Happy Valentine's Day, Black History Month Poetry Edition

Love is a Flame
 ~George Marion McClellan

Love is a flame that burns with sacred fire, 
And fills the being up with sweet desire;
Yet, once the altar feels love’s fiery breath,
The heart must be a crucible till death.

Say love is life; and say it not amiss, 
That love is but a synonym for bliss.
Say what you will of love—in what refrain, 
But knows the heart, ‘tis but a word for pain.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 20, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Black History Month ... Tuesday Poetry!

Morning on Shinnecock
~Olivia Ward Bush-Banks

The rising sun had crowned the hills,
   And added beauty to the plain;
O grand and wondrous spectacle!
  That only nature could explain.

I stood within a leafy grove,
  And gazed around in blissful awe;
The sky appeared one mass of blue,
  That seemed to spread from sea to shore.

Far as the human eye could see,
  Were stretched the fields of waving corn.
Soft on my ear the warbling birds
  Were heralding the birth of morn.

While here and there a cottage quaint
  Seemed to repose in quiet ease
Amid the trees, whose leaflets waved
  And fluttered in the passing breeze.

O morning hour! so dear thy joy,
  And how I longed for thee to last;
But e’en thy fading into day
  Brought me an echo of the past.

’Twas this,—how fair my life began;
  How pleasant was its hour of dawn;
But, merging into sorrow’s day,
  Then beauty faded with the morn.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 23, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

Let Me Not Lose My Dream
 ~Georgia Douglas Johnson

Let me not lose my dream, e'en though I scan the veil
      with eyes unseeing through their glaze of tears,
Let me not falter, though the rungs of fortune perish
      as I fare above the tumult, praying purer air,
Let me not lose the vision, gird me, Powers that toss
      the worlds, I pray!
Hold me, and guard, lest anguish tear my dreams away!

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 8, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

Altitude
 ~Cyrus Cassells

You’ve just died in my arms,
But suddenly it seems we’re eternal

Cali boys, Afro-haired cohorts in crime,
Racing through intricate lattices

Of quince and lemon tree shadows,
Corridors of Queen Anne’s lace—

On the skip-church Sunday you dubbed me
“Sir Serious” instead of Cyrus—

Then, swift as a deer’s leap, we’re devotees
Of goatees and showy Guatemalan shirts,

Intoxicated lovers for a month
On the northwest coast of Spain—

Praising the irrepressible sounds
Of a crusty Galician bagpiper

On La Coruña’s gripping finisterre,
Then gossiping and climbing

(Like the giddy Argonauts we were)
The lofty, ancient Roman lighthouse,

All the way—Keep on truckin’, we sang—
To the top of the Tower of Hercules—

Copyright © 2019 by Cyrus Cassells. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 30, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

Hello
 ~Sean Hill

She, being the midwife
and your mother’s
longtime friend, said
I see a heart; can you
see it? And on the grey
display of the ultrasound
there you were as you were,
our nugget, in that moment
becoming a shrimp
or a comma punctuating
the whole of my life, separating
its parts—before and after—,
a shrimp in the sea
of your mother, and I couldn’t
help but see the fast
beating of your heart
translated on that screen
and think and say to her,
to the room, to your mother,
to myself It looks like
a twinkling star.
I imagine I’m not
the first to say that either.
Unlike the first moments
of my every day,
the new of seeing you was the first
—deserving of the definite article—
moment I saw a star
at once so small and so
big, so close and getting closer
every day, I pray.

Copyright © 2019 by Sean Hill. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 13, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

Yearnings For Home
 ~Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Oh let me go I’m weary here
And fevers scorch my brain,
I long to feel my native air
Breathe o’er each burning vein.

I long once more to see
My home among the distant hills,
To breathe amid the melody
Of murmering brooks and rills.

My home is where eternal snow
Round threat’ning craters sleep,
Where streamlets murmer soft and low
And playful cascades leap.

Tis where glad scenes shall meet
My weary, longing eye;
Where rocks and Alpine forests greet
The bright cerulean sky.

Your scenes are bright I know,
But there my mother pray’d,
Her cot is lowly, but I go
To die beneath its shade.

For, Oh I know she’ll cling
‘Round me her treasur’d long,
My sisters too will sing
Each lov’d familiar song.

They’ll soothe my fever’d brow,
As in departed hours,
And spread around my dying couch
The brightest, fairest flowers.

