Poetry Thursday

say it with your whole black mouth
 ~Danez Smith

say it with your whole black mouth: i am innocent

           & if you are not innocent, say this: i am worthy of forgiveness, of

                    breath after breath

i tell you this: i let blue eyes dress me in guilt
walked around stores convinced the very skin of my palm was stolen

& what good has that brought me? days filled flinching
thinking the sirens were reaching for me

& when the sirens were for me
did i not make peace with god?

so many white people are alive because
we know how to control ourselves.

how many times have we died on a whim
wielded like gallows in their sun-shy hands?

here, standing in my own body, i say: the next time
they murder us for the crime of their imaginations

i don’t know what i’ll do.

i did not come to preach of peace
for that is not the hunted’s duty.

i came here to say what i can’t say
without my name being added to a list

what my mother fears i will say

                       what she wishes to say herself

i came here to say

i can’t bring myself to write it down

sometimes i dream of pulling a red apology
from a pig’s collared neck & wake up crackin up

           if i dream of setting fire to cul-de-sacs
           i wake chained to the bed

i don’t like thinking about doing to white folks
what white folks done to us

when i do
                      can’t say

           i don’t dance

o my people

          how long will we

reach for god

           instead of something sharper?

          my lovely doe

with a taste for meat

          take

the hunter

          by his hand

Copyright © 2018 Danez Smith. Used with permission of the author.

Almost the end of poetry month ... one more, not Poetry Thursday

The Way We Love Something Small
~Kimberly Blaeser

The translucent claws of newborn mice

this pearl cast of color,

the barely perceptible

like a ghosted threshold of being:

here     not here.

The single breath we hold

on the thinnest verge of sight:

not there   there.

A curve nearly naked 

an arc of almost, 

a wisp of becoming

a wand—

tiny enough to change me.

Copyright © 2020 by Kimberly Blaeser. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 8, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

more Poetry for April

No, Don’t
 ~Elena Karina Byrne
for the two of me

the thing that eats the heart is mostly heart and there
I wish, in the burly sun blossom-backwards garden I was hungry,
so damn hungry and afraid again by full open-mouth-desire.
Don’t take this as a garrote good-bye, your airless thrive ride.
I alone, fear being alone, far from the blood vocabulary. I wish
I knew where I put my fear sitting in the childhood past, in
it’s zoo, sitting on the winding Escher stairs, saying this out loud
to my dead mother, so loud a lion’s head in the mouth loud
it catches audience breath for breath measure, making us go
home to say it to the father, dead and down, holding court with                    outbreak.
You can’t hear me say this, off as asymmetry cry.
                                                                You too are dead in the circus heart      alone
because they really are all gone, and can’t feed you anymore.
You can’t sit in the lap, on the headmouth, slow kneel on the floor;
you can’t sit in the cement highchair, sit in this landscape room, this
come to crime test, alive here for feeling, or take me
to nothing sound-past longing with the lion
who won’t eat you, who won’t eat me, facing
the animal garden, shaking his yellow haystack head.

Copyright © 2017 Elena Karina Byrne. Used with permission of the author.

oops... Poetry in April... stuck in the draft folder

Control Feast
~Elizabeth Metzger

Either you’ve died, or you arrive
beside me at a funeral

patchily reaching out
from your zero gravity chair

to grab the relative achievement
of my stomach.

There is no cute life in me
but I have eaten a great meal

alone successfully, greater
than I have ever kept down before,

full of iron and clotted cream.
I cannot feel everything about you

anymore the way I used to—
the stomach overfills itself so fast

it eats the hunger and the mouth.
I grow enamored of you as an egg

you shake in my direction
then love you evenly, without belief.

Copyright © 2017 Elizabeth Metzger. Used with permission of the author.

Poetry Thursday, grief in a poem

Postcard
--Olena Kalytiak Davis

Lately, I am capable only of small things.
Is it enough
to feel the heart swimming?
Jim is fine. Our first
garden is thick with spinach
& white radish. Strangely,
it is summer
but also winter & fall.
In response to your asking:
I fill the hours
then lick them shut.
Today, not a single word, but the birds
quietly nodding
as if someone had suggested
moving on.
What is that perfect thing
some one who once believed in god said?
Please don’t misunderstand:
We still suffer, but we are
happy.


