id
int64 160k
1.59M
| url
stringlengths 46
285
| author
stringlengths 0
217
| title
stringlengths 1
241
| body
stringlengths 100
77.3k
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
169,530
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17994/los-angeles
|
R Marshall Terrell
|
Los Angeles
|
Los Angeles,
Son of old Spain by a farm-hand!
Dusty, scented, individual-
No other like him has been or shall be again
In the kaleidoscope of America,
That fits together into new forms
Bits of old lands and ancient cultures and old glamours.
Los Angeles,
Whose pulses beat to rhythms of jazz-
Hot-blooded, eager, ineffectual,
His gay Hidalgo pride spoiled by the grey blood of Iowa.
Los Angeles,
A city of houses spilled out upon the sage-clad hills,
Hills that are broken out with houses like a rash.
Adobe houses with Italian loggias and Spanish patios
And fountained gardens copied from Provence.
Houses painted blue and red and violet and pink,
With roofs that prance against a sky like lapis-lazuli,
Tiled like pagodas and more particolored
Than was Egyptian Joseph's coat.
Curious doorways shaded from the sun
By awnings copied from the tents of Teheran
And held away with spears from Africa.
Houses that spill their garden-steps down terraces
And pour a flood of blossom after.
R. Marshall Terrell
Torrents of flame and amber and spiked amethyst,
Magenta curtains of strung blooms that slow winds move,
Hedges of geranium that pain the eyes with scarlet
Redder than the sins of Babylon.
White walls where fuchsias foam and drip,
And whereon waving mantillas of the pepper-trees
Cast shadows frail and multiwebbed as lace.
Scents of eucalyptus trees,
Leaning like Dons in ragged cloaks
Made dusty by long journeying.
Scents of jasmine curded white upon the vines,
Scent of lemon groves, or apricots,
Scent of oil pumped thick and bubbling
Through the slow pulses of the wells-
Black and viscid treasure
More potent than the heaped-up gems of Ali Baba's cave,
Or a Maharaja's minted hoards.
Los Angeles, who struts and stamps,
The son of royal Spain by a farm-hand,
Longing for princely roystering
And wine-stained nights in perfumed arms,
But full of little peasant fears
Lest he be smitten by the wrath of some white-collared god
Who disapproves of joy.
Stormily he lives with his young lusty paramour
Whose name is Hollywood,
Breaking the vials of the whole world's wealth
On her barbarian feet, binding her brows with roses:
She who is brazen and beautiful, scented and soulless,
Bawdy enchantress more potent than Circe,
Than Lamia more fair;
Poets and painters chained like dancing bears for her
service,
And Art, the Divine One, the goddess, enslaved by her
captains,
Toiling like Samson, the mock of the mob.
This is Los Angeles,
In the names of whose streets castanets echo,
Bastard of Beauty Utility-ravished,
City of angels and harlots and dreams!
R. Marshall Terrell
|
177,420
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/22442/retired-actress
|
C. F. MacIntyre
|
Retired Actress
|
This florid Rubens woman hides by day
in some estaminet and first at night
like a furred moth comes swimming to the light,
flings open the red door of the café.
Rich as an autumn sunset, with a spilth
of over-ripeness, posed on a gilt crook
(which props her up instead of Lloyd's or Cook's),
she sprays us with a speech of marvelous filth:
terse words one learned from adolescent fences,
reflections on our mothers and our past;
picks up somebody's bock, blows off the foam,
kills it, sits down-this archetype of wenches-
quite uninvited, sighs, and slumps at last . . .
as if she had been lost but has got home.
|
180,808
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/24183/love-story
|
David Cornel De Jong
|
Love Story
|
'leil me your name, I cried to her,
gnawing her neck, but still caressing
her cheeks. Why in God's careful world
are you dead, before my love built
you a shrine with pigeons and ferns?
Nowhere is anyone who believes in
my racking remorse, not while her arms
are dangling from my bed, and my fists
are filled with her hair, and my knees
are still scalded white with guilt.
Errors in satin gloves, precious
hats, arch-preserver shoes are still
comparing this with the virtue they
lost, but they had no mercy and
no terror to kill what they dropped.
Must I endlessly be beholden,
while even from my ribs hangs the cross
whereon I nailed my flesh so early
so that the soul could cower safely
in the closets of Everyman's God?
Lend me your name, your blood,
I asked, enfolding her a dozen nights
DAVID CORNEL DEJONG
Her ears listened instead to a dream
smooth men concocted recklessly
from marginalia of dreams and gold.
David Cornel DeJong
|
190,190
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/29011/hyphens
|
Donald Davie
|
Hyphens
|
You remember Rossignano
Solvay, impossible hybrid,
Italian-Belgian? The hyphen
Was stretched to breaking.
Remember its streets, its piazzas?
The main line clove them, rammed
Through a truss of malodorous sidings
By the howling trench of the highway.
Black, smeared on the rocks
In the brilliant mornings,
Pontefract Cakes of naphtha
Stuck to the soles of swimmers.
Mazzimo, draughtsman
For Solvay chemicals,
Shrugging a bulky shoulder
At rigidity of Belgian blueprints,
Dived and hauled up
On the rocks an amphora,
Rough, plain and capacious,
Plucked from a foundered galley.
There too the hyphen stretched
In him to breaking, out of
Maremman cities where his Fiat spun
In week-end pieties
To the Ligurian polluted sea
And unmade avenue
Which housed him, hardly less
A transient than his summer visitors.
Holding these halves together,
His Tuscan strove
For a coining of new compounds:
Firm-transient, chemical-civic.
|
240,498
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57968/the-reliquaries
|
Valerie Martínez
|
The Reliquaries
|
Seaside, and the fragment of one running-
calves, ribs, green eyes into water.
There he goes. Waves. Buoying up
as into sky. And the seagulls fly,
seeing it as relief, a story. Once
they were there, two on a white blanket.
The circumference of a shadow.
Sunlight around that shadow.
The relation of two: bathers,
robed figures configured as one.
And she touches him-tender-and it is done.
(I've gone back to it. I've, I've-
it's not where I am. I give it away again.)
You're there. It's still in the sand.
It's trying to chisel it in.
How it comes forth: the story.
Wanting it, carving it down to vision.
Architecture, a coliseum of bent light,
the beautiful scatter of broken stones.
(And I can turn it into stones.)
Love, love: a portico, a labyrinth.
And his simple aquatics, legs and arms
in the brackish, etched against white fish.
The song, under there, of how he'll leave,
and naturally, like all living things:
animals, summer, daylight for the eves.
And the buildings, all shadows and beings:
block, angels, curves. With the love,
memory of all loves. The pediments,
these reliquaries.
It's our landscape, artifact-it might hurt.
(Run to, run away from it.)
|
245,165
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/141807/the-innocents-at-sandy-hook
|
Michael Gessner
|
The Innocents at Sandy Hook
|
Nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel,
or what life itself eventually reveals.
No more studies of kindness or courtesy,
nor grace or charity, all is needless now.
All is needless now, sky, world, family
grieving for their bundles of purity,
now beyond disgrace, failure, winter streets,
or whatever attacks, and then retreats.
Classrooms emptied of children's things,
paper and paste, and love's imaginings,
bundles of peace, Christmas-blessed
with the unborn and the dead at rest,
nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel
or what life itself eventually reveals.
|
201,048
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/34460/repossessed
|
Robert W. Watson
|
Repossessed
|
ROBERT WATSON
REPOSSESSED
Hot diggety! Here they come.
The sheriff blows his siren.
Eviction notice! The bank has foreclosed.
The Ford man drives off in our Ford.
Creditors come in trucks. There goes
The stove, the color TV next, deep freeze,
Stereo, sofa, chairs, tables, beds,
(Boy, did we over-spend) power mower,
Vacuum. Mastercharge is wild:
They can't get back our trip to Spain.
These boys work fast, all's gone.
My wife and I dance on the lawn.
Whoopee. We are the lucky ones we are,
We can start again from scratch.
We are off to Nome or Key West.
With nothing but the clothes we wear.
Not a trace of our old life: new jobs,
New friends, nothing that's broken,
No clutter, a new sky
That will be bluer, air that will be colder
Or hotter than we have known before,
Barracuda or grizzly bears.
We will find a strangeness. She and I
Will embrace; new lovers in a fresh place.
We ascend the stairs arm in arm
To an empty attic where we will watch the dawn.
|
245,169
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/141809/face
|
Indran Amirthanayagam
|
Face
|
Imagine half your face
rubbed out yet
you are suited up
and walking
to the office.
How will your mates
greet you?
with heavy hearts,
flowers,
rosary beads?
How shall we greet
the orphan boy,
the husband whose hand
slipped, children
and wife swept away?
How to greet
our new years
and our birthdays?
Shall we always
light a candle?
Do we remember
that time erases
the shore, grass
grows, pain's
modified?
At Hikkaduwa
in 1980 I wrote a ditty,
a sailor's song
about rain
in sunny Ceylon.
I don't know
what Calypsonians
would compose
about this monstrous
wave, this blind hatchet man;
don't know
the Baila singers' reply;
we are a "happy and
go" people
yet the fisherman's wife
knows
that her grandfather
was eaten by the ocean-
fisher communities
have suffered in time
and what's happened
now is just another feast
for that bloody,
sleeping mother
lapping at our island;
but what if the ocean
were innocent,
the tectonic plates
innocent, what if God
were innocent?
*
I do not know
how to walk upon the beach,
how to lift corpse
after corpse
until I am exhausted,
how to stop the tears
when half my face
has been rubbed out
beyond
the railroad tracks
and this anaesthetic,
this calypso come
to the last verse.
What shall we write
in the sand?
Where are gravestones
incinerated? Whose
ashes are these urned
and floating through a house
throttled by water?
Shall we build
a memorial
some calculated distance
from the sea, in a park,
in the shape of a giant wave
where we can write
the names of the dead?
Has the wave lost
its beauty? Is it now
considered obscene?
*
Yet tomorrow
we must go to the ocean
and refresh ourselves
in the sea breeze
down in Hikkaduwa
where it is raining
in sunny Ceylon.
Tomorrow, we must
renew our vows
at sunrise, at sunset.
Let us say the next time
the ocean recedes
and parrots gawk
and flee, and restless
dogs insist their humans
wake up, we will not peer
at the revelation
of the ocean bed,
nor seek photographs.
We will run to higher ground,
and gathered there
with our children,
our cats, dogs,
pigs, with what we've
carried in our hands
-albums, letters-
we will make a circle,
kneel, sit,
stand in no particular
direction, pray
and be silent,
open our lungs
and shout thanks
to our gods
thanks to our dogs.
|
238,026
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56639/nature-boy
|
Tomás Q. Morín
|
Nature Boy
|
If I had enough cages to keep all the birds
I've collected over the years then I would have
to open a shop because there's only so much room
in a two-bedroom walk-up for 48 birds,
not to mention the dancing bears and the frogs,
or the different varieties of fish, the one
species of flea, and I almost forgot the proud
dogs and the lone mule, the profane one
who entered my life to curse at scribes and pharisees;
and maybe he'd let the mouse I found
forever dying at the end of a poem
ride on his back like a whiskered Christ
and if not, maybe my yeti could do it
when he's not downtown working
security at the store or teaching the parrots
how to say brotherhood in grunt
and how to comb out the tangles and mud
from his hair whose sweat reminds me
of that bearded collector of beasts
with the ark who would have no doubt
understood how I feel, that prophet
of change under whose spell I want to confess
that I'm a Christian of the Old Testament,
that my grandfather hung all his goats
upside down, their throats over a bucket,
and slapped their chests like that other Nature Boy
who strutted around the ring
like a peacock with his feathered hair
that stayed immaculate
even on the nights he lost to our hero
Wahoo McDaniel who never played the heel,
he who hailed from the lost tribes
of Oklahoma, who made us want to be chiefs
so much we wore pigeon feathers
and circled each other inside a green square
of water hose until someone finally rang the bell
that was never there and we sprung
toward each other like animals in love or at war.
|
167,082
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/16638/a-god-for-you
|
Marion Strobel
|
A God for You
|
I am making songs for you!
Soon you will be asking me
With your solemn baby stare-
Soon I'll have to answer you
When you ask me, "What is God?"
God is where you want to go
When we reach the river's head
Where the branches are too low-
And we go home instead.
God is everything that you
Have not done and want to do.
God is all those shiny bright
Stories that I say I'll keep
To tell to you another night-
If you will go to sleep.
God is every lovely word
You want to hear and haven't heard.
And if you should need a place,
After searching everywhere,
To hide a secret, or your face-
You could hide it there.
God is much the safest place
To hide a secret-or your face.
|
211,572
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/39745/baiting-bush-rats
|
Anthony Lawrence
|
BAITING BUSH RATS
|
Native. Marsupial: six syllables suggesting an indigenous tenderness,
though, because they dwell in limited light, unseen,
they are given the names of vermin: rat, rodent, and their reputation
for disease and filth. They come for shelter, entering
the ceiling through cracks in the wall age or creepers have widened.
The air they exhale is blue, also the hair-thin stripes
of light that number the outstanding veins in their ears. Their tails-
rolled, banded leather-make curious lines in a sheen
of torchlit timber dust. Their nests are spiked with straw, paper, wood-
splinters and hair, and could be the careful makings
of any small bird. When they move along a narrow network of rafters,
it seems a spray of fine gravel has been cast into
the roof; or an internal, gritty rain interrupting sleep or thought.
It's simple: disturb domestic order and die. So a list
of death is made, narrowed to traps or cups of poison. You rarely hear
the traps go off- (branches at the window, the neck
bone crack of expanding joinery) -but the cries of poisoned animals
claim the walls like rising damp. With brutal thirst,
they turn in circles and rake each other's eyes, their pain forgotten
until morning, when they are sometimes found,
bobbing like unhealthy turds in water that's impossible to flush.
|
206,070
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/36980/brain-of-my-heart
|
Gerald Stern
|
Brain of My Heart
|
Thank God for the walnut in 1986.
Thank God for the hard green shell and the greasy center.
All you, you thirty white worms and forty green grubs,
I know what you are, burrowing like pigs,
running like moles inside your bulging rooms.
I pick up a rubber ball, it may be a walnut
gone black on the sidewalk, it may have a hundred worms
drinking the juices and drying up the husks.
I do a Pittsburgh twist, a double-handed
reverse action, I learned it in three short hours.
I put my foot on the mound, the rubber juices
fall like blood on the street; I'm doing the fiend's work;
I kick the tennis balls. I drive my car
over the hard green stones, it is the bounce
I learned in Philadelphia, pebbles piled up
in every alley, a terrible screaming and wailing.
Deep in the recesses two yellow brains
are facing each other. They are like human brains,
the hills and valleys make an expanded surface,
the neurons are popping, the chemicals are charging,
the eyes are already staring, the mouth is running.
Deep in the recesses there is a Twelfth Crusade.
A murderous knight is already on his knees.
His right eye is gone, his left arm is lopped at the wrist,
the skin is sewn together. He is back
in Europe. He has given up. His murders
will take five years to repay, his shoulder is raw
from the leather. There are two heads at his belt,
he has combed their hairs. Their little tongues
are whispering, one has the grating voice
of Billie Holiday, one has the voice
of Jimmy Durante, one is tormented, one
is full of sappy wisdom. It is freezing,
winter has come in one day, the few brown leaves
will turn to pieces of ice. I start to huddle
inside my blanket. I start to store my blood,
my brain is moving south, my mind is wandering.
|
252,103
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/157092/my-father-gave-me-a-gift
|
Mikeas Sánchez
|
My Father Gave Me a Gift
|
When I was young
my father brought me a gift,
a yellow bird
with orange spots, a little bird that sang
right by my mouth
and taught me the names of things.
We, we, we
ore, ore, ore
wik, wik, wik.
When I was young,
a yellow bird taught me to sing in Zoque,
opened up the world to me,
showed me the universe's language.
If you give your word, you must honor it.
If you lie, you dishonor yourself.
That is why we are called Orepät, Oreyomo.
We are men and women of our word.
There in the mountains the wewe grows,
a yellow flower with orange spots,
a bird that sings
and teaches the Zoques to sing
we, we, we
ore, ore, ore
wik, wik, wik.
Translated from the Zoque and Spanish
|
222,376
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46746/the-apples
|
W. S. Di Piero
|
The Apples
|
The city budget squads have trimmed its hours.
"You can't get in, just go home why don't you."
I couldn't tell how old she was.
Chalky braids crisscrossed her head;
the trenchcoat bunched around her waist
like paper flowers, her bare legs
streaked pink.
She held a net bag, very French,
filled with cans.
It's equinox.
Sycamore leaves bank at curbs
and blip in bike-wheel spokes.
My old library's closed. It's always closed
when I make visits home.
Starlings rake song across the wires.
I used to ride my meaty Schwinn
to this better neighborhood.
"You can't. You can't." She quivered
and chopped the bag against her knee.
Saying that,
I make a mimicry of her.
I learned to do it
in the big, lemony room of floodlit books.
Gg Zz Bb leafed from the walls.
Sky-blue globe. Soiled card catalog.
