Poetry Thursday

I felt like I was here ... and it reminded me of those walks on the beach with the bees and ladybugs washed up on the sand.

Funeral: For Us His Gold
~Alessandra Lynch
                    after Gerald Stern

The insect was yellow with crumpled-black banded legs
          and shellacked back that would outlast us
          and wistful eyes from what I could discern on that trail between
               fields,
and we laid him out in the open air under a sky fast-blue with change,
               wedging
          a leaf beneath his triple-belted belly so he didn’t rest on plain dirt,
          and we placed two cloverblooms by his head and he was old
you said, could tell by how definite the stripes were, how complete
          the patterns bold and dark, almost engraved,
and he was beautiful in that pasture of thirty-three cows and we drank
          milk in the blaring heat and ate the cake you’d made. We were
          the only humans there—unholy-seeming things with two legs,
               dismal histories—
drinking and eating around his elegant husk,
          and from the furze, fellow insects rose, a frenzied static around
               our bodies,
while he remained in situ an unremitting yellow, the color more
          vivid, louder now that he was a remnant. Was color the purpose
               here?
Yellow had alerted us to him, and we took care
          with leaf and clover to make his bed.
The insect’s gold our togetherness, its death from which we fed.

Poetry Thursday,

Corpse Flower
~Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

Yesterday, the final petal curled its soft lure into bone.

The flowerhead shed clean, I gathered up your spine

and built you on a dark day. You are still missing

some parts. Each morning, I curl red psalms into the shells

in your chest. I have buried each slow light: cardinal’s yolk, live
          seawater,

my trenza, a piece of my son’s umbilical cord, and still you don’t
          return.

A failure fragrant as magic. Ascend the spirit into the design.

My particular chiron: the record that your perfect feet ever graced

this earth. Homing signal adrift among stars, our tender impossible
          longing.

What have I made of your sacrifice. This bone: it is myself.

Poetry Thursday

In the Light of One Lamp
~Sean Thomas Dougherty
 
I crawled into bed and closed my eyes and not long after heard the small hooves of the horses, the tiny ones that gallop in our dreams, or are they the dreams of our children, galloping through the black ruins. Everything we do is against the crippling light. To hear them cry at night is to know they are alive. When they are scared they come galloping down the long hall calling your name. Tonight, it is our oldest daughter, the red mare with her fiery mane, she snuggles in between us and falls back to sleep in your arms, to that secret place inside her, she barely moves, crossing over the river, through a grove of alders, through the black ruins, she is the one who once whispered, the grass it knows everything.


I was not sure if I should include this poem in my Poetry Thursday until I read what the poet had to say about this poem: "'My daughters often refuse to sleep in their own beds, emerging in the middle of the night from some dream to climb into bed with us, with their grandparents, with each other. My oldest daughter, when young, could see our dead. She could transition casually between this world and the next. This poem tries to capture some of that.'"

Poetry Thursday

The Word
~Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Oh, a word is a gem, or a stone, or a song,
   Or a flame, or a two-edged sword;
Or a rose in bloom, or a sweet perfume,
   Or a drop of gall is a word.

You may choose your word like a connoisseur,
   And polish it up with art,
But the word that sways, and stirs, and stays,
   Is the word that comes from the heart.

You may work on your word a thousand weeks,
   But it will not glow like one
That all unsought, leaps forth white hot,
   When the fountains of feeling run.