THANKS Julie... I needed that

Not Poetry Thursday, Earth Day edition

Trees
 ~Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

not Poetry Thursday

The Time Machine
~Laura Kasischke

My mother begged me: Please, please, study
stenography...

Without it
I would have no future, and this

is the future that was lost in time to me

having scoffed at her, refusing
to learn the only skill I’d ever need, the one

I will associate forever now with loss, with her
bald head, her wig, a world
already gone
by the time we had this argument, while

our walls stayed slathered in its pale green.
While we
wore its sweater sets. While we
giddily picked the pineapple
off our hams with toothpicks. Now

I’m lost somewhere between
1937
and 1973. My

time machine, blown off course, just
as my mother knew it would be.

Oh, Mama: forget about me.
You don’t have to forgive
me, but know this, please:

I am
the Stenographer now.
I am
the Secretary you wanted me to be.  I am

the girl who gained the expertise you
knew some day some man would need.

Too late, maybe.
(Evening.)
I’m sick, I think.
You’re dead.
I’m weak.

“And now I’m going to tell you
a little secret.
Get your pen and steno-pad, and sit
down across from me.”

Ready?

The grieving:

It never ends.

You learn a million
tricks, memorize
the symbols &
practice the techniques

and still you wake up every morning
lost inside your
lost machine. Confused, but always
on a journey.

Disordered.

Cut short.

Still moving.

Keep speaking
Mama.
Please.
I’m taking it down
so quickly, so

quickly, even

(perhaps especially)

when I appear

not to be.

I do this naturally.

See? So

naturally
that in the end
no training was ever needed.

None at all.
None at all.

I taught myself so well.

It’s all I can do now.

Copyright © 2017 Laura Kasischke. Used with permission of the author.

not Poetry Thursday, but still POETRY

Ghazal !يا لطيف (Ya Lateef!)
~Marilyn Hacker

A lot more malaise and a little more grief every day,
aware that all seasons, the stormy, the sunlit, are brief every day. 

I don’t know the name of the hundredth drowned child, just the names
of the oligarchs trampling the green, eating beef every day,

while luminous creatures flick, stymied, above and around
the plastic detritus that’s piling up over the reef every day.

A tiny white cup of black coffee in afternoon shade,
while an oud or a sax plays brings breath and relief every day. 

Another beginning, no useful conclusion in sight‚—
another first draft that I tear out and add to the sheaf every day. 

One name, three-in-one, ninety-nine, or a matrix of tales 
that are one story only, well-springs of belief every day.

But I wake before dawn to read news that arrived overnight
on a minuscule screen , and exclaim  يا لطيف every day.

Copyright © 2020 by Marilyn Hacker. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 9, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

I loved this explanation from the poet: “I’m very fond of the ghazal form, because of its combination of unity—the qafia (rhyme) and radif (repeated word or phrase) are a ‘fixed’ element, while the couplets themselves can go off in any direction. Usually the poet includes their name, or a version of it, in the last couplet. I also love the ghazal because of other poets who practice it: Agha Shahid Ali, Zeina Hashem Beck, Mimi Khalvati, Shadab Zeest Hashmi, Suzanne Gardinier, Karthika Nair, among them. An American critic wrote, perhaps misinformed, that that last couplet was meant to include one of the ninety-nine names of God in Islam. ‘Lateef’—the kind or gentle one—is one of those names, but ‘Ya Lateef’ is a common exclamation, equivalent to ‘Good God!’ (in exasperation), or even ‘Oi veh is mir…’ Today, there is an overwhelming reason to say a collective and worldwide ‘Ya lateef,’ while the oligarchs golf in their compounds, for as long as they still can.”

So Much in so Few Words, not Poetry Thursday

Tender Buttons [Mildred’s Umbrella]
 ~Gertrude Stein

A cause and no curve, a cause and loud enough, a cause and extra a loud clash and an extra wagon, a sign of extra, a sac a small sac and an established color and cunning, a slender grey and no ribbon, this means a loss a great loss a restitution.

This poem is in the public domain.

Poetry Thursday

Sink Your Fingers into the Darkness of My Fur
~Ellen Bass

Up until this sore minute, you could turn the key, pivot away.