Robinson Crusoe walked across the room,
studying matter, its provisioning use
and weedy homemade powers: I put my feet
into his splayed prints in the sand,
but when he looked behind, he said
Find your own place, kid. Grow up.
You can't you can't. I lost her
in the splintered Sears and Pep Boys doors
down the block, the lost-lease sales
and recycling bins.
I feel her words, or think I do,
like matter, plasmic and boreal.
A bus diesels from the curb;
leaves chase its wheels.
Noon light
drenching the tall windows
prints images behind the steel mesh:
clouds crossing sky, stone housefronts,
football rising end over end,
sneakers on power lines like skins
of souls fled or stolen.
Equinox. Measure, middle,
I know I know. All I feel is motion
sucking me in its draft.
The middle's a fiction. I dreamed again
I materialize in the big room,
high ceilings, maybe a sky, the walls
all books sickly organized, but among them
the one true book I'll find by accident.
It will occur to my hands, like Crusoe,
near a textbook's see-through images
of the body's solid veins, muscle mass,
bloodworks and nerve draperies.
It's the book I knew I'd find.
I don't want half measures. The season
slides to winter. That thought's complete.
Her voice, too, stands watch,
sits, I mean, with me on the cold steps,
while I kill time
reading the book I brought along.
Ruskin, who loved fireflies and unities,
says that the dragon
who guards the golden apples
never sleeps, he hoards them
in his finny coils,
and his greatest skill is mimicry,
mocking human voices,
calling to us in tones
we recognize, until we believe
he's something or someone else.
Then it's too late.
|
185,500
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/26622/ahab-on-his-wedding-night
|
John Burns
|
Ahab on His Wedding Night
|
Who is this in sea
Rising in the seaweed hymns?
The sea sings sun's music tonight love
And our ships catch reverence at their harbors.
Nantucket waits for Judith and her head.
My last whale bellied up at sundown,
Eyeing an east like flukes, and they sounding-
Clipping enormous fear. I harpooned steel
Remembering Zeus at his business. (His chalice
I do not think was ambergris. Hera was a
Bitch at meddling with a god's purse strings.)
He gored boats first, flung an incense
Unlike ambergris I've seen in spoiled ones.
He tied on later riding ship's water. Still
He pulled his own weight
Well for a dead thing.
Death drawing water like desire
One loosens the belly in death
As she danced
Knowing after the wines flesh is like fruit.
Admiring her belly, Herod laborer
Plucked the choicest for the table.
The sea hums incandescence
Like the sustenance of this lean night,
And stones sing
Like last music or look in the old whaler's
Heart, remembering
The sweet time in the loins
And young moons fattening in the sky.
A Paris hall
Held me in once to the top, galleried
Like this ship to an orchestra. Their
Ornaments were cruel like Christmas.
The sea paid its sentiment with less bother:
The normal teethers
Tore their meat and the currents
Opened raw to take our prow. I grew thin
At such usual speech, seeing our whaleground
Near Japan and that heathen head
I struck at distilling in a whalespout
Like nobody's business.
But these things mind themselves tonight.
And Holofernes dreams
As these strong arms shall dip
Like wedding-spoons
In the bride's sweet ambergris. Judith
Will you shut to the mud like a clam?
|
250,407
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/154689/loose-gowns-for-mackerel
|
John Lennox
|
Loose Gowns for Mackerel
|
One died of a canceled dream.
One died of looking into a certain fact.
One died and woke up in the act.
One died and kept his atoms intact-almost.
One died after finally hearing his own engine.
One died and became a cat's small cry.
One died in a moist glass case.
One died in the heavy roar of a highway.
One died and the others unfurled a tarp.
One died asleep in the snow underfoot.
One died crawling in a cloud, was found
and wrapped in a flag and waits.
One died a hawk in summer heat.
One died and became small, became
a real doll, a real small doll.
One died stolen back on the in-breath.
One died a little cat and became a leopard;
one died a shepherd's dog, became a shepherd.
One died in the door, a clutch of bells.
One died in a circle of sound
surrounding closed lips on the ground.
One died near the exchange
where one dream meets another.
One died in a trap.
|
201,068
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/34470/the-psychiatrist
|
Ai
|
The Psychiatrist
|
I smashed the small black bottle
of Patou I'd given the woman,
threw the pieces on the bed
and turned my back.
I heard nothing, not even footsteps
as she left.
The room was half in shadow,
half in light
and one white mum
arced toward me
from the turquoise enamel vase,
thirty-five years ago
in Paris in 1943.
She was a woman like you,
fragile and thirty.
But I never touch you with my hands,
only with my voice, a pin,
that I stick inside you
when you are drifting away
with your crayons and chocolate.
Why don't you stop that coloring, I say,
that's all fantasy you know.
You take another chocolate from the box.
Tell me about your life, you say.
I, an old man, by all evidence I can accumulate,
even down to my smell,
down to the smell of this room-
I have no life.
I look at my watch. Sunday at 10.
You stand and smile
and almost glide out the door.
What could I tell you?-
that in 1943 I was thirty,
a member of the Reich,
that Paris was mine
and I didn't want it.
That you make me feel as I did then-
frightened and mortal
and free.
I lift the phone and dial.
How are you? I say.
You're silent a while
then you tell me you're afraid,
you feel like crying
and I tell you to work,
to color more diligently
and say goodbye.
But what I wanted to say-
what was it really?
I close the curtains.
My wife knocks on the door. Lunch?
I remember lunch in Paris-
bread, Chateau Margaux, cheese, olives,
those nice full black ones
and machine guns across the street, so oppressive.
What did those French have to fear? -
sudden extraordinary death, rape, torture,
or merely the passage of an ordinary day,
as I fear it here, March 1943, in my small room,
which the concierge keeps so clean for me,
as she is sure my mother would.
If only I could kill her cat;
it sleeps with me and I hate it-
the sexual clawing at the bedspread
when I'm almost asleep,
that clawing like your presence day after day.
I walk to the door and open it
and see my friend Klaus
dragging a young woman up the stairs.
He shoves her toward me.
For you, Antoine, he says.
Untouched. For you.
|
199,762
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/33817/doctor-faustus-welcome-home
|
Daryl Hine
|
Doctor Faustus' Welcome Home
|
What was to be our bargain? A few years
Of sorry satisfaction in return
For a retirement elsewhere
When hell became your home away from home.
You answered my advertisement, enraptured
By its otherworldly language,
Not riches nor restored virility
But an eternity of retribution.
At last the promised panacea came
In its unpromising plain wrapper;
All it needed was your signature
At first, full payment would of course come later.
You tasted the elixir and it worked
After a fashion: only happiness,
The one thing everyone omits to ask for,
Hadn't been included in the package,
All the rest was there, youth, luck and love,
Patience that can purchase anything
Without exception, except appetite.
The precious years seemed endless,
Eternity-
An indeterminate sentence-
Inexpensive in comparison.
Punishment was after all the point
Of this particular experiment,
Torment in proportion to the boredom
Of experience already spent.
Anticipation is its own reward.
Here is your last resort, the wrong vacation
Prepaid in advance, an oddly quiet
Spot not altogether off the map,
The solitary crowded place still open
To the scrupulously unrepentant,
For which you suffered all of this:
Premature wish-fulfillment, disappointment
Inherent in enjoyment,
The wisdom of impulse, stupid hesitation,
The reiterated act.
Welcome, sinner, to your resignation,
Penultimate reality
As stipulated in our contract.
Too late you learn the soul is not for sale.
Agreement guaranteed gratification,
Relief from the authority of things,
The achievement of the self some call damnation,
Freedom, paradox, obscurity,
The duty of the damned, to be exact,
And all the pleasures of the damned in fact.
|
241,738
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58615/from-the-island-1860
|
Tomas Tranströmer
|
From the Island, 1860
|
I
One day as she rinsed her wash from the jetty,
the bay's cold grave rose up through her arms
and into her life.
Her tears froze into spectacles.
The island raised itself by its grass
and the herring-flag waved in the deep.
II
And the swarm of small pox caught up with him,
settled down onto his face.
He lies and stares at the ceiling.
How it had rowed up through the silence.
The now's eternally flowing stain,
the now's eternally bleeding end-point.
|
228,394
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50953/prayer-for-an-irish-father
|
Norman Williams
|
Prayer for an Irish Father
|
On a damp June Saturday, as colorless
As cellar stone, the working classes from
Dun Laoghaire spread their picnic blankets, tins,
And soda bread along the coastal cliffs.
Two hundred feet below, the ocean knocks
Debris and timber on the rock, and near
The precipice, I watch a father swing
His daughter out, as though to loose her on
That long descent, past rookeries of gulls
As intricate as mosques, through casual
Alliances of mist and fog, and toward
The cowlicked Irish Sea, as fathomless
And bitter as their history. With each
Return, the young girl cries out her delight,
Then girds once more against the peril there:
As though she knows no child is desired wholly;
That there is not a mother, dreading birth,
Who does not sometime curse her recklessness,
Nor father, yoked to press or forklift truck,
Who has not brooded on the chance of some
Untimely accident. Pray God that such
Black thoughts do not now reach like beggar's mitts
Into his mind, or better pray that he
Has vowed, despite them all, not to permit
His difficult and gnarled grip to give.
|
398,291
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/27192/in-the-beginning-56d2111f70ed5
|
Daniel G. Hoffman
|
In the Beginning
|
DANIEL G. HOFFMAN
IN THE BEGINNING
On the jetty, our fingers shading
incandescent sky and sea,
my daughter stands with me.
"Boat! Boat!" she cries, her voice
in the current of speech cascading
with recognition's joys.
"Boat!" she cries; in spindrift
bobbling sails diminish,
but Kate's a joyous spendthrift
of her language's resources.
Her ecstasy's contagion
touches the whirling gulls
and turns their gibbering calls
to "Boat! Boat!" Her passion
to name the nameless pulls her
from the syllabic sea
of incommunicate loneliness,
from the isles of infancy.
She points beyond the jetty
where the uncontested sun
wimples the wakeless water
and cries, "Boat!" though there is none.
But that makes no difference to Katy,
atingle with vision and word;
and why do I doubt that the harbour,
in the inner design of truth,
is speckled with tops'ls and spinnakers,
creased with the hulls of sloops?
Kate's word names the vision
that's hers; I try to share.
That verbal imagination
I've envied, and long wished for:
the world without description
is vast and wild as death;
the word the tongue has spoken
creates the world and truth.
Child, magician, poet
by incantation rule;
their frenzy's spell unbroken
defines the topgallant soul.
|
243,651
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/90939/on-utopia-parkway
|
Lawrence Joseph
|
On Utopia Parkway
|
Between Grand Central Parkway and Little Bay,
from One Hundred Sixty-Ninth and Hillside
to Union Turnpike, to work - countless days the streets
I take to work. The front yard of roses -
did I write their names down correctly? -
Zephirine, Charis, Proud Land, Drouhin, Blale.
Q31 bus, among the words I hear are
Jamie, Jamie does not like to be humiliated,
Jamie is not about to forget it, either. Not
physically well, a poor man, arrested
on suspicion of selling cigarettes loose,
on the street, held, choked, left unconscious,
still handcuffed, no cardiopulmonary resuscitation
administered, pronounced dead, the cause of death,
according to the autopsy report, a homicide -
rectally infused puree of hummus, nuts, and raisins,
by employees of the Agency's contractor,
isn't torture, Director of Central Intelligence
explains, but, merely, legally justified means
of enhanced interrogation. 3708 Utopia Parkway
was Joseph Cornell's small wood-frame house.
He might have worked on the Medici Slot Machine
on his kitchen table, a Renaissance Box, a theater
he called it, the Medici and Mussolini's Fascist state
set in a metaphorical relation, its inner lines
the lines of the floor plan of the Pitti Palace,
the inclusion of an actual compass rose the expression
of an ascent from the temporal to the spiritual.
In what place, the Federal Reserve's
monetary spigots and banks' access
to cash pieced together with indexed futures, to reduce
the market's decline - in what places, violations
of which forms of which eternal laws?
Is it error, the idea that no place, too, is a place?
On the corner of Utopia Parkway and Union Turnpike,
in red-blue twilight abstracted into an energy
blowing it apart, in spaces of language transformed
and coded, to be decoded and recoded in the future.
|
169,792
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/18154/after-winter
|
Mary Russell
|
After Winter
|
IN ORDER
AFTER WINTER
They stand there listening,
The tall trees,
Stiff to the wistful
Plucking breeze.
They are ungracious with
The shouting wind,
Concentrate on sound,
Disciplined,
Though all the earth is lifting
Lusty noise
To beat and tug at their
Implacate poise.
Better than eager rush
Thaw-water makes,
They like the ordered rhythms
Of snow-flakes. ;
They are impatient with
Impetuous spring;
They like a more austere
Patterned thing.
|
238,872
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57112/the-prodigal-10
|
Derek Walcott
|
from The Prodigal: 10
|
I
The ground dove stuttered for a few steps then flew
up from his path to settle in the sun-browned
branches that were now barely twigs; in drought it coos
with its relentless valve, a tiring sound,
not like the sweet exchanges of turtles in the Song
of Solomon, or the flutes of Venus in frescoes
though all the mounds in the dove-calling drought
the hills and gulches all briary and ochre
and the small dervishes that swivelled in the dust
were like an umber study for a fresco
of The Prodigal Son, this scorched, barren acre.
He had the smell of cities in his clothes,
the steam and soot of trains of Fascist stations
and their resounding vaults, he had the memory of rain
carried in his head, the rain on Pescara's beach
with the pastel hotels, and instead of the doves
the air-show with the jets soaring and swooping
over the Fair, the smell off that beach
came back on the rock-road where the turtle lifted
its mating music into the dry acacias,
and mixed with the smell off the galloping sea-flock,
each odour distinct, of sheep trampling their pens
as if their fear had caught the wolf-scent.
The rock-brown dove had fluttered from that fear
that what he loved and knew once as a boy
would panic and forget him from the change
of character that the grunting swine could smell.
A sow and her litter. Acknowledged prodigal.
Grey sunrise through a sky of frosted glass,
the great trees sodden, the paths below them pooled,
the headlands veiled and muslin-thin, no birds,
and pale green combers cresting through the drizzle;
a change of climate, the clouding of the self
in a sudden culture but one more confident
in its glazed equestrian statues in wet parks,
its railway stations echoing like the combers
in the ground-shaken caves under the cliff;
gathering, cresting then dissolving shallows
as light steps quietly into the house.
Light that inaudibly fits in the house
as a book on a bookshelf with its spines of tombs
and names, mouths slightly parted, eager to speak
wherever their station now. Every library
is a cemetery in sunlight. Sometimes, a shaft . . .
Across the dry hillock, leaves chasing dead leaves
in resurrecting gusts, or in the ochre quiet
leaves too many to rake on the road's margins,
too loaded to lift themselves, they lapsed singly
or in a yellow chute from the cedar, burnt branches;
lyres of desiccation choked the dry gutters
everywhere in the country, La Feuillée, Monchy,
by the caked track to Saltibus, over D'ennery.
Drought. Song of the wireless harp of the frangipani
that still makes a tangled music out of silence.
II
Now to cherish the depredations of April
even on the threshold of March, its sunlit eve-
the gommier maudit unshouldering its leaves,
barrow after loaded barrow, the leaves fading, yellow,
burnt grass and the tigerish shadows on the hillside,
and the azure a trowelled blue, and blue hill-smoke,
parched shortcuts and rust, cattle anchored in shadows
and groaning like winches, the didactic drought
against the hot sea that teaches what? Thirst
for the grace that springs in grooves of oblivious dust.
A fine haze screens the headland, the drizzle drifts.
Is every noun: breakwater, headland, haze,
seen through a gauze of English, a bright scrim,
a mesh in which light now defines the wires
and not its natural language? Were your life and work
simply a good translation? Would headland,
haze and the spray-wracked breakwater
pronounce their own names differently?
And have I looked at life, in other words,
through some inoperable cataract?
"What language do you speak in your own country?"
Every noun has its echo, a noun is a noise,
as every stone in the expanding sunlight
finds an exact translation in its shadow,
and it may be that you were halved by language
as definitively as the meridian
of Greenwich or by Pope Alexander's line,
but what makes this, if this is all it is,
more than just bearable, in fact, exultation
is the stone that is looked at, and the manchineels,
bitter, poisonous yellow berries, treacherous apples
that look like Eden's on the tree of knowledge
when the first noun was picked and named and eaten
and the shadow of knowledge defined every edge
originating language and then difference,
and subtlety, the snake and contradiction
and the sudden Babel of the manchineel.
III
The blank page grows a visionary wood.
A parallel section, no, in fact a whole province
of far, of foreign, of self-translating leaves
stands on the place where it has always stood
the right-hand margin of the page
loud, soft but voluble in their original language,
an orchestrating lexicon, veined manuscripts
going far back in time and deep in roots
and echoing in the tunnel of the right ear
with echoes: oak-echo, beech-echo, linden-echo,
and beech and birds a half-ancestral forest
whose metre was an ocean's and whose break,
parting declared the white-lined conjugation
of combers' centuries. This ocean, English and this forest weald,
this clattering natterer "burn," this distance, mist,
kept its high columns marching as my pen moves
towards that gap of light that comes upon
the bright salt arc of a bare unprinted beach
or where the piper leaves a print, its claws,
dim, imperceptible as an ancient rune-
that is the landscape, that, the stand of forest
made up of all these leaves and lines that
still rasp with delight with rhyme and incantation
pages of shade turning into translation.
