Saying Goodbye

 I started this post a million years ago.

Ok, not a million years, but a long time ago, probably May.

And I kept looking at it sitting there in the draft folder. Taunting me.

I feel like grief is all around me. All the time. Like a pack of wolves hunting down my soul.

I should try to readjust my attitude about grief. I SHOULD not be afraid of it. I should welcome it into my house and ask it if it wants to stay a while. But I don't have my own house, that's another story for another time, so, yeah, no visitors.

As a result of this game of chicken I have with grief, it roars into my life sometimes like a motorcycle gang disrupting my pretending that every thing is alright.

Last week was the week leading up to the anniversary of my brother's death. 8 years. 

EIGHT YEARS?! How does that even happen?

And I was shoveling food and stomping around until I realized the 19th was just around the corner.

UGH.

Knowing it was going to be a rough one no matter what I did, I tried to plan a quiet weekend with lots of walking by myself.

It would have worked, too, if the stars had not aligned to take RBG from our world on the 18th.

I am trying REALLY hard, after days of sulking, to think FIRST of the tremendous gift it was to have her in our world for so long. But, I fail, often, and slink back into the terrible hole her loss has created in our world. 

Saying goodbye is hard - and this has been a rough year for everyone - and I am only human.

I started this draft (a million years ago) because I THOUGHT, maybe this is the year that grief won't be so hard. 

I was wrong, or grief is horrible, or 2020 sucks. Or all of that is true.

I am going to have a weekend away - and I haven't had any time to worry about the ramifications of interacting with people (masked, of course) because I have been all wrapped up in this grief. So, maybe not having time to be anxious is a silver lining?

I am trying, I swear.

Poetry Thursday, Hispanic Heritage Month

the independence (of puerto rico)
 ~Raquel Salas Rivera
English translation from Spanish

we are fiercer than melted snow;
we are bigger than storage cemeteries;
we are more rabid than mired winds;
we are immenser than rivers in sea;
we are wider than wasted tyrannies;
we are more tender than roots with earth;
we are more tender than rain in moss;
we are more tender than downpour’s tremor;
we are stronger than overworked years;
we are braver than stalking anguish;
we are more beautiful than universal monarchies;
we are more jevos than the dreamt good life;
we are richer than stolen ports;
we are more pirates than federal governments;
we are more justice-seeking than armed gods;
we are more more than the minimum
and more more than the most.
we are insularly sufficient.

we owe no one shame.

we owe no one smallness.

they tell us for a whole centuried
and quintuplentaried life that we are
the smallest of the upper,
that we are much of the less
and too little of the more,
but we are more than what they say,
more than what they imagine
and more than, to this day,
we have imagined.

we are home libraries
gathered in a data strike
that miss their bowels
of historied flesh.

we are a latitude of tied belts,
serpents who shed their punishing skins,
make a tape to measure the globe
and know if the world can
expand by opening chests.

we are that calculation that traces today
and hits rock bottom.

we are the fortaleza without spaniards,
the rib cage that expires the old empire
where before they housed crusades.

we are fatal, meaning,
the death of trenches
and the governments that induce them.

we are high-and-mighty on the coast
and humble in the mountains.
we gather coffee and plant it
in the buildings we build,
the children we raise,
and the exponential applications
we complete.

and in all things we are independent,
even in the most colonized hole of our porous fear;
even in the panadería most packed with papers that cover ads;
even in the corrosive act of saying we are only an island;
even that we have done looking each other in the face,
gathering cement blocks,
arming the neighbor’s storage rooms;
even from afar, it has been us
who has gone to the post office
and sent cans and batteries.

don’t fear what you already know.
we’ve spent a lifetime fearing ourselves
while getting robbed by strangers.
look at us. look closely.
don’t you see we are
beauty?


la independencia (de puerto rico)

somos más fieros que la nieve derretida;
somos más grandes que un cementerio de vagones;
somos más rabiosos que los vientos atascados;
somos más inmensos que los ríos en el mar;
somos más amplios que las tiranías gastadas;
somos más tiernos que las raíces con la tierra;
somos más tiernos que la lluvia en el musgo;
somos más tiernos que el temblor del aguacero;
somos más fuertes que los años fajones;
somos más bravos que la angustia acosadora;
somos más bellos que las monarquías universales;
somos más jevos que la buena vida soñada;
somos más ricos que los puertos robados;
somos más piratas que los gobiernos federales;
somos más justicieros que los dioses armados;
somos más más que lo más mínimo
y más más que lo más mejor.
somos insularmente suficientes.

