Poetry Thursday, Still Women's History Month

Landscape with Written Statement
 ~Lynn Melnick

You wrap my ribs in gauze—
an experiment with the word tenderly

after your hands left my throat too bruised to speak.

While winter sun squints at the ghost flower
dying in its shabby terra cotta

far from home

men tell me to be honest about my role in the incident:

Okay, yes
I should have stayed inside

while you railed from the sidewalk

but my confused heart got into the car.

What happened is
I once spent too much time in the desert

so pogonip seems glamorous hung stuck in the trees
like when blood dries on skin

and I want to wear it

out for an evening,
pat my hands over its kinky path down my face

because: f*** you,

you didn’t find me here.
I brought you here.

Rallying for Their Lives

[sometimes I put something in the draft folder and forget...]
I attended the March for Our Lives rally in Princeton this weekend.

Here are some of the pictures from the crowd.

I was late. After rising too early for a weekend, I had to go visit the vampires in anticipation of my yearly physical. I walked to and from the lab, racking up 3 miles before 9:30am. I was so tired, once home, I crawled back into bed to rest.

I was late. But I arrived in time to hear the last of the students giving their statements and rallying calls.

I wish I had heard them all.

They are our future ... and if these students represent the best of their generation, I am impressed.

I am hopeful.

I am grateful.

We need hope in our future right now, we need it more than anything else.

[after the rally, folks dropped their signs in front of the Panera, site of a shooting just the week before. The restaurant was closed "for remodeling" at the time. The signs were all gone the next morning, but I think this was an awesome impromptu message.]

Poetry Thursday, courtesy of a friend

We delight in the beauty
of the butterfly
but rarely admit the changes 
it has gone through 
to achieve that beauty.
~Maya Angelou

Poetry Thursday, Women's History Month

Barter
 ~Sara Teasdale

Life has loveliness to sell,
   All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
   Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up
Holding wonder in a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,
   Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
   Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit's still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness,
   Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
   Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstacy
Give all you have been, or could be.

Poetry Thursday, Rumi returns

I want to sing 
like the birds sing, 
not worrying about 
who hears or 
what they think.

~Rumi

Not Poetry Thursday, Still Black History Month

2019
 ~Rickey Laurentiis

I could string him back up the tree, if you’d like.
     Return his skin’s meaning to an easy distance, coal dust, blaze
And Willie Brown him. You
     Love how the blood muddies the original,
The way it makes a stage of my speechifying, this leeching
     Capital from his dying,
Like an activist. I know

I’m not supposed to sing

Of his ringing
     Penetrability, some hole I open impose
On the form—but all I see is bullets, bullets discerning him,
     As years ago it was rope.
I could pull it tighter, finger each bullet deeper,
     If you’d like, an inch rougher,
Far enough to where becomes that second heat, erotic.

I could use the erotic,

If you’d like,
     So ungarish, baring not too frank
A mood, subtle so you need it.— Funny
     How some dark will move illicit if you close your eyes,
The way, say, my black
     Pleasure is named too explicit for a page, but this menace
I put in it is not.

I could yank and knot

The rope, if you’d like, him like a strange fragment
     In them trees,
And the word “again” spelled out about his neck
     Would be the rope’s predicate till let wild, patterned and
Fierce his moan.
     It is a tragedy. No. It is a sonnet, how I know
Already how he ends,

But I could make him

Her, if you’d like, regender them till merely
     Canvas for your “empathy,”
Soup for my mouth. Still, if I could but just get
     This blunt,
Burnt lynched body up
     From on
Out the pocket behind my eye

All trees could be themselves again, all sound.

Poetry Thursday

Scaffolding
~Seamus Heaney, 1939 - 2013

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.


For a while, I collected Nobel Laureates in literature ... ok, not collected the actual people or even their books, but their public appearances. It is something for which I will be forever indebted to Princeton. Mr. Heaney is one of them. Magical. And this poem is gorgeous.