And my left hand another vegetation
but not their opposite or their enemy,
palms and wild fern and praising them, the sea,
sea-almond, grape and vine and agave
that the wind's finger folded carefully
drawing its thumb to mark the dog-eared wave
across the dry hill, leaves chasing leaves
in a shiny, scurrying wind, and, in the brown quiet,
leaves, unraked, tiling the road's margins,
so loaded they don't lift, they lapse singly, yellow,
or chute from the cedars. Lyres of desiccation
in March's autumn, filling the dry gutters,
everywhere in the country, La Feuillée, Monchy,
except for the wireless harp of the frangipani
that still makes its music out of extreme stillness.
In my own botanic origins, frangere panem
to break bread, flower-flour in its white lilies,
except that in rare blossom I now remember
the flower is pink. It doesn't matter.
Since whatever hue it is, its wafer it serves that need,
petal on the sky's open palate at early mass
every morning but here most on this Sunday
with its Lenten drought, the heart-coloured flowers then
the caterpillars determinedly devour,
on a Sunday when a sadness still eats at the parallel
petals of my beaten heart, and the white pews of the sea,
the waves coming in aisles, my longing
for the communion of breakfast, the leafless,
flower-less but crusted bark of the frangipani,
frangere panem , the pain that I break and eat
flower and flour, pain and pain ,
bright Easter coming, like the seas white communion.
IV
In the country of the ochre afternoon
it is always still and hot, the dry leaves stirring
infrequently sometimes with the rattling pods
of what they call "women's tongues," in
the afternoon country the far hills are very quiet
and heat-hazed, but mostly in the middle
of the country of the afternoon I see the brown heat
of the skin of my first love, so still, so perfect,
so unaltered, and I see how she walked
with her sunburnt hands against the still sea-almonds,
to a remembered cove, where she stood on the small dock-
that was when I thought we were immortal
and that love would be folded doves and folded oars
and water lapping against eroding stone
in the ochre country of the afternoon.
|
224,714
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/48445/known-sound-
|
W. S. Merwin
|
Known Sound
|
After I can no longer see her
she says to me For a while there is all
that asking about how the body becomes
itself as it goes and what it is becoming
what is happening to it where it is going
step by step one moment at a time
and then all that falls aside like a curtain
and the body is gone with its worn questions
hollow joints marrow and breath and instead there is
the way whatever lived in it goes on as itself
neither before nor after neither moving nor still
and while the body was going somewhere
the way was there to begin with in the feet themselves
wherever they went and you know the sound
|
182,076
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/24846/tumbando-cana
|
Lysander Kemp
|
Tumbando Caa
|
two poems |
TUMBANDO CARA
(Puerto Rico)
Roses are red and violets are blue and sugar
is profitable and sweet. You know the rhyme,
but taste a pinch of your sugar, mister-taste
how it tastes of human sweat. You know the word,
but this is not a golfing dew on Sunday-
Miguel Pifiero sweats all day in the cane,
tumbando cana, chopping the monstrous cane,
he clambers home to a flimsy shack on the hill.
No plumbing, madam-peep in the door-no rugs,
no choice, no china, no money for rainy days,
no luck, no linen, no charm or chance, oh nothing
here is like a Vermeer. And look at our valley,
its green fortune of cane like dollar bills
in the mile and more of anyone's air-oh nothing
there is like a Breughel, see the sweating
backs and hacking machetes. And see Miguel:
that cane is ours (for whose island is it?)
but look, now we are the stalks of cane! Tumbando!
Look, he chops in a glory! Tumbando yanqui!
No, in a dream of fatigue. The cane is cane,
and roses are red, and sugar is sweat, and money.
The copious air stinks from Cayey to Boston.
|
171,760
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/19244/tartary
|
Audrey Wurdemann
|
Tartary
|
Under the shards of shattered stone
The bells are mute, nor has anyone
For centuries shaken, petal by petal,
The songs that ring through stricken metal;
Nor anyone stirred the blood poured in
When the molten bronze ran ruddy thin;
And none has called to the living voice,
And heard it, answering, rejoice.
This is the fate of a buried bell
With all the tales of the khans to tell.
There shall be only ghosts to listen
Deep in the dust where nothing can glisten,
And a pebble is bright as a diamond or two
Lost from a Mongol emperor's shoe.
There shall be only a silence deeper
Than any quiet about a sleeper,
And the quick-eyed mice with fur like rust
Shall leave their prints in gathering dust.
SHADOW
Winged joy, between
The sky and me,
|
225,060
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48653/leap-in-the-dark
|
Roberta Hill Whiteman
|
Leap In The Dark
|
I.
Stoplights edged the licorice street with ribbon,
neon embroidering wet sidewalks. She turned
into the driveway and leaped in the dark. A blackbird
perched on the bouncing twig of a maple, heard
her whisper, "Stranger, lover, the lost days are over.
While I walk from car to door, something inward opens
like four o'clocks in rain. Earth, cold from autumn,
pulls me. I can't breathe the same
with dirt for marrow and mist for skin,
blurring my vision, my vision's separate self.
I stand drunk in this glitter, under the sky's grey shelter.
The city maple, not half so bitter, hurls itself
in two directions, until both tips darken and disappear,
as I darken my reflection in the smoking mirror
of my home. How faint the sound of dry leaves,
like the clattering keys of another morning, another world."
II.
She looked out the window at some inward greying door.
The maple held her glance, made ground fog from her cigarette.
Beyond uneven stairs, children screamed,
gunned each other down. Then she sealed her nimble dreams
with water from a murky bay. "For him I map
this galaxy of dust that turns without an answer.
When it rains, I remember his face in the corridor
of a past apartment and trace the anguish around his mouth,
his wrinkled forehead, unguarded eyes, the foreign fruit
of an intricate sadness. With the grace that remains,
I catch a glint around a door I cannot enter.
The clock echoes in dishtowels; I search love's center
and bang pans against the rubble of my day, the lucid
grandeur of wet ground, the strangeness of a fatal sun
that makes us mark on the margin of our loss,
trust in the gossamer of touch, trust in the late-plowed field."
III.
When the sun opened clouds and walked into her mongrel soul,
she chopped celery into rocky remnants of the sea,
and heard fat sing up bread, a better dying.
The magnet in each seed of the green pepper kept her flying,
floating toward memories that throb like clustered stars:
the dark water laughter of ducks, a tangle of November oaks,
toward sudden music on a wheel of brilliant dust
where like a moon she must leap back and forth
from emptiness. "I remember the moon shimmering
loss and discovery along a water edge, and skirting
a slice of carrot, I welcome eternity in that sad eye of autumn.
Rare and real, I dance while vegetables sing in pairs.
I hug my death, my chorus of years, and search
and stretch and leap, for I will be apprentice to the blood
in spite of the mood of a world
that keeps rusting, rusting the wild throats of birds."
IV.
In lamplight she saw the smoke of another's dream:
her daughter walk woods where snow weighs down pine,
her son cry on a bridge that ends in deep-rooted dark,
her man, stalled on a lonely road, realize his torque
was alcohol and hatred. "Hungry for silence, I listen
to wind, to the sound of water running down mountain,
my own raw breath. Between the sounds, a seaborn god
plays his reed in the caverns of my being.
I wear his amethyst, let go my dreams: Millars, Lacewings,
and Junebugs scatter, widen and batter the dark,
brightening this loud dust with the fever of their eyes.
Oh crazy itch that grabs us beyond loss
and lets us forgive, so that we can answer birds and deer,
lightning and rain, shadow and hurricane.
Truth waits in the creek, cutting the winter brown hills.
It sings with needles of ice, sings because of its scar."
|
196,982
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/32426/mouths
|
Glover Davis
|
Mouths
|
I make mouths
in a bar's mirror
and watch the tulip
crush like a heart
the puffed bell of the world
or the stunned orchid.
Later, in drunkenness
in the stained depths of the mirror
the spots of light
faces or glowing fish
that flutter out of control
where the lips are winged
with persimmon
and the harbor lights
the gold tooth
the flowing pennant
of the tongue sighs
as my own mouth sighs
above the loose change,
paper clips, the fluids of machines
or clogged with dirt
and bluer than a slug.
|
172,196
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/19488/the-parting
|
Thomas Orean
|
The Parting
|
Hip turned, O white arrow _
of the roadless feet.
Stopped the mouth-
white strange knuckles
unscrew the brain,
make it a wild garden of poppies.
And the world: a wooden stallion
still bears upon its back
grinning eyes, dangling feet-
only one line effaced from it,
a dim blue chalk line
of my love's computation.
Then the landscape of interior poppies
is phosphorescent
as a hand against lamplight;
lamplight spells sleep,
blown out even that-
only left
the white arrow-
and lifting my eyes to Ursa Minor
and Orion's Car,
I hear above them the whir of white arrows,
the wandering of roads.
|
201,694
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/34785/tender-acre
|
Jane Shore
|
Tender Acre
|
As you slept, the pulse
flickering on your neck like a trick of light,
I thought how, earlier, beside the sleeping shape
Adam labored the whole night to stay awake,
afraid she'd vanish in the morning with the moon.
Out of the earth sprang the planet's
blurred, unpredictable life.
The pulse of the near hill,
or was it the shudder he was born with,
rocked him. The animals also,
who yesterday brushed like wind against his body,
were now given form. On a branch
a yard-long icicle began to melt.
It hung, glistening and patient, :
while a zipper of vertebrae inched all the way down
its back. Then bands of bargello
stitched the skin-tiny saw-tooth flames
of dull gold and rust, rust and gold.
This, he named snake.
On the topmost branch of the tree,
a bird bristled with little white thorns.
Then each thorn fanned out like a palm-frond
and the bird flew away.
All day Adam watched and listened,
but he couldn't name his loneliness-
the long 'oh' of sorrow, the 'ooh' of hallelujah.
Eleven curved knifeblades
of his ribcage, and the twelfth
that cut his flesh without injury,
he accepted,
as he accepts these other gifts placed before him.
All night he watched
and memorized her human shape,
so that later, were she not there,
his memory could reconstruct that absent body
from the air, and wrench him from his solitude
|
206,568
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/37231/in-dickens-house
|
Donald Finkel
|
In Dickens' House
|
In the back bedroom where Mary slipped from him
"in such a calm and gentle sleep" he hardly
knew she'd gone, the writing table (on which
he chivvied Nell with his pen to her immortal
rest) sleeps also, upright on all fours.
From his bedroom, I can hear the grumbling vans
in Doughty Street. Beyond his embattled garden,
beyond the ivy shivering on the bricks,
a panel of chimney pots assembles like smug reviewers.
In the downstairs hall, his reluctant clock (that would not
always chime for him) now tolls for me.
Going out, I glimpse my inglorious face in his mirror.
|
213,116
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/40518/detroit-tomorrow
|
Philip Levine
|
Detroit, Tomorrow
|
Newspaper says the boy killed by someone,
don't say who. I know the mother, waking,
gets up as usual, washes her face
in cold water, and starts the coffee pot.
She stands by the window up there on floor
sixteen wondering why the street's so calm
with no cars going or coming, and then
she looks at the wall clock and sees the time.
Now she's too awake to go back to bed,
she's too awake not to remember him,
her one son, or to forget exactly
how long yesterday was, each moment dragged
into the next by the force of her will
until she thought this simply cannot be.
She sits at the scarred, white kitchen table,
the two black windows staring back at her,
wondering how she'll go back to work today.
The windows don't see anything: they're black,
eyeless, they give back only what's given;
sometimes, like now, even less than what's given,
yet she stares into their two black faces
moving her head from side to side, like this,
just like I'm doing now. Try it awhile,
go ahead, it's not going to kill you.
Now say something, it doesn't matter what
you say because all the words are useless:
"I'm sorry for your loss." "This too will pass."
"He was who he was." She won't hear you out
because she can only hear the torn words
she uses to pray to die. This afternoon
you and I will see her just before four
alight nimbly from the bus, her lunch box
of one sandwich, a thermos of coffee,
a navel orange secured under her arm,
and we'll look away. Under your breath make
her one promise and keep it forever:
in the little store-front church down the block,
the one with the front windows newspapered,
you won't come on Saturday or Sunday
to kneel down and pray for life eternal.
|
162,726
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14194/their-strange-eyes-hold-no-vision
|
Howard Buck
|
Their Strange Eyes Hold No Vision
|
Their strange eyes hold no vision, as a rule;
No dizzy glory. A still look is theirs,
But rather as one subtly vacant stares,
Watching the circling magic of a pool.
Now when the morning firing becomes tame,
Out in the warming sun he tries to guess
Which battery they're after. "Let me see;
Which battery is there? which battery?
I wonder which. ...." Again, again, the same
Returning question, idle, meaningless.
Startled, he sighs-or laughs-or softly swears;
Mutteringly something of dear names declares
In the bitter cruelty of tenderness.
The planes drift low, circling monotonously,
Droning like many a drowsy bumble-bee
Some summer morning. Only now and then
A whining shell, the mere formality
Of stupid war, calls back his thoughts again.
Suddenly near the unseen death swoops low,
Laughing and singing; and full pitifully
The startled eyes stare wide, but do not see
The whirling features of the genie foe,
Safe in his summoned cloud. The quiet skies
Tell not his surest comings. With waved wands
A mist springs from the earth, and swaying stands
A veiling moment . .... sinks.....
And there he lies
Face down, clütchirfg the clay with warm dead hands
|
234,024
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54330/before-56d2348d3ada3
|
Avis Harley
|
Before
|
The butterfly was there
before any human art was made.
Before cathedrals rose in prayer,
the butterfly was there.
Before pyramids pierced the air
or Great Wall stones were laid,
the butterfly was there.
Before any human, art was made.
|
215,836
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/41880/jimmie-rogers-last-blue-yodel-1933
|
David Wojahn
|
Jimmie Rogers' Last Blue Yodel, 1933
|
There were twelve of them before it, and they made him
something grander than a yodeling brakeman: "a star of
screen & stage"
etc., but a minor one & broke, with a ticket to a final
hemorrhage
in NYC, Victor Studios. He yodels as the crimson phlegm
lavas out to ruin his Sunday suit. They've got him propped
with pillows on a cot, & he's singing that he's free
o he's free from the chain gang now, his follow-up to TB
Blues, his last real hit, itself the follow-up to Whipping
That Ol' TB. He needs to make enough from tunes
to pay for a proper sanitarium: the hillbilly Keats
of my father's 78's, red-yodeling his blues
his Negative Capability Rag, into an antique
microphone, his name writ on railroad ties. Two days later
he was on his way to Mississippi in a box.
|
249,359
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/151766/after-birth
|
Devon Walker-Figueroa
|
After Birth
|
Reed, who's got one strike left before he gets
life, tells me afterbirth is what the cougars are after.
"Lambing season," he says, "plus, placenta's a delicacy
to a cat." I try to explain how
intent they were, how their intentions appeared
to involve me, but Reed won't hear
a word. My mother takes me at my word & won't
let me leave the house. So I learn to regret
my story, sit indoors for weeks, watching
for hunters, only to find what's hunted: the gray
diggers interring green
walnuts at the feet of the tree they fell from. Now
all I can think of is blood, how we first feed
on it without knowing
we feed on it or that it possesses a plan all its own. Every girl
I know has started, nicknamed it
Florence or Flo or the Red Badge of Courage. It'll be years
for me. When a doctor finally says I've fallen so far
off the growth chart he's worried
I won't find my way back, I'm fourteen
& can still go out shirtless
without causing a stir. "Eat more butter," he says, but I don't
yet believe what I eat will help me hate
my body any less. Reed doesn't hate
his kids. He loves them too much is the story. People tell me
to avoid him, but I don't. His flock grazes
the fields I drag my shadow over & I have nothing
better to do than gaze at the perpetual feeding, mumbling
Exodus under my breath, some passage about bearing
false witness. & somehow I think I know
by now that knowing involves the senses turning a touch
licentious. My parents haven't known each other in years
& no one wants to know me either. A tree falls
in the woods. Consensus leaves us cold, etc.