But mine is the only medicine now

wherever you go or follow.

The past is so far away, but it flickers,

then cleaves the night. The bones

of the past splinter between our teeth.

This is our life, love. Why did I think

it would be anything less than too much

of everything? I know you remember that cheap motel

on the coast where we drank red wine,

the sea flashing its gold scales as sun

soaked our skin. You said, This must be

what people mean when they say

I could die now. Now

we’re so much closer

to death than we were then. Who isn’t crushed,

stubbed out beneath a clumsy heel?

Who hasn’t stood at the open window,

sleepless, for the solace of the damp air?

I had to get old to carry both buckets

yoked on my shoulders. Sweet

and bitter waters I drink from.

Let me know you, ox you.

I want your scent in my hair.

I want your jokes.

Hang your kisses on all my branches, please.

Sink your fingers into the darkness of my fur.



Copyright © 2020 by Ellen Bass. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 13, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Not Poetry Thursday, But We Still Need Poetry

Elegy for a Year
~Joseph Fasano

Before I watched you die, I watched the dying
falter, their hearts curled and purring in them

like kitfoxes asleep
beside their shadows, their eyes pawed out by the trouble

of their hunger. I was
humbling, Lord, like the taxidermist’s

apprentice. I said
yes, and amen, like the monk brushing

the barley from the veal calf’s
withers, the heft of it

as it leans against his cilice.
Winter, I have watched the lost

lie down among their bodies, clarified
as the birdsong

they have hymned of.
I have heard the earth sing longer than the song.

Come, I said, come
summer, come

after: you were the bull-elk in the moonlight
of my threshold, knocking off the mosses from its antlers

before it backed away, bewildered, into foliage.
You were thin-ribbed, were hawk-

scarred, were few.
Yes, amen, before I heard you giving up

your singing, you were something stumbling hunted
to my open door; you were thinning with the milkweed

of the river. Winter, Wintering, listen: I think of you
long gone now

through the valley, scissoring
your ancient way

through the pitch pines. Not waiting, but the great elk
in the dark door. Not ravens

where they stay, awhile, in furor,
but the lost thing backing out

among the saplings, dancing off the madness
of its antlers. Not stone, not cold

stone, but fire. The wild thing, musk-blooded, at my open
door, wakening and wakening and

wakening, migrations
in the blindness of its wild eyes,

saying Look at them, look at how they have to.
Do something with the wildness that confounds you.

Copyright © 2017 Joseph Fasano. Used with permission of the author.

For the Raza, not Poetry Thursday

Dear Buffalo, Dear Zeta or To a Few of My Dead or Nearly Dead Tíos
 ~Joseph Rios

I see my dead father's face in your face.
My furled eyebrow, these puffed cheeks
weep into a pillow of inherited hands.
Tío, I still don't know what to do
with this buffalo body. I crush tea cups
every time I raise them to my pursed lips.
How do I tenderize the meat on my bones?
This morning, I dry heaved a vat of foam
into a toilet in Tampa and found no art in it.
Who tells us we deserve to die?
My Tío, you, the one with a brown beret,
who saw the hydrogen bomb blow
from an aircraft carrier at Bikini Island,
the one with Hep C and a quiet wife,
I don't know if you're still alive,
but I pray this world has softened
you with its firm kneading hands,
that you are still able to ride your bike
up Homsy to the liquor store on Cedar
and can still reach the oranges in the yard.
Tío, mi tío, when you wet the bed,
is it still my Tia's job to change the sheets?
From the kitchen, I see the twelve foot spear
over the maguey. I see its fresh blooms
and know it is about to die. I wonder
if it is better to disappear into Aztlán
or Mazatlán or Mazapan the way you did
or stay in Prather or Marysville and slowly fade
into a sofa chair and reruns of Bonanza.
Is there honor in being shot and skinned? 
      like Ruben?
Hacked up in a hospital for lymphoma research? 
Poked and drained with the swollen face of 
      a failed liver?
How many more fists will be raised until we can 
     no longer,
or better yet, don't have to? I'm tired of thinking 
     these things.
Come back, Tío, or whatever. My mom saved you 
     a plate.
The street dump came by and I got rid of 
     grandpa's clothes.
I found your mesh t-shirt here and I've been 
     wearing it.

