Wear fifties coats with shoulder pads.
If you get a little plump,
just pile on the frills.

Go to Prelude and order Kaluha with cream,
or cream with anything.
Dance up a storm.
And if a scary dyke looks too long at you,
start picking the polish off your nails
or burst into tears and
beg her to take you home.

1981

 

[midcan5]

My granddaughter dances in circles when she see me - who knew when you start this journey....have a great day all you dads and more out there.

=================

(for Doris Schnabel)

'My Father'

was a cowboy.
My father was a sugar man.
My father was a teamster.

My father was a Siberian
tiger; a corsair; a lamb,
a yellow dog, a horse's ass.

My father had a triple bi-pass.
My father was a rat
but he bought me my first hat.

My father believed in decency
and fair play. My father drove
the getaway. My father was a blue jay.

My father drove the boys away.
My father drove a Thunderbird,
a Skylark, a Firebird, an old pickup truck

with a rusty tool box, a Skybird,
a Sunray. My father drove hard bargains
ever day; he was a force. My father

was mercurial. He was passive,
a little moody: rock... paper... scissors.
He loved me. He loved me not.

He stomps and hurls lightning bolts.
Has slipped away. Passed away.
My father was passé. My father

was a Texas Ranger. Taught me
to pray. Because of him, I hoard things
in an old shoe box. Because of him, I use

botox. Because of him, I look to clocks.
Because of my father, I know how
to oil the gate; don’t own a map.

Because of my father, I have no use for
similes. Because of my father, I hunger
for my own catalog of metaphors."

Scott Hightower

 

[Sky Dancer]

HARLEM SWEETIES

Have you dug the spill
Of Sugar Hill?
Cast your gims
On this sepia thrill:
Brown sugar lassie,
Caramel treat,
Honey-gold baby
Sweet enough to eat.
Peach-skinned girlie,
Coffee and cream,
Chocolate darling
Out of a dream.
Walnut tinted
Or cocoa brown,
Pomegranate-lipped
Pride of the town.
Rich cream-colored
To plum-tinted black,
Feminine sweetness
In Harlem's no lack.
Glow of the quince
To blush of the rose.
Persimmon bronze
To cinnamon toes.
Blackberry cordial,
Virginia Dare wine--
All those sweet colors
Flavor Harlem of mine!
Walnut or cocoa,
Let me repeat:
Caramel, brown sugar,
A chocolate treat.
Molasses taffy,
Coffee and cream,
Licorice, clove, cinnamon
To a honey-brown dream.
Ginger, wine-gold,
Persimmon, blackberry,
All through the spectrum
Harlem girls vary--
So if you want to know beauty's
Rainbow-sweet thrill,
Stroll down luscious,
Delicious, fine Sugar Hill.


Langston Hughes

 

[midcan5]

One thousand - wow.

'A Story'

"Everyone loves a story. Let's begin with a house.
We can fill it with careful rooms and fill the rooms
with things—tables, chairs, cupboards, drawers
closed to hide tiny beds where children once slept
or big drawers that yawn open to reveal
precisely folded garments washed half to death,
unsoiled, stale, and waiting to be worn out.
There must be a kitchen, and the kitchen
must have a stove, perhaps a big iron one
with a fat black pipe that vanishes into the ceiling
to reach the sky and exhale its smells and collusions.
This was the center of whatever family life
was here, this and the sink gone yellow
around the drain where the water, dirty or pure,
ran off with no explanation, somehow like the point
of this, the story we promised and may yet deliver.
Make no mistake, a family was here. You see
the path worn into the linoleum where the wood,
gray and certainly pine, shows through.
Father stood there in the middle of his life
to call to the heavens he imagined above the roof
must surely be listening. When no one answered
you can see where his heel came down again
and again, even though he'd been taught
never to demand. Not that life was especially cruel;
they had well water they pumped at first,
a stove that gave heat, a mother who stood
at the sink at all hours and gazed longingly
to where the woods once held the voices
of small bears—themselves a family—and the songs
of birds long fled once the deep woods surrendered
one tree at a time after the workmen arrived
with jugs of hot coffee. The worn spot on the sill
is where Mother rested her head when no one saw,
those two stained ridges were handholds
she relied on; they never let her down.
Where is she now? You think you have a right
to know everything? The children tiny enough
to inhabit cupboards, large enough to have rooms
of their own and to abandon them, the father
with his right hand raised against the sky?
If those questions are too personal, then tell us,
where are the woods? They had to have been
because the continent was clothed in trees.
We all read that in school and knew it to be true.
Yet all we see are houses, rows and rows
of houses as far as sight, and where sight vanishes
into nothing, into the new world no one has seen,
there has to be more than dust, wind-borne particles
of burning earth, the earth we lost, and nothing else."

Philip Levine