Green Eggs and Ham , I really dislike that kid's book, with all
its I-would-nots & could-nots on boats & in woods,
all its reds & its greens inter- mingled, muck of inks
you should never swallow. A doctor hands me
a copy, says, "eat up" & pulls a polyester curtain
between us. I'm three & can't yet read
any word on my own but "God." He reaches
his hand, gloved green, inside my mother & says,
"what about this weather we are
having?" Just between us,
I warn the story's star not to touch
its plate, but in the end it'll do
what the good Dr.'s scripted. I throw
the book. My mother stops singing
beneath a stream of steaming
water, a red-black mass dehiscing
at her feet. "Find your father,"
she commands, so I run
through yellow meadows, yelling
his name, his name, which the hills give back
to me, though he can't hear them from the other side
of this state. On the other
side of this state, my mother
finds her first horse. It is 1980, decade
of the single-wide & no-children-in-the-
picture. Just a mare called Chianti
who dies one year
before I'm born. Her heart, size of a child's globe, fails
while foaling, something involving a length of decayed
intestine & great pain. My parents take
great pains to save her, but the foal will lose
her the instant the air
enters his chest. In Egyptian hieroglyphs, "I" can be rendered
as a single reed & "meadow" as a row of three
reeds bound by a flatline of horizon. I know little,
even now, though enough
to say my name & know it isn't
mine, but just an inadvertent testament
to my mother's love of horses & "good
breeding." In an ancient Seventeen
Magazine , a British teenager of means
straddles a dappled pure-
bred bearing my name. 17, the age I am
when my interior starts giving up
the way it's meant to, with blood,
& thanks only to pregnant mares held
captive, their urine stolen for the green
tablets I'm made to swallow. & though I feel
like a martyr outgrowing martyrdom when it happens,
a sacrifice of sorts is still
taking place inside me. I admit I'm kind
of a poser sometimes, like when I convince my best
friend Ann I've started, when in fact I've only used
my mother's lipstick to tint my underpants
the right shade of red. I'm the first
to admit I've begun to forget my mother's
writing as it appears in Arabian Horse World , some piece
on giving birth & up & tricking a strange
mare into caring for a foal not hers by painting it up,
by daubing it down, in the afterbirth of her still-
born. What more could one ask for?
My mother once rubbed moonshine on my gums to numb the pain
appearing inside me. Moonshine, the name given the foal
dressed in after- birth & therefore breathing.
|
249,187
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/151476/the-cane-field-testifies-regarding-the-assassination-of-the-mirabal-sisters
|
Julian Randall
|
The Cane Field Testifies Regarding the Assassination of the Mirabal Sisters
|
Pues es possible que I have learned to fear la lluvia
All of my saddest stories have the same beginning
Entiendes? One thing falls into another I am fallen
Into all the time Men enter me like rain
Swing the moon in their hands until I'm mud
I suck their boots beg them tranquilase tranquilase
It was an accident mostly to have lived this long
I regret the entry but what choice did I have
Men shove their weapons inside me and only I
Ever think to call them bastard All I have ever
Said has been blamed on the wind como una
Mariposa I am beautiful because I am surrounded
Guapísima I am cherished most by the blade
Yo soy la prima de la tormenta What rages
against me used to keep me alive entiendes?
Es possible que every storm begets women
I am only what memories were buried in me
So I can't say what's buried elsewhere
Una país is only as good as the saddest acres
Of its deception Nobody can tell you this
Better than la tierra itself That night it rained
They dragged them off the road El poder de
La tormenta es en el oscuro y los manos
I howled for a country I'm mostly made of ghost
Stories and rumor The men entered me
What choice did I have but to suck their boots
For this crime they have only ever called me citizen
I tremble when the rain comes De verdad
When the soldiers came back I mistook the headlights
Of the truck for lightning The thunder for acres of batons
|
180,186
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/23861/snow-56d20e62a4a81
|
Howard Moss
|
Snow
|
A zebra photographs this scene,
His skin is more indigenous than mine.
A slanting wind, a slanting roof
Unhinge the pinwheel of the mind:
What is left is black and white.
The lake strums beneath the ice
And covets distance in your face.
Miles of miracles converge,
And what of thought is left in place
Is all illogical and lace.
Each tree, a manikin of frost,
Invites its lover wind to feast;
. Love is christened and swirled
In the new joy covering the beast:
Snow is the wedding of the world.
|
239,664
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/57527/asking-the-way
|
Ko Un
|
Asking the Way
|
You fools who ask what god is
should ask what life is instead.
Find a port where lemon trees bloom.
Ask about places to drink in the port.
Ask about the drinkers.
Ask about the lemon trees.
Ask and ask until nothing's left to ask.
Translated from the Korean
|
182,252
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/24935/delights-of-husbandry
|
David Cornel De Jong
|
Delights of Husbandry
|
Cope with getting figs from corn,
Half believe in kittens born from
Less than innocent angels, or instead,
Pray with rasping knees on the bedroom
Floor where the sand was blown from
Many a magnificent Michigan dune.
Fly the moon-eyed, shell-eared kitten
Like a magpie from sycamore to elm!
But it might land at the window of
A neighbor's wife and scare her half
To hell, which is no answer to nor
Substance of the prayer we did not pray.
It always goes back to God, everything,
Word and word, sand and sand, round
And round, asking that supple figs
May climb the corn stalks yet, though He
Is surely more methodical than that,
And man entitled to his piebald hopes.
Oh, Millicent, how handsome the sunset!
Say we were meant for this: standing
Always silhouetted against men's greed,
Saints' hopes, and God's withheld behests,
Always to suck popsickle evenings when
We find no purple figs upon our corn.
|
199,564
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/33718/afternoon
|
Alfred Corn
|
Afternoon
|
Or, the odds are zero, counted from here.
The past survives its population
And is unkind. Triumph no more than failure
In the longest run ever fails to fail.
Is that the argument against shuffling,
Dealing, and reshuffling these photographs?
They are not mementoes of death alone,
But of life lived variously, avatars
Energy, insight, cruelty took-and love.
Variousness: the great kaleidoscope
Of time, its snowflake pictures, form after
Form, collapsing into the future, hours,
Days, seasons, generations that rise up
And fall like leaves, each one a hand inscribed
With the fragile calligraphy of selfhood;
The human fate given a human face.
AFTERNOON
Scudding clouds give happenstance to the walls
Of the dome above me. Add the motion
Of my last ride this season-cyclist in all
But winter-add breezes, and what a fluid
Day is rushing by. Though the bike always
Takes me for the same ride, for staying the same,
It changes all the more-not a place but
An event, demolition wrought with speed,
As in our downtown urban renewal.
Whereas the Hudson's a static shimmer;
And seagrasses, reclaiming the landfill,
Still wave as they waved by New Amsterdam,
Fond farewells to the poor stone houses of men,
So jerry-built, so variable, compared
To forms in straw that know how to recur,
And so, last... . A helicopter lifts off,
A moment signifies. The wheels randomly
Spin after an impulse and gravitate
Down street names I like: Coenties Slip, Pearl,
Broad and Water. There: renewal can mean
Repair. Fraunces Tavern has been restored
Like new again, or, rather, old. (Still, I'd
Hesitate to have lunch there.) Renewal:
"Dear Love-We've both changed. On a different
And better basis, we'll be able to..."
St. Paul's bell strikes five and struck the same tone
For the nineteenth century. But I am left
With my text, no less coherent than its day.
Good citizen, discontent as any,
One who has seen home base as enemy
And ally; and lived in contradiction,
The order of this place, in this moment.
The city thinks, but whose thoughts? Wire service,
Museum, financial directorate,
Creator, conscience-mind's the very air
We breathe. Thought by a place, am I that place?
A part of the whole and the whole in part?
These inspired breezes, once-in-a-lifetime clouds,
Pearl-white autumnal light creating suns
Like whirligigs on the water. . .. My bike,
My charger turns toward home. Towers rise
And swell as I come closer, the pedals
I pedal like a pump that pumps them up-
As such, I am the builder. Though what proof
But in saying it, an act, much like love,
That enjoins substance on what comes and goes?
Streets, stay with me. Desire, match with a moment;
See, that there always be one of this day.
|
183,032
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/25333/variations-on-being-thirty
|
Reed Whittemore
|
Variations on Being Thirty
|
1
The oven is sticky with grease,
And the latch on the broken door to the backyard is broken.
An arm to the sofa is off,
And the new phonograph needles are mixed
With the old phonograph needles.
These are most certainly signs.
The faucet drips in the sink,
And the bulb in the overhead lamp in my bedroom is out.
Six months of The Times
Have gathered in heaps in the closet, and neighbor Bates
Is girding himself to demand that I cut my lawn.
That these are signs is as clear as the nose on my face.
Sitting here on the sofa
Watching the ceiling crack and the paint fade,
Watching the rugs gather dust and the doors warp,
Watching the bulbs burn out and the curtains stiffen,
I have been struck, I have been touched, I have been
saddened
By instance on top of instance, sign on sign.
The absence of rhyme, for example.
And meter?
And what of the thoughts and the feelings? The care, the
infinite care?
Instance on top of instance, sign on sign.
I have been sitting here on the broken sofa
Watching the slow decline of second-hand cars,
Watching the slipping of cotton and phonographs,
Watching the West decline.
I have been sitting here as the bulbs blacken,
The dishes pile up in the sink, and the beard grows,
Watching.
And I have been struck, I have been touched, I have been
saddened
By the terrible meaning of signs.
2
The bulbs go black. And the dishes,
The beard grows. And the lawn.
The ceiling cracks, And the West.
And there is no rhyme.
Never again in my time will the oven be clean,
And never again in my time will the faucet be silent.
All things creep to their ends in my house. I sit
Here on this broken sofa in my time,
Knowing the time is past for oven or faucet,
Knowing the terrible end of second-hand cars,
Knowing
That nothing will be as it has been; the West declines.
3
Who is now thirty knows that the West declines.
He is let in. He sees the charts on the tables,
Pins all in place, lines drawn, and an arrow
Pointing at some little town of new tactical prominence,
His own. He stands unobtrusively by,
Looking over the shoulders of the commanders,
Watching their gestures, hearing their briefs, taking notes
As the great plan is unfolded under his nose.
He ages another thirty over the shoulders.
The charts become mountains and fields; the lines become
storms,
Plagues, beetles, infantile incubi
Legging it glumly over the mountains and fields
To the singled-out town, their objective, his castle, a poor
Burg but his own, a comfortable burg
Suddenly filled at the windows with panicky gentles
Craning their necks to see what they'd rather not.
And the West.
nl
The West declines in the windows and over the shoulders,
Watching the arrows advance,
Watching the mountains and fields blacken with beetles,
And so forth.
The West declines in the windows and over the shoulders,
Aging another thirty,
And so forth.
|
241,448
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58468/looking-at-a-coyote
|
Javier Zamora
|
Looking at a Coyote
|
among thirty dusty men the only wet thing
the mouth of the coyote
is a mini zoo we are from many countries
in which there are many coyotes
500 bucks and we're off think about it
is the shortest verse of a corrido
a gila monster and a coyote are one
a gila monster and a coyote and a gringo are one
strewn bottles melt dirt
the coyote's tongue fills them
we don't know which to swat the coyote or the froth
the mosquitoes or the flies
gringos why do you see us illegal don't you think
we are the workers around you
we speak different accents yours included and we know
también the coyote is suspect of what we say
when the coyote hears helicopters
in Nike shoes he trots Arizona
Nogales whores close their doors
the coyote trots Arizona in Nike shoes
the desert is still the coyote must be tired
in his shadow he sees searchlights
it's day all night it's dusting and it's going to dust
the coyote rests under yuccas
|
244,979
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/92921/from-summer-rain-tr-by-hoyt-rogers
|
Yves Bonnefoy
|
from Summer Rain (tr. by Hoyt Rogers)
|
From SUMMER RAIN
A STONE
No more paths for us, nothing but unscythed grass.
No more ford to cross, nothing but mud.
No more well-made bed, nothing but stones
And shadows embracing through us.
Still this night is bright,
As we desired our death might be.
It whitens the trees, they expand.
Their foliage: sand, then foam.
Even beyond time, day breaks.
A STONE
A mysterious haste urged us on.
We went in, we opened
The shutters, we recognized the table, the hearth,
The bed; the star was growing larger in the window,
We heard the voice that wants us to love
At summer's crest
Like dolphins playing in their sea without a shore.
Let's sleep, not knowing ourselves. Chest against chest,
Our breathing mingled, holding hands without a dream.
A STONE
Those mornings of ours,
I would sweep up the ashes; I would fill
The jug and set it on the flagstones,
So the whole room was awash
With the unfathomed smell of mint.
O memory,
Your trees are blossoming against the sky:
It almost seems to be snowing.
But thunder hurries further down the path.
The evening wind is shedding its clustered seeds.
A STONE
We granted ourselves the gift of innocence:
For years it fed its flames on our two bodies, nothing more.
We wandered barefoot through the trackless grass.
We were the illusion known as memory.
Why gather sundered ashes
When fire is born of its own accord.
On the appointed day we gave up what we were
To the vaster blaze of the evening sky.
A STONE
Everything was poor, bare, transfigurable:
Our sticks of furniture were simple as stones.
We loved the crevice in the wall, an ear of grain
That swarmed with worlds.
Clouds, this evening,
The same as always, like thirst,
The same red cloth, unfastened.
Imagine, passer-by,
How we begin again, how we hasten, how we confide.
A STONE
He remembers
When two earthly hands
Held his head
On knees of eternal warmth.
These days of becalmed desire, among his dreams,
The mild sea-swell of his life all silent,
Glowing fingers kept his eyes shut.
But the evening sun, the skiff of the dead,
Was touching the window, asking for berth.
Translated by Hoyt Rogers
|
241,128
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58295/nuggets
|
Alan Gillis
|
Nuggets
|
Emptied, precious, querulous, frail,
a box of butter biscuits by the bedside,
dun pills in a pale plastic tray,
your grandmother lies in her tiny bones
and mumbles, mysterious, while you say nothing,
barely thirteen, blank as the day.
You were to keep an eye on her
breathing, her little bones heaving,
and your eyes scan figurines, mementos
on the windowsill - Little Bo Peep has lost
her head - and green fields through the window:
hay barns, small farms, a chicken battery shed.
Bwwaaakk! Buck-back-bock-buckaaaakk!
Rows upon rows of chickens.
There was a funnel hung from a gibbet
that swung like a big steel conical conundrum
above their dun feathers - the color
of your grandmother's tights scrumpled on the floor.
Even a year before, she would have swooned
for shame at the sight of those tights half-trailed
under her bed, their crinkled wee ankles
jouking out, as if they had crawled under
and tipped their wrinkled cargo into the void -
your grandmother in bed, waiting for the spoon.
Her weak breath does not reach heaven
but hazes among the chipped figurines,
the dull color television's black screen,
fading flesh-colored flowers on the wall-
paper, dun as the wings of those dirt-crusted
rows upon rows of throbbing chickens.
When you dropped one into the funnel
its head pushed through that blood-rimmed O
to stare chicken-eyed at the other side,
blackened numbles and giblets
upon which it would soon stream
like warm port, its feet still in a fidget.
What gets passed on, through generations?
Your grandmother tries to speak. Her bony
fingers clutch your hand - and you bend
your head down. But you'd get more sense
from the sea in a seashell as your father
enters the room beaming, Well! Well?
|
185,596
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/26670/the-nameless-ocean
|
Donald Jenkins
|
The Nameless Ocean
|
Oregon:
All down this coast the headlands fall to the ocean,
And each is a horse, sloping its head to the water:
Great shuddering animals come to still their thirst.
O, let there be oceans, oceans, and more sparkling seas.
Nowhere is home. Desire must come to its own
Nameless ocean. And it will call, it will call:
Too much was left, spring calling through the world.
Italy:
O, spring in Tuscany. Buried in
The thick new wheat were poppies. Olives were
An ancient silver under the flawless skies.
At the gate was Cypress, redbud over the wall.
Later we came to Lerici. Below
Was the curve of the bay. Outward was the sweet,
Maidenly sea. Wistaria hung thickly at
The windows. Houses crowded together down
The hillside, like steps to the waiting boats.
O, let there be oceans, oceans, and more sparkling seas.
|
229,740
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51885/slavery
|
Hannah More
|
Slavery
|
If Heaven has into being deigned to call
Thy light, O Liberty! to shine on all;
Bright intellectual Sun! why does thy ray
To earth distribute only partial day?
Since no resisting cause from spirit flows
Thy universal presence to oppose;
No obstacles by Nature's hand impressed,
Thy subtle and ethereal beams arrest;
Not swayed by matter is they course benign,
Or more direct or more oblique to shine;
Nor motion's laws can speed thy active course;
Nor strong repulsion's powers obstruct thy force:
Since there is no convexity in mind,
Why are thy genial rays to parts confined?
While the chill North with thy bright beam is blest,
Why should fell darkness half the South invest?
Was it decreed, fair Freedom! at thy birth,
That thou should'st ne'er irradiate all the earth?
While Britain basks in thy full blaze of light,
Why lies sad Afric quenched in total night?
Thee only, sober Goddess! I attest,
In smiles chastised, and decent graces dressed;
To thee alone, pure daughter of the skies,
The hallowed incense of the Bard should rise:
Not that mad Liberty, in whose wild praise
Too oft he trims his prostituted bays;
Not that unlicensed monster of the crowd,
Whose roar terrific bursts in peals so loud,
Deafening the ear of Peace; fierce Faction's tool,
Of rash Sedition born, and mad Misrule;
Whose stubborn mouth, rejecting Reason's rein,
No strength can govern, and no skill restrain;
Whose magic cries the frantic vulgar draw
To spurn at Order, and to outrage Law;
To tread on grave Authority and Power,
And shake the work of ages in an hour:
Convulsed her voice, and pestilent her breath,
She raves of mercy, while she deals out death:
Each blast is fate; she darts from either hand
Red conflagration o'er the astonished land;
Clamouring for peace, she rends the air with noise,
And, to reform a part, the whole destroys.
Reviles oppression only to oppress,
And, in the act of murder, breathes redress.