no le debemos a nadie la vergüenza.

no le debemos a nadie la pequeñez.

nos dicen por toda una vida siglada
y quintuplegada que somos
el menor de las mayores,
que somos mucho de lo menos
y muy poco de lo más,
pero somos más que lo que dicen,
más de lo que se imaginan
y más de lo que hasta hoy
nos hemos imaginado.

somos las bibliotecas de las casas
juntadas en una huelga de datos
que añoran sus entrañas
de carne historiada.

somos una latitud de correas atadas,
sierpes que mudaron su piel de castigo
por una cinta de medir el globo
para saber si el mundo puede
expandirse abriendo pechos.

somos ese cálculo que traza hoy
y toca fondo.

somos la fortaleza sin españoles,
la caja torácica que expira el viejo imperio
donde antes se almacenaban cruzadas.

somos fatales, es decir,
la muerte de las trincheras
y los gobiernos que las inducen.

somos altaneros en la costa
y humildes en la cordillera.
recogemos café y lo sembramos
en los edificios que construimos,
los niños que cuidamos,
las solicitudes exponenciales
que completamos.

y en todo somos independientes,
hasta en el hueco más colonizado del temor poroso;
hasta en la panadería más llena de periódicos de anuncios;
hasta en el acto corrosivo de decir que somos isla solamente;
hasta eso lo hemos hecho mirándonos las caras,
juntando los bloques de cemento,
armando los almacenes de los vecinos;
hasta en la lejanía, hemos sido nosotros,
nosotros los que llegamos al correo
y envíamos latas y baterías.

no temas lo que ya conoces.
llevamos una vida temiéndonos
mientras nos roban extraños.
míranos bien.
¿no ves que somos
hermosura?

Copyright © 2020 by Raquel Salas Rivera. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 13, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Not poetry Thursday, Hispanic Heritage Month, on pain and keeping it real

A Pain That Is Not Private
~Lara Mimosa Montes

There is a time and place in the world for abstraction. When my mother left Puerto Rico for the first time, the year was 1968. Against my unknowing. We hesitate to say what intimacy is and whether or not we have it. I keep trying / to teach my students that / stream-of-consciousness is / this, not that / this / activity fails. We know it does because each of us leaves the room / feeling like barbed wire— snarling behind the barricade (because) at some point, we stopped feeling (like language could say). So we went without while some others embraced. Notice (after the emptiness) : a pain that is not private. In other words, focus not on the object, but rather, the light that bounces off of that object. Perforated. Estranged. Esa luz. Tómatela. Under that light° I felt my body try / to hold on (to the knot inside) your right hand; when did it become a fist? Remind me what it is again / what it is that you wish / to share (with others) >> when you’re on stage…

                                        °That light, this pain (what never translates).

Copyright © 2018 Lara Mimosa Montes. Used with permission of the author.

Not Poetry Thursday, for Greg

Hummingbird
 ~Robin Becker

I love the whir of the creature come
to visit the pink
flowers in the hanging basket as she does

most August mornings, hours away
from starvation to store
enough energy to survive overnight.

The Aztecs saw the refraction
of incident light on wings
as resurrection of fallen warriors.

In autumn, when daylight decreases
they double their body weight to survive
the flight across the Gulf of Mexico.

On next-to-nothing my mother
flew for 85 years; after her death
she hovered, a bird of bones and air.

Copyright © 2017 Robin Becker. Used with permission of the author.

Not poetry Thursday, Hispanic Heritage Month on persistence

Instructions on Not Giving Up
~Ada Limón

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Copyright © 2017 Ada Limón. Used with permission of the author.

Grief and Healing during Hispanic Heritage Month, Poetry Thursday

Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World
 ~Martín Espada
                    For the community of Newtown, Connecticut,
                    where twenty students and six educators lost their
                    lives to a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School,
                    December 14, 2012

Now the bells speak with their tongues of bronze.
Now the bells open their mouths of bronze to say:
Listen to the bells a world away. Listen to the bell in the ruins
of a city where children gathered copper shells like beach glass,
and the copper boiled in the foundry, and the bell born
in the foundry says: I was born of bullets, but now I sing
of a world where bullets melt into bells. Listen to the bell
in a city where cannons from the armies of the Great War
sank into molten metal bubbling like a vat of chocolate,
and the many mouths that once spoke the tongue of smoke
form the one mouth of a bell that says: I was born of cannons,
but now I sing of a world where cannons melt into bells.