Then let me go I’m weary here
And fevers scorch my brain,
I long to feel my native air,
Breathe o’er each burning vein.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 15, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

Unruly
 ~Jari Bradley

Hushed whispers in an undisclosed room
            Take it out of the girl
a child, boyish in nature                     their smallness magnified.

Outcasted—the soft bodied animal you are
determined unruly animalia,
                                                    what survives inflation & inertia?

The body is a set of complex feedback systems
nothing is as it appears
                                                   the coexistence of a beard & breasts
                                                   evidence of the body’s willfully defiant
                                                       nature

The body’s resilience amid the promise of perish:
                                              somehow the child survives their own hand
                                              the day’s weary edge inverted toward grace

A child, boyish in their nature           & barrel shaped
            survives sedimented against the residue
            of dunes, soil, leaf litter,         & the bodies of a lesser

What couldn’t be excised
            your boyish nature
            your untamed phylum,         your small heart pulsing loud
                                                               notes against the night.

Copyright © 2020 by Jari Bradley. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 8, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

A Far Country
~Leslie Pinckney Hill

Beyond the cities I have seen,
Beyond the wrack and din,
There is a wide and fair demesne
Where I have never been.

Away from desert wastes of greed,
Over the peaks of pride,
Across the seas of mortal need
Its citizens abide.

And through the distance though I see
How stern must be the fare,
My feet are ever fain to be
Upon the journey there.

In that far land the only school
The dwellers all attend
Is built upon the Golden Rule,
And man to man is friend.

No war is there nor war’s distress,
But truth and love increase—
It is a realm of pleasantness,
And all her paths are peace.

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

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

Thoughts
 ~Myra Viola Wilds

What kind of thoughts now, do you carry
   In your travels day by day
Are they bright and lofty visions,
   Or neglected, gone astray?

Matters not how great in fancy,
    Or what deeds of skill you’ve wrought;
Man, though high may be his station,
    Is no better than his thoughts.

Catch your thoughts and hold them tightly,
   Let each one an honor be;
Purge them, scourge them, burnish brightly,
   Then in love set each one free.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 18, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

Sophia the Robot Contemplates Beauty
 ~Safiya Sinclair

As a girl I held the hind
legs of the small and terrified, wanted
the short-fur and the wet meat furrowing.

Wanted the soft cry of the quavering
boy at primary school, rockstone

mashed up against his tender head,
the sick milk of us poor ones sucked
clean from a Government-issued plastic bag.

At lunchtime children were lethal
and precise, a horde hurling “Ben-foot”
at she who was helpless and I

waking too-surprised to hear my own
cruel mouth taunting. Her smile some
handsome forgery of myself.

Grateful, even now,
they cannot see the bald-wire
patois of my shamdom—

Makeshift, dreaming the warmth
spent in the muscle of the living,
the girl I grew inside my head dreaming

of a real girl, dreaming.
I wanted a pearled purse so I stole it.
I wanted a real friend so I let him. Let her.

Let him. Let him. Let him.

This beauty I am eager to hoard
comes slippery on ordinary days,

comes not at all, comes never.

Yet I am a pure shelled-thing. Glistening
manmade against the wall where one
then two fingers entered

the first time,
terror dazzling the uncertainty
of pleasure. Its God as real as girlhood.

Copyright © 2020 by Safiya Sinclair. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 4, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month

Inheritance
~Camille Rankine

What have I

To say in my wrong tongue

Of what is gone   To know something is

Lost but what   You have forgotten what

You long forgot   If I am 

What survives   I am here but I am not

Much of anything at all   To be what’s left 

And all the rest scooped out 

And dropped into the sea   My flesh

Forming a knot on itself is a habit

Learned from whom   A mind reaching back

Into the dark a body releasing itself

Backward into space a faith

I have no prayer in which to keep

Am I home or merely caught

Between two unmarked graves

I’m saying where we live

It’s a mistake   A compromise 

I’m made to make   

I’m told come willingly 

Halfway across a bridge to where

I’m halfway human   Or else 

A door bricked over 

Behind which all I am   

To be shadow cast by shadows cast

By no one’s hand   And now

Whose fault am I   It’s said 

I stand against the grain

Of natural law   A being in chaos

In argument with itself   What would it be

To be simply   I am here but what of me 

That’s gone stays gone

Copyright © 2019 by Camille Rankine. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 5, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month Edition