Such have we seen on Freedom's genuine coast,
Bellowing for blessings which were never lost.
'Tis past, and Reason rules the lucid hour,
And beauteous Order reassumes his power:
Lord of the bright ascendant may he reign,
Till perfect Peace eternal sway maintain!
O, plaintive Southerne! whose impassioned page
Can melt the soul to grief, or rouse to rage;
Now, when congenial themes engage the Muse,
She burns to emulate thy generous views;
Her failing efforts mock her fond desires,
She shares thy feelings, not partakes thy fires.
Strange power of song! the strain that warms the heart
Seems the same inspiration to impart;
Touched by the extrinsic energy alone,
We think the flame which melts us is our own;
Deceived, for genius we mistake delight,
Charmed as we read, we fancy we can write.
Though not to me, sweet Bard, thy powers belong,
The cause I plead shall sanctify my song.
The Muse awakes no artificial fire,
For Truth rejects what Fancy would inspire:
Here Art would weave her gayest flowers in vain,
The bright invention Nature would disdain.
For no fictitious ills these numbers flow,
But living anguish, and substantial woe;
No individual griefs my bosom melt,
For millions feel what Oroonoko felt:
Fired by no single wrongs, the countless host
I mourn, by rapine dragg'd from Afric's coast.
Perish the illiberal thought which would debase
The native genius of the sable race!
Perish the proud philosophy, which sought
To rob them of the powers of equal thought!
What! does the immortal principle within
Change with the casual colour of a skin?
Does matter govern spirit? or is mind
Degraded by the form to which it's joined?
No: they have heads to think, and hearts to feel,
And souls to act, with firm, though erring zeal;
For they have keen affections, soft desires,
Love strong as death, and active patriot fires:
All the rude energy, the fervid flame
Of high-souled passion, and ingenuous shame:
Strong, but luxuriant virtues, boldly shoot
From the wild vigour of a savage root.
Nor weak their sense of honour's proud control,
For pride is virtue in a Pagan soul;
A sense of worth, a conscience of desert,
A high, unbroken haughtiness of heart;
That selfsame stuff which erst proud empires swayed,
Of which the conquerors of the world were made.
Capricious fate of men! that very pride
In Afric scourged, in Rome was deified.
No Muse, O Qua-shi! shall thy deeds relate,
No statue snatch thee from oblivious fate!
For thou wast born where never gentle Muse
On Valour's grave the flowers of Genius strews;
And thou wast born where no recording page
Plucks the fair deed from Time's devouring rage.
Had fortune placed you on some happier coast,
Where polished Pagans souls heroic boast,
To thee, who sought'st a voluntary grave,
The uninjured honours of thy name to save,
Whose generous arm thy barbarous Master spared,
Altars had smoked, and temples had been reared.
Whene'er to Afric's shores I turn my eyes,
Horrors of deepest, deadliest guilt arise;
I see, by more than Fancy's mirror shown,
The burning village, and the blazing town:
See the dire victim torn from social life,
See the sacred infant, hear the shrieking wife!
She, wretch forlorn! is dragged by hostile hands,
To distant tyrants sold, in distant lands:
Transmitted miseries, and successive chains,
The sole sad heritage her child obtains.
E'en this last wretched boon their foes deny,
To weep together, or together die.
By felon hands, by one relentless stroke,
See the fond links of Nature broke!
The fibres twisting round a parent's heart,
Torn from their grasp, and bleeding as they part.
Hold, murderers! hold! nor aggravate distress;
Respect the passions you yourself possess:
Ev'n you, of ruffian heart, and ruthless hand,
Love your own offspring, love your native land;
Ev'n you, with fond impatient feelings burn,
Though free as air, though certain of return.
Then, if to you, who voluntary roam,
So dear the memory of your distant home,
O think how absence the loved scene endears
To him, whose food is groan, whose drink is tears;
Think on the wretch whose aggravated pains
To exile misery adds, to misery chains.
If warm your heart, to British feelings true,
As dear his land to him as yours to you;
And Liberty, in you a hallowed flame,
Burns, unextinguished, in his breast the same.
Then leave him holy Freedom's cheering smile,
The heaven-taught fondness for the parent soil;
Revere affections mingled with our frame,
In every nature, every clime the same;
In all, these feelings equal sway maintain;
In all, the love of home and freedom reign:
And Tempe's vale, and parched Angola's sand,
One equal fondness of their sons command.
The unconquered savage laughs at pain and toil,
Basking in Freedom's beams which gild his native soil.
Does thirst of empire, does desire of fame,
(For these are specious crimes) our rage inflame?
No: sordid lust of gold their fate controls,
The basest appetite of basest souls;
Gold, better gained by what their ripening sky,
Their fertile fields, their arts, and mines supply.
What wrongs, what injuries does Oppression plead
To smooth the crime and sanctify the deed?
What strange offence, what aggravated sin?
They stand convicted - of a darker skin!
Barbarians, hold! the opprobrious commerce spare,
Respect His sacred image which they bear.
Though dark and savage, ignorant and blind,
They claim the common privilege of kind ;
Let Malice strip them of each other plea,
They still are men, and men should still be free.
Insulted Reason loathes the inverted trade -
Loathes, as she views the human purchase made;
The outraged Goddess, with abhorrent eyes,
Sees Man the traffic, souls the merchandise!
Man, whom fair Commerce taught with judging eye,
And liberal hand, to barter or to buy,
Indignant Nature blushes to behold,
Degraded man himself, trucked, bartered, sold;
Of every native privilege bereft,
Yet cursed with every wounded feeling left.
Hard lot! each brutal suffering to sustain,
Yet keep the sense acute of human pain.
Plead not, in reason's palpable abuse,
Their sense of feeling callous and obtuse,
From heads to hearts lies Nature's plain appeal,
Though few can reason, all mankind can feel.
Though wit may boast a livelier dread of shame,
A loftier sense of wrong, refinement claim;
Though polished manners may fresh wants invent,
And nice distinctions nicer souls torment;
Though these on finer spirits heavier fall,
Yet natural evils are the same to all.
Though wounds there are which reason's force may heal,
There needs no logic sure to make us feel.
The nerve, howe'er untutored, can sustain
A sharp, unutterable sense of pain;
As exquisitely fashioned in a slave,
As where unequal fate a sceptre gave.
Sense is as keen where Gambia's waters glide,
As where proud Tiber rolls his classic tide.
Though verse or rhetoric point the feeling line,
They do not whet sensation, but define.
Did ever wretch less feel the galling chain,
When Zeno proved there was no ill in pain?
In vain the sage to smooth its horror tries;
Spartans and Helots see with different eyes;
Their miseries philosophic quirks deride,
Slaves groan in pangs disowned by Stoic pride.
When the fierce Sun darts vertical his beams,
And thirst and hunger mix their wild extremes;
When the sharp iron wounds his inmost soul,
And his strained eyes in burning anguish roll;
Will the parched Negro own, ere he expire,
No pain in hunger, and no heat in fire?
For him, when agony his frame destroys,
What hope of present fame or future joys?
For that have heroes shortened Nature's date;
For this have martyrs gladly met their fate;
But him, forlorn, no hero's pride sustains,
No martyr's blissful visions soothe his pains;
Sullen, he mingles with his kindred dust,
For he has learned to dread the Christian's trust;
To him what mercy can that God display,
Whose servants murder, and whose sons betray?
Savage! thy venial error I deplore,
They are not Christians who infest thy shore.
O thou sad spirit, whose preposterous yoke
The great deliver Death, at length, has broke!
Released from misery, and escaped from care,
Go, meet that mercy man denied thee here.
In thy dark home, sure refuge of the oppressed,
The wicked vex not, and the weary rest.
And, if some notions, vague and undefined,
Of future terrors have assailed thy mind;
If such thy masters have presumed to teach,
As terrors only they are prone to preach;
(For should they paint eternal Mercy's reign,
Where were the oppressor's rod, the captive's chain?)
If then, thy troubled soul has learned to dread
The dark unknown thy trembling footsteps tread;
On Him, who made thee what thou art, depend;
He, who withholds the means, accepts the end.
Thy mental night they Saviour will not blame,
He died for those who never heard his name.
Not thine the reckoning dire of Light abused,
Knowledge disgraced, and Liberty misused;
On thee no awful judge incensed shall sit
For parts perverted, and dishonoured wit.
Where ignorance will be found the surest plea,
How many learned and wise shall envy thee !
And thou, White Savage! whether lust of gold,
Or lust of conquest rule thee uncontrolled!
Hero, or robber! - by whatever name
Thou plead thy impious claim to wealth or fame;
Whether inferior mischief be thy boast,
A tyrant trader rifling Congo's coast:
Or bolder carnage track thy crimson way,
Kings dispossessed, and provinces thy prey;
Whether thou pant to tame earth's distant bound;
All Cortez murdered, all Columbus found;
O'er plundered realms to reign, detested Lord,
Make millions wretched, and thyself abhorred: -
Whether Cartouche in forests break the law,
Or bolder Caesar keep the world in awe;
In Reason's eye, in Wisdom's fair account,
Your sum of glory boasts a like amount:
The means may differ, but the end's the same;
Conquest is pillage with a nobler name.
Who makes the sum of human blessings less,
Or sinks the stock of general happiness,
Though erring fame may grace, though false renown,
His life may blazon or his memory crown,
Yet the last audit shall reverse the cause,
And God shall vindicate his broken laws.
Had those adventurous spirits who explore
Through ocean's trackless wastes, the far-sought shore;
Whether of wealth insatiate, or of power,
Conquerors who waste, or ruffians who devour:
Had these possessed, O Cook! thy gentle mind,
Thy love of arts, thy love of human kind;
Had these pursued thy mild and liberal plan,
Discoverers had not been a curse to man.
Then, blessed Philanthropy! thy social hands
Had linked dissevered worlds in brothers' bands;
Careless, if colour, or if clime divide;
Then, loved and loving, man had lived, and died.
Then with pernicious skill we had not known
To bring their vices back and leave our own.
The purest wreaths which hang on glory's shrine,
For empires founded, peaceful Penn! are thine;
No blood-stained laurels crowned thy virtuous toil,
No slaughtered natives drenched thy fair-earned soil.
Still thy meek spirit in thy flock survives,
Consistent still, their doctrines rule their lives;
Thy followers only have effaced the shame
Inscribed by slavery on the Christian name.
Shall Britain, where the soul of Freedom reigns,
Forge chains for others she herself disdains?
Forbid it, Heaven! O let the nations know
The liberty she tastes she will bestow;
Not to herself the glorious gift confined,
She spreads the blessing wide as human kind;
And scorning narrow views of time and place,
Bids all be free in earth's extended space.
What page of human annals can record
A deed so bright as human rights restored?
O may that god-like deed, that shining page,
Redeem our fame, and consecrate our age!
And let this glory mark our favoured shore,
To curb false freedom and the true restore!
And see, the cherub Mercy from above,
Descending softly, quits the spheres of love!
On Britain's isle she sheds her heavenly dew,
And breathes her spirit o'er the enlightened few;
From soul to soul the spreading influence steals,
Till every breast the soft contagion feels.
She speeds, exulting, to the burning shore,
With the best message angel ever bore;
Hark! 'tis the note which spoke a Saviour's birth,
Glory to God on high, and peace on earth!
She vindicates the Power in Heaven adored,
She stills the clank of chains, and sheathes the sword;
She cheers the mourner, and with soothing hands
From bursting hearts unbinds the oppressor's bands;
Restores the lustre of the Christian name,
And clears the foulest blot that dimmed its fame.
As the mild Spirit hovers o'er the coast,
A fresher hue the withered landscapes boast;
Her healing smiles the ruined scenes repair,
And blasted Nature wears a joyous air;
While she proclaims through all their spicy groves,
'Henceforth your fruits, your labours, and your loves,
All that your Sire possessed, or you have sown,
Sacred from plunder - all is now your own.'
And now, her high commission from above,
Stamped with the holy characters of love,
The meek-eyed spirit waving in her hand,
Breathes manumission o'er the rescued land:
She tears the banner stained with blood and tears,
And, Liberty! thy shining standard rears!
As the bright ensign's glory she displays,
See pale Oppression faints beneath the blaze!
The giant dies! no more his frown appals,
The chain, untouched, drops off, the fetter falls.
Astonished echo tells the vocal shore,
Oppression's fallen, and slavery is no more!
The dusky myriads crowd the sultry plain,
And hail that mercy long invoked in vain.
Victorious power! she bursts their two-fold bands,
And Faith and Freedom spring from Britain's hands.
And Thou! great source of Nature and of Grace,
Who of one blood didst form the human race,
Look down in mercy in thy chosen time,
With equal eye on Afric's suffering clime:
Disperse her shades of intellectual night,
Repeat thy high behest - Let there be light!
Bring each benighted soul, great God, to Thee,
And with thy wide Salvation make them free!
|
209,862
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/38881/thirst
|
Thirst
|
I almost wish it were me
whose house is now a pile of
saturated ash, the chimney stones
laid bare. Maybe the orange cat
who hid inside a fireplace
would emerge singed and mewling,
saying Feed me, needing
my unfurred hands to turn
the can opener, to pour water
into his baked ceramic dish.
So clean, to be houseless,
to never choose which clothes
to keep, which papers,
the simplicity of dispossession,
when the only way to know who
I am is to write it down,
remember: objects don't name you
anymore, and even your foundation
is the floor of an oven that
consumes all shreds of being.
No things to mark me. No things
to lay their wooden claim. Embers.
Ashes. Barely a self, listening,
puzzled, to the year's first
rainfall on the flapping dry leaves
of eucalyptus, which no longer
groan in the Santa Ana-the bitter
thirst would match theirs.
|
|
201,820
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/34848/servants-56d218405266a
|
Baron Wormser
|
Servants
|
What happened to them?
The men were drafted in the war; the women
Went to live with daughters who had flats of their own;
The young ones ran off; the old ones took world tours.
What happened to them?
They lost their faith, casually, without a fuss,
Being somewhat cynical to begin with.
The master was a pederast, the mistress a glutton.
Both were insanely stingy.
What did they do?
Announced guests, changed diapers, served roasts,
Sensed desire before it was voiced.
Practiced circumspection, never yawned.
What did they do?
Soothed quarrels, offhandedly explained the basics
Of sex, walked playmates home, devised contests,
Made jam and mocked doctors, in general
Were as wise as wizards.
How big were their lives?
No more than a shoe box-a few locks
Of the children's hair, some excursion tickets, letters
From home, a good luck charm that was never used.
How big were their lives?
They saw the world getting on and grew
Envious, read advanced novels and technical
Manuals and magazines, demanded that
Their children be sent to schools.
And we?
All the better for it, relieved of decorum
We parade around our houses in our underwear,
Disparage goblins and sprites, know how to fry an egg.
And we?
All the worse for it, cramped, robbed
Of our prerogatives and kindnesses. Without an
audience
We grow shoddy, become imprecise in our speech,
Believe in the future.
|
175,080
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/21168/in-place-of-snow
|
Grace Baer Hollowell
|
In Place of Snow
|
IN THE PEARL
IN PLACE OF SNOW
That Greece was their
White mother -
Well do these thin small brown
Fingers know
Their own bright fleece
From snow!
From acknowledging receipt of
Snow-drop, anemone, freesia,
Hepatica and rue, five other
Small brown things -
As though from their own snow
The silver frosts had cut them off -
Bloom in their true season,
Fall and leap
whirling into the deep
Blue sun. That Greece
Was their white mother
Well do these thin small brown
fingers know
Their own bright fleece
from snow.
|
238,528
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56936/mrs-god
|
Joshua Corey
|
Mrs. God
|
I am not a woman, I
am a man. Made in His image.
I keep the house, a gray Cape Cod,
and broom it well. I wear a skirt to be
comfortable. I build the fire.
When my husband comes home I don't pester Him with questions.
He knows where to find His slippers and His pipe.
Out our kitchen back door I see the prophets freight-hopping
the long bad Western in ancient English
that no one need read to know. Everyone speaks his part:
the women keep their heads down
while the men are losing theirs. Children?
How often I've prayed for a child, which means
slipping meaning looks to my husband as we rock
together on the porch of an evening, drinking lemonade
and playing Scrabble. If He lets me win
it's a sign. I haven't won yet.
But the neighbor children come and go
and take the pies cooling on the windowsill
without thanks. Sometimes terrible things
happen to them - some man
spills the blood
cradled so carefully in every hand. I accept
no blame. The pies were there to leave alone,
or not. God says nothing
but taps out His pipe, stands, with a hand
to ease His aching back. Time for bed.
Our bed is a rolling ocean that I tread alone
just a head bobbing above the ash-colored waves
while the moon waits for me and everything
to drown, to know again the peace
the moon knows, the silence interrupted by astronauts,
little green men, the spectacle a mother
can't help but make of herself. God
comes to bed
and I clutch a spar, a barrel, an oar,
and ride out the night with it. When He fucks me
still He doesn't speak, for speech is creation
but I rock with him, I roll inside
what cannot be comprehended, in force. I forget
that I'm a man, I forget the wild sea, I let slip
my grasp and the colors I have
that cover me. Once I dreamed
of the morning: we left the house together
in identical sober suits, we stood in the street
and beheld the sad little town, wreathed in black crepe
for its children. As though the morning
could show me His face. He coughed.