Listen to the bells in a town with a flagpole on Main Street,
a rooster weathervane keeping watch atop the Meeting House,
the congregation gathering to sing in times of great silence.
Here the bells rock their heads of bronze as if to say:
Melt the bullets into bells, melt the bullets into bells.
Here the bells raise their heavy heads as if to say:
Melt the cannons into bells, melt the cannons into bells.
Here the bells sing of a world where weapons crumble deep
in the earth, and no one remembers where they were buried.
Now the bells pass the word at midnight in the ancient language
of bronze, from bell to bell, like ships smuggling news of liberation
from island to island, the song rippling through the clouds.

Now the bells chime like the muscle beating in every chest,
heal the cracks in the bell of every face listening to the bells.
The chimes heal the cracks in the bell of the moon.
The chimes heal the cracks in the bell of the world.

From Bullets Into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence (Beacon Press, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Martín Espada. Used with permission of the author and Beacon Press.

Not Poetry Thursday, surviving among the flames

 In the Middle of the Burning
~Canisia Lubrin

notice now pictures of awful things on top our head

the freight that barricades this view, how enough

how the law batter down the dogged tide we make

the world shoring its dark scars between seasons

as though to hold it together only by a flame

is here a voice to please enough the blunt

borderlessness of this grief turning our heads to rubble

the lunacy of nothing so limning as death in the streets

in these vibrating hours where the corners talk back

need I simply run my tongue along the granite sky and live

to know how lost the millionth life somewhere today
the swift shape of roads new names combust, the sum
of anthems flooding the world with the eye’s sudden and narrow
saltwater and streets ziplined with screams at the pitch of cooking pots
then tear gas, then pepper spray, then militarized lies unzipping
body bags, oh, our many many there, our alive and just born,
and that is how to say let’s fuck it up, we the beat and we the loud
tuning forks and the help arriving empty-handed
propping the hot news of new times on our head

days like these pleat whatever the hollow year must offer

between the not-yet-dead and those just waking up

it will not be the vanished thing that we remember

it will be what we exchanged close to midnight

like smugglers high-wiring the city, hoarding the thoughts

of ours we interrupted midway to discovering the velocity

of the burning world below

of our language in the lateness of our stuck and reckless love

where the forces who claim they love us
level our lives to crust—the centuries-wide dance
of swapped shackles for knees
their batons and miscellany
thrown at our whole lives demanding our mothers
raise from their separate rooms, separate graves, today
to save who and me? I open the book to a naked page
where nothing clatter my heart, what head
what teeth cling to broadside, roll alias after
alias with a pen at their dull tribunes and shrines
imagine our heirlooms of shot nerves make a life
given to placards and synergies and elegies, but more

last things: where letters here where snow in May

where the millennium unstitches the quartered earth

in June, how many today to the viral fire

the frosted rich and their forts, but not

the fulsome rage of my people unpeaced

mute boots with somber looks appear

a fearsome autumn ending spring, though we still hear

I dare not sing

another song to dig a hole this time for the lineages
of magnolias where the offspring bring a hand to cover
our mouth, our heaping lives, who sit who burn who drop
three feet to the tar, who eat and demolish the thing
that takes our head, the thing that is no more
the place that never was except a burning learned

just once and not again when the darker working’s race

Copyright © 2020 by Canisia Lubrin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 3, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday pre-Hispanic Heritage Month #HHM

December Morning in the Desert
 ~Alberto Ríos

The morning is clouded and the birds are hunched,
More cold than hungry, more numb than loud,

This crisp, Arizona shore, where desert meets
The coming edge of the winter world.

It is a cold news in stark announcement,
The myriad stars making bright the black,

As if the sky itself had been snowed upon.
But the stars—all those stars,

Where does the sure noise of their hard work go?
These plugs sparking the motor of an otherwise quiet sky,

Their flickering work everywhere in a white vastness:
We should hear the stars as a great roar

Gathered from the moving of their billion parts, this great
Hot rod skid of the Milky Way across the asphalt night,

The assembled, moving glints and far-floating embers
Risen from the hearth-fires of so many other worlds.