Copyright © 2019 by Joseph Rios. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 27, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

We Still Need Poetry, not Poetry Thursday

Faith
~Arthur Caswell Parker

There is a faith that weakly dies
When overcast by clouds of doubt,
That like a blazing wisp of straw
A vagrant breeze will flicker out.


Be mine the faith whose living flame
Shall pierce the clouds and banish night,
Whose glow the hurricanes increase
To match the gleams of heaven’s night.


This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 30, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

not Poetry Thursday

Labyrinth
~Kenyatta Rogers

I’ve lost something and I can’t describe
what it is
_____________

and what if that’s my job
to say how empty an absence is
_____________

like rolling 2 gears together
and maybe teeth are missing in one
or both
_____________

or maybe trying to grind
two stones that are
polished and smoothed 
_____________

I’ve always liked
a little grit
_____________

but sand in my shoes
or in my hair
_____________

is like shattering
a glass in carpet
and using a broom to
get it out
____________

I can’t describe
what it’s like to
sit on opposite ends
of a park bench and
not know how
to get any closer
____________

I miss so many things
and I’ve looked through my piggy
bank and only found pennies
____________

a pile of things that are
almost completely worthless
_____________

a shoebox full of sporks
a well with a bucket and a rope
that’s too short
_____________

sometimes in my room
it’s so dark that if I wake
up I won’t know if it’s morning or night
_____________

imagine being someplace you know
so well but are lost and don’t have any idea
how to get out
____________

the rule is, put your right hand out
lay it on the wall, and follow
____________

sometimes the rules don’t apply to all of us
I don’t want to sleep here again tonight

Copyright © 2020 by Kenyatta Rogers. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 26, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday

Souvenir
~Edna St. Vincent Millay 

Just a rainy day or two
In a windy tower,
That was all I had of you—
Saving half an hour.

Marred by greeting passing groups
In a cinder walk,
Near some naked blackberry hoops
Dim with purple chalk.

I remember three or four
Things you said in spite,
And an ugly coat you wore,
Plaided black and white.

Just a rainy day or two
And a bitter word.
Why do I remember you
As a singing bird?


This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 25, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

not Poetry Thursday, for the love of sunrise

The Dawn’s Awake!
~Otto Leland Bohanan

The Dawn’s awake! 
   A flash of smoldering flame and fire
Ignites the East. Then, higher, higher, 
   O’er all the sky so gray, forlorn, 
The torch of gold is borne. 

The Dawn’s awake! 
  The dawn of a thousand dreams and thrills. 
And music singing in the hills 
   A pæen of eternal spring 
Voices the new awakening. 

The Dawn’s awake! 
     Whispers of pent-up harmonies, 
With the mingled fragrance of the trees; 
     Faint snaches of half-forgotten song—
Fathers! Torn and numb,—
   The boon of light we craved, awaited long, 
Has come, has come! 

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 2, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Because we need beauty... extra poetry this week...

In April
~Rainer Maria Rilke

Again the woods are odorous, the lark 
Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray
That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark, 
Where branches bare disclosed the empty day. 

After long rainy afternoons an hour 
Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings 
Them at the windows in a radiant shower, 
And rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings. 

Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep
By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies; 
And cradled in the branches, hidden deep
In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on April 5, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Not Poetry Thursday

How I Became a Madman (Prologue)
 ~Kahlil Gibran

You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen,—the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives,—I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, “Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves.”

Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.

And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, “He is a madman.” I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, “Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks.”

Thus I became a madman.

And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.

But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 21, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday

Sonnet XLIV 
[For Thee the Sun Doth Daily Rise, and Set]
 ~George Santayana

For thee the sun doth daily rise, and set
Behind the curtain of the hills of sleep, 
And my soul, passing through the nether deep, 
Broods on thy love, and never can forget. 
For thee the garlands of the wood are wet, 
For thee the daisies up the meadow’s sweep
Stir in the sidelong light, and for thee weep
The drooping ferns above the violet. 
For thee the labour of my studious ease
I ply with hope, for thee all pleasures please, 
Thy sweetness doth the bread of sorrow leaven; 
And from thy noble lips and heart of gold
I drink the comfort of the faiths of old, 
And thy perfection is my proof of heaven. 

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 22, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.