And when I awoke
in our ordinary bed, streaked by sun through leaded windows, I held
my baby to my breast and watched the roof beam
and whispered to her, It's all right,
we are safe only and always
from our dreams.
|
181,592
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/24596/the-wanderer-56d20ee8ab502
|
William Pillin
|
The Wanderer
|
In my dreams are shadows
like ashes in teeth of poplars.
Yellow swathes of rye run
like flame to horizon.
I see porcelain towers
and frozen fugues of streets
but from what land I come
I do not remember.
In my dreams I see faces
kind as a candle,
grave as autumn highway,
brutal
as a stone sneer
and one face
whose eyelashes were secrets
of a precious smile
but my father's face
I do not remember.
One name thrilled me
like an opium flower
and one was like sculpture
with a globe for a pedestal
and one made folk shudder
like a dirge at midnight
but my true name
I do not remember,
I have eaten bread
conspiring with showers
under saffron sun
and in bronzed lagoons
cast nets for leaping silver
and on sturdy loom
threw a shuttle like a gull
but my real skill
I do not remember.
When soldiers come knocking
to my door at midnight
I will say that once
in a little inn
I drank wine
like moonlight
and heard a song
like a luminous tear
and I Jay down
under a tree
whose branches were
like tender hands
and on waking
I remembered nothing.
|
253,813
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/160255/2-hard-2-luv-2-young-2-die
|
MICHAEL CHANG
|
2 HARD 2 LUV 2 YOUNG 2 DIE
|
1.] NUMB FUGGO STRANGER W. PRISTINE RECTUM
2.] MIND'S NARRATIVE UNKNOWABLE
3.] HAVE FEELINGS, MAKE BOOK, LIFE GREAT
4.] URS THE ONLY WORDS I NEED, I THINK I FEEL IT NOW, JUST LIKE U
5.] NOBODY READS POETRY, I REALLY SHOULDN'T ANYMORE
6.] SKIP AHEAD, LOOK WEAK, A BEATING WOULD DO US A LOT OF GUD
7.] WHITE FLAGS, Xs ON DOORS, FACES TWISTED W. DESIRE
8.] CEASE STRIVING, I'M SICK FOR U, DON'T U WANNA PET ME
9.] WANNA BE TIED TO BACK OF UR JEEP LIKE CAB DRIVER OR U.S. SENATOR
10.] WHAT DID J- SAY ABT FILLING U LIKE A CANOE, I DON'T REMEMBER
11.] IDENTIFYING CAUSE OF MY TREMBLE, R U READY TO SHOW ME SOME ASS
*.] DEVASTATING, INDESCRIBABLE, HOW WILL U TELL ME WHEN UR READY
|
225,260
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/48766/the-enigma
|
Anne Stevenson
|
The Enigma
|
Falling to sleep last night in a deep crevasse
between one rough dream and another, I seemed,
still awake, to be stranded on a stony path,
and there the familiar enigma presented itself
in the shape of a little trembling lamb.
It was lying like a pearl in the trough between
one Welsh slab and another, and it was crying.
I looked around, as anyone would, for its mother.
Nothing was there. What did I know about lambs?
Should I pick it up? Carry it . . . where?
What would I do if it were dying? The hand
of my conscience fought with the claw of my fear.
It wasn't so easy to imitate the Good Shepherd
in that faded, framed Sunday School picture
filtering now through the dream's daguerreotype.
With the wind fallen and the moon swollen to the full,
small, white doubles of the creature at my feet
flared like candles in the creases of the night
until it looked to be alive with newborn lambs.
Where could they all have come from?
A second look, and the bleating lambs were birds-
kittiwakes nesting, clustered on a cliff face,
fixing on me their dark accusing eyes.
There was a kind of imperative not to touch them,
yet to be of them, whatever they were-
now lambs, now birds, now floating points of light-
fireflies signaling how many lost New England summers?
One form, now another; one configuration, now another.
Like fossils locked deep in the folds of my brain,
outliving a time by telling its story. Like stars.
|
199,444
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/33658/in-another-city
|
Joseph M. Ditta
|
In Another City
|
In another city this time.
There were arctic nights
and frozen ground
when her husband died,
and I was cold under the aurora,
when I felt my own isolation
more than the dying.
Since then others have gone.
The news comes by telephone.
"She died at 5:30 and everyone
was there."
The ground gets colder and darker.
"She died at 5:30 and everyone
was there,"
cries the frog voice, vague
over the distances, calling
to me. "I was not there,"
I answer in another city.
|
160,922
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13164/as-to-truths
|
Richard Untermeyer
|
As to Truths
|
They always said the moon was far away,
A hundred miles or more up on the skies;
They said he never could come down to play;
They said a lot of things that sounded wise:
But they were lies.
So when they said the moon is dead
I did not even shake my head;
I only laughed because I know
It isn't so.
Only the other night
I'watched and saw how light
He leaped down from the skies.
And then, with crinkling eyes,
That seemed to say, "I'm coming,"
He danced and started humming
So gaily and so brightly
That Wendy, who sleeps lightly,
(She's our canary) woke
And scolded when she spoke.
But on he came-so near
That he could almost peer
Into my room and see
Wendy, the toys and me.
Closer he came, until
His hands were on the sill-
They stretched and tried to get
My pail, my soldier set,
And, as he touched my broom,
He jumped into the room.
I knew then right away
He had come down to play-
And so without a word
(For mother might have heard),
Making no talk or noise,
We played with all my toys.
I never had such fun
Before with anyone.
After awhile he had to go-
I tired him, I'm afraid;
And then I knew why I liked him so
When he played.
For his face-as fat as a face could be-
Was jolly, and powdered white;
And I knew why the stars had to wink when he
Laughed all night.
I saw him dancing along a wall,
And jumping lightly down-
And I knew he wasn't a moon at all,
But a clown!
So when they tell me corn-starch makes you strong,
And sitting still is good for tired eyes;
I think that very likely they are wrong;
And lots of other things that sound so wise
Are only lies.
I think about the way they said
The moon was far away-and dead;
And then I laugh because I know
What isn't sol
|
202,140
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/35009/it-has-been-written-tr-by-kimon-friar
|
Tasos Livadhitis
|
It Has Been Written... (Tr. by Kimon Friar)
|
TASOS LIVADHITIS
THE JUGGLER WITH THE ORANGES
As though you're not touching earth but are
on a large stair that supports itself on another stair,
and that one also on other, innumerable stairs
which, if you wish to give them a name, call them
ambition, arrogance, compassion;
call them fear of death, and still another fear, a greater one,
the fear of life; call them visions, desires, your own
memories and the other memories
of those who gave you blood although you never knew
them;
call them days, call them nights, and even call them God,
and Nothing, and time, and justice;
names of every kind, each word a dangerous huge stair,
fashioning thus an enormous quivering structure of stairs
ready to fall and held only
by the remorseless equilibrium of this your small existence.
IT HAS BEEN WRITTEN ...
We walked and chatted in the large luminous night,
when, wanting for a moment to fix your hair,
you stopped and looked at yourself in a shopwindow.
ff was that of a funeral parlor. We laughed.
And yet, since then there has always remained on your hair
this pale, implacable reflection from the old, timeworn
coffins.
|
182,834
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/25232/institution-child
|
Diana Witherby
|
Institution Child
|
two poems
INSTITUTION CHILD
Where is the grass-sea in flower
To wash round his sundial of years?
His time lies in stone, his light falls on tiles,
And minutes are marked down the well of a bell.
Where are the summer white waves
To crash on his driftwood.and fears?
His terror is held in striped bar and ray
And ravens revolve round a charity sun.
Where are the shells he could hold
Their rings singing space in his ears?
The voices that. call him echo through doors,
Whisper near gratings, and click fast like keys;
Words are in uniform, words grumbling grey
Hang round his movements and fray
In his mind, and soon the wild
Lion, love, will run with a phantom instead of a child.
ST JAMES' PARK
Pelican and willow droop
In this garden like a print;
Boys are throwing nails
Into sky as dark as flint.
Rain smokes through feathers, foliage,
|
221,624
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46299/a-parable-56d22622a1ac9
|
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
|
A Parable
|
The cheese-mites asked how the cheese got there,
And warmly debated the matter;
The Orthodox said that it came from the air,
And the Heretics said from the platter.
They argued it long and they argued it strong,
And I hear they are arguing now;
But of all the choice spirits who lived in the cheese,
Not one of them thought of a cow.
|
223,718
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47761/last-month-56d22872cf025
|
John Ashbery
|
Last Month
|
No changes of support-only
Patches of gray, here where sunlight fell.
The house seems heavier
Now that they have gone away.
In fact it emptied in record time.
When the flat table used to result
A match recedes, slowly, into the night.
The academy of the future is
Opening its doors and willing
The fruitless sunlight streams into domes,
The chairs piled high with books and papers.
The sedate one is this month's skittish one
Confirming the property that,
A timeless value, has changed hands.
And you could have a new automobile
Ping pong set and garage, but the thief
Stole everything like a miracle.
In his book there was a picture of treason only
And in the garden, cries and colors.
|
230,180
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52111/the-venus-hottentot
|
Elizabeth Alexander
|
The Venus Hottentot
|
1. CUVIER
Science, science, science!
Everything is beautiful
blown up beneath my glass.
Colors dazzle insect wings.
A drop of water swirls
like marble. Ordinary
crumbs become stalactites
set in perfect angles
of geometry I'd thought
impossible. Few will
ever see what I see
through this microscope.
Cranial measurements
crowd my notebook pages,
and I am moving closer,
close to how these numbers
signify aspects of
national character.
Her genitalia
will float inside a labeled
pickling jar in the Musée
de l'Homme on a shelf
above Broca's brain:
"The Venus Hottentot."
Elegant facts await me.
Small things in this world are mine.
2.
There is unexpected sun today
in London, and the clouds that
most days sift into this cage
where I am working have dispersed.
I am a black cutout against
a captive blue sky, pivoting
nude so the paying audience
can view my naked buttocks.
I am called "Venus Hottentot."
I left Capetown with a promise
of revenue: half the profits
and my passage home: A boon!
Master's brother proposed the trip;
the magistrate granted me leave.
I would return to my family
a duchess, with watered-silk
dresses and money to grow food,
rouge and powders in glass pots,
silver scissors, a lorgnette,
voile and tulle instead of flax,
cerulean blue instead
of indigo. My brother would
devour sugar-studded non-
pareils, pale taffy, damask plums.
That was years ago. London's
circuses are florid and filthy,
swarming with cabbage-smelling
citizens who stare and query,
"Is it muscle? bone? or fat?"
My neighbor to the left is
The Sapient Pig, "The Only
Scholar of His Race." He plays
at cards, tells time and fortunes
by scraping his hooves. Behind
me is Prince Kar-mi, who arches
like a rubber tree and stares back
at the crowd from under the crook
of his knee. A professional
animal trainer shouts my cues.
There are singing mice here.
"The Ball of Duchess DuBarry":
In the engraving I lurch
toward the belles dames , mad-eyed, and
they swoon. Men in capes and pince-nez
shield them. Tassels dance at my hips.
In this newspaper lithograph
my buttocks are shown swollen
and luminous as a planet.
Monsieur Cuvier investigates
between my legs, poking, prodding,
sure of his hypothesis.
I half expect him to pull silk
scarves from inside me, paper poppies,
then a rabbit! He complains
at my scent and does not think
I comprehend, but I speak
English. I speak Dutch. I speak
a little French as well, and
languages Monsieur Cuvier
will never know have names.
Now I am bitter and now
I am sick. I eat brown bread,
drink rancid broth. I miss good sun,
miss Mother's sadza . My stomach
is frequently queasy from mutton
chops, pale potatoes, blood sausage.
I was certain that this would be
better than farm life. I am
the family entrepreneur!
But there are hours in every day
to conjur my imaginary
daughters, in banana skirts
and ostrich-feather fans.
Since my own genitals are public
I have made other parts private.
In my silence I possess
mouth, larynx, brain, in a single
gesture. I rub my hair
with lanolin, and pose in profile
like a painted Nubian
archer, imagining gold leaf
woven through my hair, and diamonds.
Observe the wordless Odalisque.
I have not forgotten my Xhosa
clicks. My flexible tongue
and healthy mouth bewilder
this man with his rotting teeth.
If he were to let me rise up
from this table, I'd spirit
his knives and cut out his black heart,
seal it with science fluid inside
a bell jar, place it on a low
shelf in a white man's museum
so the whole world could see
it was shriveled and hard,
geometric, deformed, unnatural.
|
235,452
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55217/off-a-side-road-near-staunton
|
Stanley Plumly
|
Off A Side Road Near Staunton
|
Some nothing afternoon, no one anywhere,
an early autumn stillness in the air,
the kind of empty day you fill by taking in
the full size of the valley and its layers leading
slowly to the Blue Ridge, the quality of country,
if you stand here long enough, you could stay
for, step into, the way a landscape, even on a wall,
pulls you in, one field at a time, pasture and fall
meadow, high above the harvest, perfect
to the tree line, then spirit clouds and intermittent
sunlit smoky rain riding the tops of the mountains,
though you could walk until it's dark and not reach those rains-
you could walk the rest of the day into the picture
and not know why, at any given moment, you're there.
|
201,736
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/34806/the-playground
|
Richard Moore
|
The Playground
|
Over the playground where
ancient and wizened trees
touch odors to the air
to draw the latest bees,
children swarm on the lawn,
muss the grass with their toes...
What can they touch of dawn
-what sweetness-as it goes?
Dew, that will turn to tears
and trickle through their sleep
and through their future years,
till they, they too, are old
and in their wisdom weep
a honey dark and cold.
|
251,771
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/156589/song-sparrow-615db9f253261
|
Bruce Willard
|
Song Sparrow
|
That summer we opened the lake cottage,
prehistoric sound of loons before us,
decades of children at our back,
familiar sound of water
under the porch eaves.
A song sparrow
hit the window
just as summer began.
You held it in your hand
bent over, unable to breathe
another year, working
your fingers
under its feathers and bone.
|
230,608
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52363/the-clote-water-lily
|
William Barnes
|
The Clote (Water-Lily)
|
O zummer clote! when the brook's a-glidèn
So slow an' smooth down his zedgy bed,
Upon thy broad leaves so seäfe a-ridèn
The water's top wi' thy yollow head,
By alder sheädes, O,
An' bulrush beds, O,
Thou then dost float, goolden zummer clote!
The grey-bough'd withy's a leänèn lowly
Above the water thy leaves do hide;
The bènden bulrush, a-swaÿèn slowly,
Do skirt in zummer thy river's zide;
An' perch in shoals, O,
Do vill the holes, O,
Where thou dost float, goolden zummer clote!
Oh! when thy brook-drinkèn flow'r's a-blowèn,
The burnèn zummer's a-zettèn in;
The time o' greenness, the time o' mowèn,
When in the häy-vield, wi' zunburnt skin,
The vo'k do drink, O,
Upon the brink, O,
Where thou dost float, goolden zummer clote!
Wi' eärms a-spreadèn, an' cheäks a-blowèn,
How proud wer I when I vu'st could swim
Athirt the deep pleäce where thou bist growèn,
Wi' thy long more vrom the bottom dim;
While cows, knee-high, O,
In brook, wer nigh, O,
Where thou dost float, goolden zummer clote!
Ov all the brooks drough the meäds a-windèn,
Ov all the meäds by a river's brim,
There's nwone so feäir o' my own heart's vindèn
As where the maïdens do zee thee zwim,
An' stan' to teäke, O,
Wi' long-stemm'd reäke, O,
Thy flow'r afloat, goolden zummer clote!
|
248,577
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/149882/from-lisiensan-galago-
|
Craig Santos Perez
|
from Lisiensan Ga’lago
|
"goaam" ~
"goam" ~
"islas de las velas latinas" (of lateen sails ~
"guan" "guana" ~
"islas de los ladrones" (of the thieves ~
"guåhan" "guajan" ~
"islas marianas"
(after the spanish queen ~
"bahan" "guhan" ~
"guacan" "isla de san juan" ~
"guaon"
"y guan"
"omiya jima" (great shrine island)
"guam"
"the first province
of the great ocean" ~
geographic absence ~
"the old census records show"
because who can stand on the reef
and name that below water and sky
imagined territory ~
"a spanish baptismal name and"
burnt villages
archipelago of
"chamoru last names drawn from
the lexicon of everyday language"
bone
carved word
~
"it is possible they changed
their last names throughout their lives"
remade : sovereign
|
174,828
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/21019/saint-swithens
|
Virginia Armitage McCall
|
Saint Swithen's
|
His shadow met him at his door -
That fatal shadow on the floor.
He came and saw his shadow there
Hanging in the empty air.
He came and saw and went again .
Inside the hallways of his den.
I think it was on Saturday,
That fatal day - alack the day!
For six more weeks, for six weeks more,
Snow and frost and ice and thaw.
We may expect for six more weeks
The wind to chap reluctant cheeks.
The snow will spread an even plain
And none will know where grew the grain.