Where does the noise of it all go
If not into the ears, then hearts of the birds all around us,

Their hearts beating so fast and their equally fast
Wings and high songs,

And the bees, too, with their lumbering hum,
And the wasps and moths, the bats, and the dragonflies—

None of them sure if any of this is going to work,
This universe—we humans oblivious,

Drinking coffee, not quite awake, calm and moving
Into the slippers of our Monday mornings,

Shivering because, we think,
It’s a little cold out there.

Copyright © 2019 by Alberto Ríos. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 2, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Not Poetry Thursday - extra poetry love for September be nicer to us...

 Again it is September
~Jessie Redmon Fauset
   Again it is September! 
It seems so strange that I who made no vows
Should sit here desolate this golden weather 
And wistfully remember—
    A sigh of deepest yearning, 
A glowing look and words that knew no bounds, 
A swift response, an instant glad surrender
To kisses wild and burning! 
   Ay me! 
   Again it is September! 
It seems so strange that I who kept those vows 
Should sit here lone, and spent, and mutely praying 
That I may not remember! 

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

Poetry Thursday, on perspective and supposed clarity it brings

From “Perspective is Supposed to Yield Clarity”

~Dawn Lundy Martin

She said, I wish I prayed, I would pray for you. And,

we all wanted a shape of prayer in our brains, taking over

instead of it chomping on itself. Stupid little elf. God has

never come to me. We surrender in the teeming utterance

of materials soaked with sentences already made in air

and by machines. The country says Freedom, crushed under

its own dream weight. I did not make up this song. Design

Within Reach is having a “Work from home sale.” The coming

apart, the giant laceration across the sky, we all feel it. Look

at the fire, look at it, like all the rage of all the smallest beings.

Copyright © 2020 by Dawn Lundy Martin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 6, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, free

 fleeing

~Kara Jackson

everything i do comes down to the fact that i’ve been here before.

in some arrangement of my atoms i was allowed to be free

so don’t ask me when freedom is coming

when a certain eye of mine has seen it,

a cornea in a convoluted future recalls my freedom.

when asked about the absence of freedom, the lack of it

i laugh at the word absence, which always suggests

a presence that has left. but absence is the arena

of death, and we call the dead free (went on to glory), what

is the absence of freedom but an assumption of it?

i have never longed for something

which was not once mine. even fiction is my possession,

and flight is an act of fleeing as much as an act of flying.

Copyright © 2020 by Kara Jackson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 3, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, owning our past and meaning your words

 You Still Dream

~Nikki Grimes

Here, poem meets prayer.

We are exceedingly comfortable

with posturing and self-defense

that masquerade as apology.

But what’s needed in this moment

is unmixed confession

of our nation’s sin,

deep and indefensible.

“Now I lay me down to sleep”

must make way for

something more muscular:

sack cloth and ashes,

prayer and fasting,

naked prostration.

Daniel understood

radical repentance begins

with this unvarnished profession:

You are righteous,

and we are not.

Please heal our nation.

Cleanse our stubborn hearts.

Show each of us what part to play.

Broken as Judah and Jerusalem,

we cry and come bending our will

toward the good

you dream for us still,

no matter our sin,

no matter what skin

we’re in.

Copyright © 2020 by Nikki Grimes. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 7, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, respite from our world

I Saw You

~Joshua Henry Jones, Jr.

I saw you as I passed last night,

    Framed in a sky of gold;

And through the sun’s fast paling light

    You seemed a queen of old,

Whose smile was light to all the world

    Against the crowding dark.

And in my soul a song there purled—

    Re-echoed by the lark.

I saw you as I passed last night,

    Your tresses burnished gold,

While in your eyes a happy bright

    Gleam of your friendship told.

And I went singing on my way;

    On, on into the dark.

But in my heart still shone the day,

    And still—still sang the lark.

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

Poetry Thursday, in honor of some of my AUG bday faves, HOPE

Hope.

~Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Wild seas of tossing, writhing waves,

A wreck half-sinking in the tortuous gloom;

One man clings desperately, while Boreas raves,

     And helps to blot the rays of moon and star,

     Then comes a sudden flash of light, which gleams on shores afar.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 19, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

This, too, is grief

When you lose someone you love, you expect grief. 

Ok, maybe you don't have a full grasp of how grief will be like a tidal wave until it isn't - and sometimes still because it cuts you at your knees or sucker punches you in the gut when you least expect it.