The gentle rattle of the corn
Will be forgotten. All forlorn
The silent starling in the snow
Upon his back is all we know.
Put on the pot! Put on the pot!
Pull your shawl about your arm.
Brew linden blossoms boiling hot.
The tea will keep us warm,
And somehow we shall live this down
By skating through the frozen town.
|
163,330
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14539/what-do-i-care
|
Sara Teasdale
|
What Do I Care
|
What do I care, in the dreams and the languor of spring,
That my songs do not show me at all?
For they are a fragrance, and I am a flint and a fire;
I am an answer, they are only a call.
What do I care-for love will be over so soon-
Let my heart have its say, and my mind stand idly by.
For my mind is proud, and strong enough to be silent-
It is my heart that makes my songs, not I.
MY HEART IS HEAVY
|
238,036
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56646/the-hypno-domme-speaks-and-speaks-and-speaks
|
Patricia Lockwood
|
The Hypno-Domme Speaks, and Speaks and Speaks
|
I was born as a woman, I talk you to death,
or else your ear off,
or else you to sleep. What do I have, all the time
in the world, and a voice that swings brass back
and forth, you can hear it, and a focal point where
my face should be. What do I have, I have absolute
power, and what I want is your money, your drool,
and your mind, and the sense of myself as a snake,
and a garter in the grass. Every bone in the snake
is the hipbone, every part of the snake is the hips.
The first sound I make is silence, then sssssshhh,
the first word I say is listen. Sheep shearers
and accountants hypnotize the hardest,
and lookout sailors who watch the sea, and the boys
who cut and cut and cut and cut and cut the grass.
The writers who write page-turners, and the writers
who repeat themselves. The diamond-cutter kneels
down before me and asks me to hypnotize him, and
I glisten at him and glisten hard, and listen to me and
listen, I tell him. Count your age backward, I tell him.
Become aware of your breathing, and aware of mine
which will go on longer. Believe you
are a baby till I tell you otherwise, then believe
you're a man till I tell you you're dirt. When a gunshot
rings out you'll lie down like you're dead. When you
hear, "He is breathing," you'll stand up again.
The best dog of the language is Yes and protects you.
The best black-and-white dog of the language is Yes
and goes wherever you go, and you go where I say,
you go anywhere. Why do I do it is easy, I am working
my way through school. Give me the money
for Modernism, and give me the money
for what comes next. When you wake to the fact that you
have a body, you will wake to the fact that not for long.
When you wake you will come when you read the word
hard, or hard to understand me, or impenetrable poetry.
When you put down the book you will come when you
hear the words put down the book,
you will come when you hear.
|
1,531,198
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49263/lisa
|
David Hernandez
|
Lisa
|
Last night I traced with my finger
the long scar on my love's stomach
as if I was following a road on a map.
I heard the scream of tires, saw the flash
of chrome, her six-year-old body
a rag doll bleeding at the seams.
It is foolish of me to wish
I was there before it happened, to reach
back thirty years, clasp her small hand
and pull her away from that speeding car
that turned her organs into bruised fruit.
How easily she could have missed
her seventh birthday, the lit candles waiting
for her to blow out their tiny flames.
How easily I could've spent last night
in a crowded bar instead,
my shoulders brushing against strangers,
a man on the jukebox
singing his heart out to a woman
with the prettiest eyes he's ever seen.
|
199,164
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/33518/dead-elms-by-a-river
|
Brad Leithauser
|
Dead Elms by a River
|
In early spring, unlike the others,
These retain their same shapes, same
Sharp angular lines, edges
Thick with splinters. Dozens
Of shallow snow-fed rivulets sift
Through old dumps of vegetation,
Down toward the river, until the sopping
Banks spill over and the elms stand
With bases under a frigid inch of water.
On all the other trees
Buds cling to the slender branches,
Each one a green dot no bigger
Than a bubble of air, and each adhering
Just as lightly. Birds-unseen,
Perceived as sweet, disembodied voices-
Call through the blue chilly sky;
And callers echo from distant stations,
All these fibrous cries encircling,
Encircling like the shrubs and ferns
That will close upon the elms,
Green infant fists battling
Wildly for vacant places. Blind
To light and heat, the elms
Will keep to their winter selves;
A dry company, among the summer foliage
These same gray trunks
Will glimmer, pale as ghosts.
Or nearly the same: gradually,
Far slower than losses of leaves
In a single season, the brittle
Outer branches are torn,
Stripped by wind and rain to contours
Still more spare. The river-wind
Pours through the trees, peeling
Back their bark: underneath,
They are smooth, close-grained columns.
Until later in the summer when one
Is found on the morning after a storm
Snapped like a matchstick and lying
Tossed into the river, it is apt to seem
That with every lost branch the elms
Constrict around an essence hard as crystal,
That under their ash-colored skins
Airless hearts grow more and more indurate:
Core of diamond, core of ice.
|
165,550
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/15783/foolish-bird
|
Jewell Bothwell Tull
|
Foolish Bird
|
Foolish bird,
Do you think, because the rain's over
And the sun's in your eyes,
Summer's here again?
Don't you know it's October?-
Foolish bird that sings in my heart.
GRAY RIVER
|
176,590
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/22017/the-winning-of-the-west
|
William Stephens
|
The Winning of the West
|
TWO POEMS
THE WINNING OF THE WEST
Iam Joe Grandys: I have gone at night
under the stars until the 'early light
came faint along the hills; and I have slept
in rock arroyos, where the shadows crept
while lizards watched me sleeping in the shade.
Then, when the sun was sinking, I have made
a careful fire beside my saddle-pack ;
have eaten, and put pack and saddle back
on pony and lead-pony, and have gone
across the desert with the setting sun.
|
188,256
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/28033/where-the-track-vanishes
|
Galway Kinnell
|
Where the Track Vanishes
|
I
The snow revives in the apple trees;
The winter sun seeps from jonquils
Bright as goldmills on the slopes;
Le chemin montant dans les hautes herbes
Curves for the Alps and vanishes.
2
Pierre le Boiteux
-Yellow teeth
Gnashed into gum-level
Stumps, yellow
Eyes beaconing about,
A blackhead the size
Of a huckleberry
Making a cheek sag,
A leg the gypsies
Cut the tendon of
So he could beg as a child
Pumping under him,
Twelve goats at heel-
Mounts the track,
Limping through the wild
Grasses toward where?
GALWAY KINNBLL
3
The track vanishes in a heap of stones
Mortared with weeds and wildflowers,
The fallen church. Nearby stand stones
Of the parish graves, dates worn away,
A handful of carved words visible:
Jacques et Geneviève, priez pour eux-
Véronique DuPrès, regrets éternels-
Sown here even to their fingertips.
Who was it wore the track through the grass?
Surely their mourners are dead, and theirs, and theirs.
Maybe Pierre limps up each day
Training the goats where to come when it is time,
Foreseeing a terrible loneliness.
No one is lonely here: take Véronique-Jacques
Husband of another, indifferently dissolves into her . . .
A skull or two, a couple of pelvises or knees.
4
My hand on the sky
Cannot shut the sky out
Any more than any March
Branch can. In the Boston Store
Once, I tried new shoes-
The shoeman put my feet
In a machine, saying Kid
Wrig yer toes. I
Wrigged and peered:
Inside green shoes green
Twigs were wrigging by themselves
Green as the grasses
I drew from her
Hair in the springtime
While she laughed, unfoliaged
By sunlight, a little
Spray of bones I loved.
5
From villages lost in the valleys
-Moncharvet, St. Bon, La Jaura-
Thin braids of smoke waver upward
Through the clear air. A few lights
Come on, visible from the untracked snow
On the stairway to the Alps. Venus
Shines from the grave of the sun, like
The white gem churched again in its valley.
Once, driving from Morristown at night,
As we came over a crest the fish-island
Breached shining under the strung-out stars
Of the Galaxy, a long way from Jacques
And Geneviéve and Véronique in the prairie;
We stood there not thinking that for them
This was a strange continent to be dying in,
This island under the continent of the stars-
Job's Coffin and the Scorpion; Jacques
And Geneviéve side by side in a field of lights;
Capricorn, Ophiocus; the Serpent embracing
The unhinged knees, St. Bon heaped
Like a molted skin; Le Fourmier the arms
Of Hercules; the Swan sailing toward Planay;
Moncharvet, La Jaura by the blinking Lyre,
Véronique borne on the Balances; Champ Béranger-
Fields into which the limping Herdsman wades
Leading his flock up the trackless slopes, toward
Some writhing lights. Are they Notre Dame des Neiges
Where men ask their God for the daily bread,
Or the March-climbing Virgin carrying wheat?
Where the track vanishes the first land begins:
It goes out everywhere obliterating the horizons:
We must have been walking through it all our lives.
|
160,506
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12941/calle-memo-o-loredan
|
Douglas Goldring
|
Calle Memo O Loredan
|
We were staying (that night) in a very old palace-
Very dark, very large, and sheer to the water below.
The rooms were silent and strange, and you were frightened,
Alice:
The silver lamp gave a feeble, flickering glow.
And the bed had a high dark tester, and carved black posts,
And behind our heads was a glimmer of old brocade.
Do you remember?-you thought the shadows were full of
ghosts,
And the sound of the lapping water made you afraid.
Ah! and your face shone pale, in the gleam of 'hat quivering
flame,
And your bosom was rich with the round pearls, row on
row;
And you looked proud, and jeweled, and passionate without
shame-
Like some princess who stooped to her lover, a long while
ago.
|
227,726
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50526/to-alexis-in-answer-to-his-poem-against-fruition
|
Aphra Behn
|
from To Alexis In Answer to His Poem Against Fruition
|
Since man with that inconstancy was born,
To love the absent, and the present scorn
Why do we deck, why do we dress
For such short-lived happiness?
Why do we put attraction on,
Since either way 'tis we must be undone?
They fly if honour take our part,
Our virtue drives 'em o'er the field.
We love 'em by too much desert,
And oh! they fly us if we yield.
Ye gods! is there no charm in all the fair
To fix this wild, this faithless wanderer?
Man! our great business and our aim,
For whom we spread our fruitless snares,
No sooner kindles the designing flame,
But to the next bright object bears
The trophies of his conquest and our shame:
Inconstancy's the good supreme
The rest is airy notion, empty dream!
Then heedless nymph, be rul'd by me
If e're your swain the bliss desire;
Think like Alexis he may be
Whose wisht possession damps his fire;
The roving youth in every shade
Has left some sighing and abandon'd maid,
For 'tis a fatal lesson he has learn'd,
After fruition ne'er to be concern'd.
|
184,316
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/26005/the-pony
|
Jean Garrigue
|
The Pony
|
The little pony stands upon his pride
As do we all, as do we all.
With coiling mane and glittering hide
He stumbles from the earthworn stall
His pride and vehemence his all.
What if they take it from him and he fall?
Now children pout and perch upon the wall
By which he stands to rear them 'gainst the tide
Of his brown side.
But if they kick and bawl?
God save the pony, then, from all
Our deadlock heaven holds at its tall pole
Against the braked composure of the will
Which he must know to go at all.
God save the pony that he not be maimed
Beyond redemption and recall,
His low broad nostril and his waiting back
A taunt to those afflicted by their lack,
To whips the gash, to power the gall,
And despot law.
POEM
Fate, heat, the strike of the night -
It is all seen inward in time.
We love what we love for ill or good
It is the fascination of what is done -
And we are blood, blood -
Moves in our mind. Is it blind, blind?
Is as well, wine. Is it doom? As much
Song. And the night plucks open our veins,
Strong, strong!
In the garden the roses scattered
When under the wicket I came
To their blooming there on the mound.
Such early largesse of red
|
221,244
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45829/the-famous-tay-whale
|
Knight of the White Elephant of Burmah William McGonagall
|
The Famous Tay Whale
|
'Twas in the month of December, and in the year 1883,
That a monster whale came to Dundee,
Resolved for a few days to sport and play,
And devour the small fishes in the silvery Tay.
So the monster whale did sport and play
Among the innocent little fishes in the beautiful Tay,
Until he was seen by some men one day,
And they resolved to catch him without delay.
When it came to be known a whale was seen in the Tay,
Some men began to talk and to say,
We must try and catch this monster of a whale,
So come on, brave boys, and never say fail.
Then the people together in crowds did run,
Resolved to capture the whale and to have some fun!
So small boats were launched on the silvery Tay,
While the monster of the deep did sport and play.
Oh! it was a most fearful and beautiful sight,
To see it lashing the water with its tail all its might,
And making the water ascend like a shower of hail,
With one lash of its ugly and mighty tail.
Then the water did descend on the men in the boats,
Which wet their trousers and also their coats;
But it only made them the more determined to catch the whale,
But the whale shook at them his tail.
Then the whale began to puff and to blow,
While the men and the boats after him did go,
Armed well with harpoons for the fray,
Which they fired at him without dismay.
And they laughed and grinned just like wild baboons,
While they fired at him their sharp harpoons:
But when struck with the harpoons he dived below,
Which filled his pursuers' hearts with woe:
Because they guessed they had lost a prize,
Which caused the tears to well up in their eyes;
And in that their anticipations were only right,
Because he sped on to Stonehaven with all his might:
And was first seen by the crew of a Gourdon fishing boat,
Which they thought was a big coble upturned afloat;
But when they drew near they saw it was a whale,
So they resolved to tow it ashore without fail.
So they got a rope from each boat tied round his tail,
And landed their burden at Stonehaven without fail;
And when the people saw it their voices they did raise,
Declaring that the brave fishermen deserved great praise.
And my opinion is that God sent the whale in time of need,
No matter what other people may think or what is their creed;
I know fishermen in general are often very poor,
And God in His goodness sent it to drive poverty from their door.
So Mr John Wood has bought it for two hundred and twenty-six pound,
And has brought it to Dundee all safe and all sound;
Which measures 40 feet in length from the snout to the tail,
So I advise the people far and near to see it without fail.
Then hurrah! for the mighty monster whale,
Which has got 17 feet 4 inches from tip to tip of a tail!
Which can be seen for a sixpence or a shilling,
That is to say, if the people all are willing.
|
244,469
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/92059/whenever-i-saw-you-i-handed-you-a-bouquet-and
|
Sharon Olds
|
Whenever I Saw You I Handed You a Bouquet, and
|
what about those nosegays?! If you were to return
I would give you more, for all you have given us, for
your going first. Those posies might have a
peony, a freesia, a tulip - an eye snack
and nostril snack, I could not get enough of
giving you coronation bundles, handing them
and almost bowing, tongue-tied with
respectful adoring, with gobbling
the sight of you the sound, the bouquets saying mother-
- we would not be here, without your song, your eye.
|
171,420
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/19052/song-at-the-rise-of-the-full-moon
|
Carl John Bostelmann
|
Song at the Rise of the Full Moon
|
She comes in robes of serge and silk
Above round hills half crystalline,
To flood the heavens with her milk,
To drown the dark lands with her wine.
The river rides no ripple now,
Suspended in idolatry;
The bird is silent in the bough,
The bough is silent in the tree.
Carl Fohn Bostelmann
She comes arrayed, in her design
An apparition warm and white
And beautiful as milk and wine;
And I am given to the night.
|
182,492
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/25056/terms
|
Randall Jarrell
|
Terms
|
Poetry for September 1948
VOL. LXXII, NO. VI
TI
ER
LL Éd dd dd dd LA
ES
seven poems
TERMS
I
on™. one-legged, and one-headed,
The pensioner sits in the sun.
He is telling a story to the leaf
Of the new maple in his new yard:
"The Department of the Interior has sent Jack Frost with a
spray-gun
To paint you red."
The leaf pulls hard
To get away-it believes the man-
And a blue Chevrolet sedan
Draws up and leaves a check for the man in the mail-box.
"You're as good as dead,"
Says the man, with a mocking smile, to the leaf;
And somebody knocks
At the front door and the man doesn't answer
But sits back in his white board chair-
Holding a mallet, by a stake with rainbow rings-
And rubs his eyes, and yawns like a dog when the dog
Next door whines and rattles its chain.
He looks at the leaf, as he looks at things,
With mixed feelings-
And says, "I've changed."
The good dreams keep haunting
The ghost with a check in the mail-box, the fox
With four quick brown wooden legs.
With one military brush, in the morning,
He pulls forward, or brushes back, the fair
Hair on the living head,
And brushes his firm white teeth, and the porcelain jacket
On his left front tooth, that is dead.
The leaf is alive, and it is going to be dead;
It is like any other leaf.
You keep flipping the coin and it comes down heads
And nobody has ever seen it come down anything but heads
And the man has stopped looking:
it's heads.
He looks at the leaf-it is green-
And says with a flat black leather gesture:
"Never again."
il
He says: "My arm and leg-
My wooden arm, my wooden leg-
Wrestled with each other all last night
The way you whet a carving-knife
Till they stood crisscross against dawn
Over what seemed to me a tomb.
I felt for the dog-tags on the cross.
"] could find one number on the leg
And a different number on the arm.
The grave was empty.
"I thought first, 'I have arisen,'
And looked up past the cross into the dawn
And saw my own head, burning there,
Go out.
But in the darkness
The leaves fell one by one, like checks,
Into the grave;
And I thought: I am my own grave.
"Then I awoke; I could see the toaster
On its rack over the waffle-iron
And the dew on the wickets; at breakfast the bread
Pops up, all brown, from its-
'It's all a dream,'
I said to myself. 'I am a grave dreaming
That it is a living man"
The man, as he has learned to,
Gets up and walks to the door.
As he opens the door
He watches his hand opening the door
And holds out his good hand-
And stares at them both, and laughs;
But he says softly: "I am a man."
|
211,810
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/39864/he-wanted-to-live-his-life-over
|
Robert Bly
|
HE WANTED TO LIVE HIS LIFE OVER
|
What? You want to live your life over again?
"Well, I suppose, yes... That time in Grand Rapids. . .
My life-as I lived it-was a series of shynesses."
Being bolder-what good would that do?
"Td open my door again. I've felt abashed,
You see. Now I'd go out and say, 'All right,
I'll go with you to Alaska.' Just opening the door
From inside would have altered me-a little.
I'm too shy . . ." And so, a bolder life
Is what you want? "We could begin now.
Just walk with me- down to the river.
I'll pretend this boat is my life . . . Pll climb in."
|
186,124
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/26940/the-family
|
Kyojiro Hagiwara
|
The Family
|
KYOIIRO HAGIWARA
two poems
THE FAMILY
Out of my brother's yellow trousers, my black trousers
Comes headless money
With the smell of the black heart of the night rubbed in.
With this money we eat rice, buy stamps, pay for
laundry.
We don't know what future we have to live for.
Our father became bone and mud when young;
Our mother keeps the kitchen first, and puts
Manuscripts and magazines in order, or
Reads a paper, or drinks tea, or...
Ma!
My right eye was stabbed with a knife, and I am half-
blind;
Brother is nearsighted, his eyes stick out and from the
waist down he is awfully thin.
Money that comes from our pants
Is our own turbid blood we trample on.
Ma does not suspect
We suffer from diarrhoea and dizziness.
When we brothers, already crippled, change into our
summer clothes,
We do not seem to her eyes more than ghosts.
... Ma!
...Give us some food!
|
213,954
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/40938/hide
|
Robin Robertson
|
Hide
|
I have been waiting for the black deer
all my life, hidden here in the dark
corner of the wood.
I see glimpses of them, breaking cover,
swinging away
to erase themselves in the deep trees.
They are implicit there, and will move
only if I hold still.
Though in a dream I have
they stand so near I can feel them breathing.
Then, when I look down
I have disappeared.
Out at the wood's edge, the snorts
and coughs of the feeding herd.
A gust startles a lift of leaves, and they
scatter and bound like the far-off heads
of deer in the distance.
The wind drops and the trees are antlered.
|
159,936
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12617/to-a-child-dancing-upon-the-shore
|
William Butler Yeats
|
To a Child Dancing upon the Shore
|
Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water's roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool's triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won.
And he, the best warrior, dead
And all the sheaves to bind! .
What need that you should dread
The monstrous crying of wind?
William Butler Yeats
FALLEN MAJESTY
Although crowds gathered once if she but showed her face
And even old men's eyes grew dim, this hand alone,
Like some last courtier at a gipsy camping place
|
162,896
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14290/in-the-morgue
|
Agnes Lee
|
In the Morgue
|
She who walked with flaming dress
And the gems of idleness,
She who counted in her troop
Young man Dream and old man Dupe,
Comes at last to lay her head
Here among the unclaimed dead.
She was weary as the sages
With the riddle of the ages,
Saying to midnight: 'Whether or no,
Half the world is builded so;"
Saying to morn: "Come do your mocking !-
But there's money in my stocking!"
Now, with strong, insistent voice
Calling, urging to the choice,
More than gems or loves that were,
The stern sea has tempted her.
|
217,632
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42816/my-father-in-the-night-commanding-no
|
Louis Simpson
|
My Father in the Night Commanding No
|
My father in the night commanding No
Has work to do. Smoke issues from his lips;
He reads in silence.
The frogs are croaking and the street lamps glow.
And then my mother winds the gramophone;
The Bride of Lammermoor begins to shriek-
Or reads a story-
About a prince, a castle, and a dragon.
The moon is glittering above the hill.
I stand before the gateposts of the King-
So runs the story
Of Thule, at midnight when the mice are still.
And I have been in Thule! It has come true-
The journey and the danger of the world,
All that there is
To bear and to enjoy, endure and do.
Landscapes, seascapes ... where have I been led?
The names of cities-Paris, Venice, Rome-
Held out their arms.
A feathered god, seductive, went ahead.
Here is my house. Under a red rose tree
A child is swinging; another gravely plays.
They are not surprised
That I am here; they were expecting me.
And yet my father sits and reads in silence,
My mother sheds a tear, the moon is still,
And the dark wind
Is murmuring that nothing ever happens.
Beyond his jurisdiction as I move
Do I not prove him wrong? And yet, it's true
They will not change
There, on the stage of terror and of love.
The actors in that playhouse always sit
In fixed positions-father, mother, child
With painted eyes.
How sad it is to be a little puppet!
Their heads are wooden. And you once pretended
To understand them! Shake them as you will,
They cannot speak.
Do what you will, the comedy is ended.
Father, why did you work? Why did you weep,
Mother? Was the story so important?
" Listen! " the wind
Said to the children, and they fell asleep.
|
213,344
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/40632/if-feeling-isnt-in-it
|
John Brehm
|
If Feeling Isn't In It
|
Dogs will also lick your face if you let them.
Their bodies will shiver with happiness.
A simple walk in the park is just about
the height of contentment for them, followed
by a bowl of food, a bowl of water,
a place to curl up and sleep. Someone
to scratch them where they can't reach
and smooth their foreheads and talk to them.
Dogs also have a natural dislike of mailmen
and other bringers of bad news and will
bite them on your behalf. Dogs can smell
fear and also love with perfect accuracy.
There is no use pretending with them.
Nor do they pretend. If a dog is happy
or sad or nervous or bored or ashamed
or sunk in contemplation, everybody knows it.
They make no secret of themselves.
You can even tell what they're dreaming about
by the way their legs jerk and try to run
on the slippery ground of sleep.
Nor are they given to pretentious self-importance.
They don't try to impress you with how serious
or sensitive they are. They just feel everything
full blast. Everything is off the charts
with them. More than once I've seen a dog
waiting for its owner outside a café
practically implode with worry. "Oh, God,
what if she doesn't come back this time?
What will I do? Who will take care of me?
I loved her so much and now she's gone
and I'm tied to a post surrounded by people
who don't look or smell or sound like her at all."
And when she does come, what a flurry
of commotion, what a chorus of yelping
and cooing and leaps straight up into the air!
It's almost unbearable, this sudden
fullness after such total loss, to see
the world made whole again by a hand
on the shoulder and a voice like no other.
|
254,129
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/160742/im-rewatching-the-she-ra-episode-where-glimmer-gets-sick-for-the-first-time
|
Arianna Monet
|
I’m rewatching the She-Ra episode where Glimmer gets sick for the first time
|
and I keep mistaking the screen for a
mirror. By which I mean, I too was once
adolescent and unconquerable:
purple hair; a body unmarked by pain.
Then, the bright unholiness of onset.
She screams, glitches into crimson static.
In the right light, even pain can sparkle.
Blood cells glinting into oblivion.
Flicker of agony, scarlet against
the ego. Candescence of a body
as it burns itself undone. If I am
to live this way-neurons blazing, my fists
clenched proudly against a whimper-let me
at least malfunction in a way that shines.
|
177,002
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/22229/tillie-sage
|
Louise McNeill
|
Tillie Sage
|
I
A Kane girl lives in the Sage's mansion
And a fiddle hangs on the parlor wall.
A red colt runs in the Sage's pasture
And a hound dog sleeps in the Sage's hall.
Oh, Wind blow cold from the north-blue autumn,
Oh, Wind blow hot from the brazen south,
To sculpture the lines of my golden body...
To press your strength to my rose-stained mouth.
Down in their brick and brownstone town house
My dull Sage cousins knit and sew
On charity garbs for the naked heathen
They would convert to a creed of woe.
But I ride the hills on a colt unbroken,
Ride the hills on a colt unshod.
I will not reach for their precious money,
Nor bend my head to their wrathful god.
I might have need for the swathes of virtue
If my legs were bowed and my face were plain... .
Oh, Wind blow hot from the brazen southland
On the red-haired daughter of Nora Kane!
u
What shall I say to you all as you watch me dying?
Shall I moan of terror or shall I whine of shame
Or ask forgiveness that this child I leave you
Must bear my own and not my lover's name?
What shall I say to comfort you pious Sages
Who wait the crumble of my tight-walled heart?
Who wait to hear the quiver of confession
Break through my teeth and force my lips apart?
What shall I say as you hover there at my bedfoot?
Should I speak of heaven or should I speak of sin?
Bend near... and look. My neck is stiff forever,
As it has ever been.
|
232,096
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53221/leviathan-56d2325279712
|
George Oppen
|
Leviathan
|
Truth also is the pursuit of it:
Like happiness, and it will not stand.
Even the verse begins to eat away
In the acid. Pursuit, pursuit;
A wind moves a little,
Moving in a circle, very cold.
How shall we say?
In ordinary discourse-
We must talk now. I am no longer sure of the words,
The clockwork of the world. What is inexplicable
Is the 'preponderance of objects.' The sky lights
Daily with that predominance
And we have become the present.
We must talk now. Fear
Is fear. But we abandon one another.
|
235,616
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55302/sick-to-death-of-the-hardpan-shoulder
|
Greg Glazner
|
Sick to death of the hardpan shoulder,
|
the froth of noise
the undersides of the cedars make,
the windblown dark that hints
and fails for hours at effacement-
maybe I could claim it isn't
praying, but it's asking,
at the least, begging
that these lungfuls of this blackness
eat whatever keeps on swelling
and collapsing in my chest, and be done
with it, no more noise
left hanging in the spaces
between brake lights than a smothered rush
that sounds like suffering
and is nothing. Instead a sobbing isn't
so much easing from my throat
as shining like black light from my torso,
veining the leaves of weeds, stoning
the whole roadside in a halo-I can feel
the heat of truck lights on my back,
I'm inside that brilliant gravity,
I think of time, I'm in the driver's
nightmare and it shudders by-
|
183,470
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/25566/the-cow
|
Theodore Roethke
|
The Cow
|
There Once was a Cow with a Double Udder.
When I think of it now, I just have to Shudder!
She was too much for One, you can bet your Life:
She had to be Milked by a Man and His Wife.
|
185,696
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/26721/lunar-tune
|
Gray Burr
|
Lunar Tune
|
The moon is mottled: dark shadows eat
Into the sockets of the skull of a world
Laid away in the blue winding-sheet.
It dwindles and sharpens to the curled
And Cheshire grin of heaven vanishing.
But the twenty-eighth day returns it, pearled
And possible as ever. Now a low-flying wing
Of silver, now rolling a leprous wheel,
It turns in the jewelled machine like a bearing.
All lovers can distill this reel
Into their absolute and make it yield
A white wine only they can feel.
To press this greatest grape from heaven's field
Lovers will toe the mark of their esteem.
For them it warms and covers like a shield
But shakes the mad who rot along the seam
That binds them to their kind till on their bed
The darkside moonshine falls and kills the dream
They once had had of being more than dead.
|
184,882
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/26306/extra-ecclesiam
|
Leslie A. Fiedler
|
Three Poems
|
I: THE SEA
Here where no madness follows
And the sea is nearly still,
I let my lust lie fallow
And milk my lowing will.
I milk my will at dawning,
I tread my grapes at noon;
I walk the beach at evening,
Paced by the hastening moon:
To find the Old Man sleeping,
Green in his jetsam hair;
To seize him 'in his shifting,
His jellied everywhere;
To ask that madness follow,
And lust be never still;
That wild dogs through the evening
Hunt down the lowing will.
Il: THE QUARRY
Greenest Sallies, let us go
Where the faithful waters show
Flesh to flesh, and stone to stone,
Make our selves and shadows one.
Diving, diving, let us prove
Depths not deep enough for love.
But, see, the gentlest afternoon
Lures the trembling leaves to ruin.
Who lives by nature surely dies;
Unleafing is the summer's price.
Greenest Sallies, we must go
Where the faithless waters show
Stone to flesh, and flesh to stone,
Make our selves and shadows one...
EXTRA ECCLESIAM . . .
Thank God that God is good to us;
Give thanks that God is good!
The seething of His mad salt sea
But seasons baby's food.
His awful Hand is guarding
The tender-fleshed fish,
Until it find the baited hook
And fry to baby's wish.
Rejoice that God is kind to us,
Rejoice that God is kind!
He fattens for us cattle,
Who really do not mind.
u
Each simple beast is yearning
That his turn may come soon
To give his blood for baby's broth,
Or be his marrow bone.
While baby chews contented
And lifts his dirty face,
Where flies dispute the Blessing,
That have not known God's Grace.
But flies live just one season,
Nor do their mommas pray
With candles and with incense
To speed them on their way.
Be glad that God is love for us,
That God is very Love!
And gives His Flesh for eating
When fish is not enough;
But swat the Pests, that graceless,
Come buzzing out of Hell,
Attracted to the crumbs of Love
By God's delicious Smell!
|
222,732
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46976/star-light-star-bright
|
Anonymous
|
"Star light, star bright,"
|
Star light, star bright,
First star I see tonight,
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have this wish I wish tonight.
|
242,450
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/89330/worry
|
sam sax
|
Worry
|
is a woman
burying bread
beneath her lawn.
praying for summer
to make whole loaves
break in their plastic
shells through dirt
like so many hands.
worry is how i thumb
a groove in the stolen
jewel case in my back
pocket at tower
records, the man
puts his hands
on me & i'm cooked,
i'm crooked, red
handed, red thumbed.
had enough money
in my pocket
for music
& who really needs
that bad? all my father's
overtime stocked
in our pantry.
all my mother's
edges worried
smooth below
the river of her
boss's hands.
who am i
who steals music
who sells drugs
because i love
how it sounds.
who sold my own
good mouth
for gold. a man
puts his hands
on me &
i'm his & i'm paid.
in the old country
women buried
what little we had
in the dirt & hoped
it would make more
better on earth.
in this country
all food is unzipped
from its plastic
& passes clean through us.
my grandmother's
panic is a relic, is bread
unearthed from
some forgotten dust
bowl still dark
& moldy & whole.
why not eat the hand
that feeds you, i think,
why not eat the arm,
the elbow,
the shoulder? why
not eat the whole
damned body alive
|
241,142
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58302/sound
|
Billy Ramsell
|
Sound
|
To render the ocean one needs a whole year
with Zoom in freezing fingers on a quarter-mile of coast.
Sound is the one true vocabulary of nature
and not the peacock-palette painters swear
he uses for his best stuff, for his daily disposable frescoes.
To render the ocean one needs a whole year
on the quayside tracking the tide's increasing stature,
its drones and climaxes, the diminuendo when it shows
sound is the one true vocabulary of nature.
Nature plays bass clarinet in a Barcelona pop-up theatre.
In a polo neck he solos the ocean. He tongues, he blows
to render the ocean. One needs a whole year
or centuries to capture even its least-most feature:
like the boat-cove's lapping, backwashed contraflows.
Sound is the one true vocabulary of Nature,
who's lost in his MacBook, applying filter after filter
to this day-long rock-pool's jazz, its stadium of echoes.
To render its ocean one needs a whole year:
sound is the one true vocabulary of nature.
|
199,100
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/33486/the-case-of-the
|
Mona Van Duyn
|
The Case of The
|
MONA VAN DUYN
THE CASE OF THE
Drinking the seconal dissolved in bourbon,
stabbed in the fog, shoved into quicksand,
caught in the telescopic sight,
feeling a sudden pressure on the carotids from behind,
scalped, buried, bombed, smothered in cellophane,
"another blow and another, savage, fast,
unreasoning," in Amsterdam,
Gary, Indonesia, Alabama, Budapest,
perilous, perilous the keeping of the human spirit.
Killed everywhere, on the train, in the tomb,
generosity, at the racetrack, grace,
at the tiller, down the sewers, in the unguarded hospital
room,
willingness, in the London slum, on the plane,
at the mountain resort, strength, in the pew,
on Golden Gate Bridge, affection. Nowhere to hide.
Everywhere, everywhere someone is out looking for you.
One, with his mouth hung open to hear,
grunts "Huh?" after every statement. "Huh?"
His prostate swells, blood pressure bangs his head.
"This country's gone to the dogs and the hippies can go
too."
And one pees fourteen times a night,
missing the bedpan every other time.
Her false teeth clicking with malice, she whispers,
"If you don't watch them every minute they'll steal you
blind."
Are the passersby in collusion? Did the victim
deserve what he got? The search for evidence
goes on and on, the light burns,
the sirens whine, the long report says you only live once.
Fingerprints, autopsies, exhumations
tell us a great deal, but the shoes
don't fit anyone we know. As for the bodies,
some were fair of face, some had nothing to lose.
On the last page, the one-eyed witness,
trapped by the D.A., drops his dreams and his lies,
his squirrel mouth opens, and he squeals all he knows:
"The sun done it, coming up every damn morning like
it does!"
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.