But grief as desperately wrenching as it is in its rawest form - that deep hole in your heart, is not only sadness and anguish.

Of course, everyone has heard of the stages of grief, which by the way were meant to describe a patient coming to terms with her/his own death not that of those bereaved. There is anger. There is denial. All of that along side, in between and at disparate times with the sadness and anguish.

I cannot speak to acceptance - unless you are talking about finally agreeing that your loved one is, indeed, dead - as in not coming back. Maybe. But I think lots of people forestall denial by assuming that they will be reunited at some point in the future or the after world. As I do not hold on to that hope, my denial did have to come to an end - but it lasted a good, long time - when I still saw my sister from the corner of my eye, driving by, escaping death even if it meant abandoning us as well.

But grief is also the aftermath.

This is the part that I don't think people talk about.

It has been a horrible place for me - and I imagine that it is for others as well.

Your life is reconfigured. You are told about the new normal when people can be honest about the fact that it does not get better, just different.

But I was wholly unprepared for the devastation that has been the aftermath in my family.

It's not like a war torn landscape with craters were there used to be houses. That seems so bleak and drastic ... but, sometimes, it really does feel that way.

Poetry Thursday, bucking up

Go Give the World

~Otto Leland Bohanan

I do not crave to have thee mine alone, dear

   Keeping thy charms within my jealous sight;

Go, give the world the blessing of thy beauty,

   That other hearts may share of my delight!

I do not ask, thy love should be mine only

   While others falter through the dreary night;

Go, kiss the tears from some wayfarer’s vision, 

   That other eyes may know the joy of light!

Where days are sad and skies are hung with darkness, 

   Go, send a smile that sunshine may be rife;

Go, give a song, a word of kindly greeting, 

   To ease the sorrow of some lonely life!

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 12, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

 

Poetry Thursday, for our times...

Untethered

~Allison Joseph

what anger in defiance

what sympathy in doubt

emotions steady try us

demanding every shout

what sympathy in doubt

what pleasure in our pain

demanding are our shouts

such hazardous terrain

what pleasure in our pain

mere thinness to our skin

such hazardous terrain

such unrelenting din

sheer thinness of our skin

the ruptures and the breaks

such unrelenting din

mistake after mistake

we rupture and we break

we stagger and we shine

mistake after mistake

inhabiting our minds

we stagger and we shine

we live our lives on spin

inhabiting our minds

and undermining limbs

we live our lives on spin

and thrive until we grieve

we undermine our limbs

then get the strength to leave

we thrive until we grieve

emotions steady try us

we get the strength. we leave.

what anger in defiance.

Copyright © 2020 by Allison Joseph. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 13, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets

Sometimes Daily Poetry hits home... one more for you

When Puffy says, and we won’t stop, ‘cause we can’t stop.

~Rasheed Copeland

I think of a good night’s sleep

an exhale taking its precious time

to leave my lungs         unworried

about the breathing to come        If only

I did not hail from the sweet state

of panic                                the town’s river,

my adrenaline raging without cease

I’d love peace but the moon is pulling me by my water

I know this is no way to live    but I was born here

a mobile of vultures orbiting above my crib

the noise you speak      bragging

about the luxury of your stillness

reminds me that some children are told to pick flowers

while others are told to pick a tree switch

that’ll best write a lesson across their hide

and my skin is a master course written in welts

I touch myself and read about the years

I cannot escape                              I hold my kids

and pray our embrace is not a history

repeating itself

Copyright © 2020 by Rasheed Copeland. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 22, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Not Poetry Thursday but we need some, so here you go

The Optimist

~J. W. Hammond

Who would have the sky any color but blue,

     Or the grass any color but green?

Or the flowers that bloom the summer through

     Of other color or sheen?

How the sunshine gladdens the human heart—

     How the sound of the falling rain

Will cause the tender tears to start,

     And free the soul from pain.

Oh, this old world is a great old place!

     And I love each season’s change,

The river, the brook of purling grace,

     The valley, the mountain range.

And when I am called to quit this life,

     My feet will not spurn the sod,

Though I leave this world with its beauty rife,—

     There’s a glorious one with God!

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 11, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday

Peacock Feather

~Effie Lee Newsome

 

Heav’n’s deepest blue,

Earth’s richest green,

Minted dust of stars,

Molten sunset sheen,

Are blent together

On this lithe brown feather,

In a disc of light—

Lithe, light!

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 21, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.