Bird
 ~Niki Herd

Yesterday, at Shepherd and Gray, the parking lot was
filled with birds, black birds, actually grackles. It was a grackle
lot; instead of a bumper on a car, there were ten grackles, instead
of a sunroof, fifty grackles sat high, their bodies shimmers
under cheap strip mall lights as shoppers delayed their spending
to pull out phones and take shots, such spectators we were,
like that summer in July, when I was left again
to wonder who was the child and who the adult,
that Sunday evening that hung in the air like bug spray
when my father, the one who fed me and gave me his last name,
stood two stories on our family porch, every neighbor,
in all manner of dress, drawn from their homes, in the street watching.
Let me tell you how he spread his arms wide, like the man
he was before Vietnam, or before the schizophrenia.
Let me tell you how a child learns the alphabet by counting,
how she learns only 2 letters separate the words hero and heroin,
how he stood high on the ledge of a porch the child never much
liked because there was a crack in its wooden center as if the world
was waiting to open its jaws to swallow her body whole.
Let me tell you how that July evening didn’t hold death,
but instead was the preface to death. The point being he jumped.
Some will say there are worse songs to sing, others might believe it
a tragedy, but who are we to question the Gods when a man
unconcerned with the inconvenience of his presence shows up
in a parking lot winged as an army of himself? Eventually, lights
went dark in the shops and each watcher retraced their steps back
           home
to find their families, to rejoice over food, to laugh and settle the night;
and the birds, steadfast they stood, not quite ready for flight—


Copyright © 2020 by Niki Herd. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 20, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

OOPS... got caught in drafts... Black History Month POETRY

My Mother and Lucille Clifton Have Tea
 ~Parneshia Jones

When I get to where I’m going
I want the death of my children explained to me.
                                             —Lucille Clifton

They meet over tea and potato chips.
Brown and buttermilk women,
hipped and hardened,
legs uncrossed but proper
still in their smiles;
smiles that carry a sadness in faint creases.
A sadness they will never be without.

One asks the other,
“What do they call a woman who has lost a child?”

The other sighs between sips of lukewarm tea.
There is no name for us.

“No name? But there has to be a name for us.
We must have something to call ourselves.”

Surely, history by now and all the women
who carry their babies’ ghosts on their backs,
mothers who wake up screaming,
women wide awake in their nightmares,
mothers still expected to be mothers and human,
women who stand under hot showers weeping,
mothers who wish they could drown standing up,
women who can still smell them—hear them,
the scent and symphony of their children,
deep down in the good earth.

“Surely, history has not forgotten to name us?”

No woman wants to bear
whatever could be the name for this grief.
Even if she must bear the grief for all her days,
it would be far too painful to be called by that name.

“I’ve lost two, you know.”
Me too.
“I was angry at God, you know.”
Me too.
“I stopped praying but only for a little while,
and then I had no choice. I had to pray again.
I had to call out to something that was no longer there.
I had to believe God knew where it was.”

“I fear death no longer. It has taken everything.
But should I be? Should I be afraid of what death has taken?
That it took and left no name?”

The other who sighs between sips of lukewarm tea
leans over and kisses the cheek of the one still with questions.
She whispers…

No, you don’t have to be afraid.
Death is no more scary than the lives we have lived
without our babies, bound to this grief
with no name.

Copyright © 2019 Parneshia Jones. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 22, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, Black History Month Edition

Winter
~Constance Merritt

     after Lucie Brock-Broido

winter crossing
bleak annulled
dulcimer damaged
choir miraculous
air &
monstrous ravishing
animal fallen
calls nightsky
ghost spectacle
again lynch
light loved
flint bliss
starfish tissue
shrouds lukewarm
sheathes everything
fanatic vanishing


Copyright © 2020 by Constance Merritt. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 22, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday

I Am Like A Leaf
 ~Yone Noguchi

The silence is broken: into the nature 
  My soul sails out, 
Carrying the song of life on his brow,
   To meet the flowers and birds.

When my heart returns in the solitude, 
   She is very sad,
Looking back on the dead passions
  Lying on Love’s ruin. 

I am like a leaf
   Hanging over hope and despair, 
Which trembles and joins 
  The world’s imagination and ghost. 

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 28, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday

Brown Love
 ~Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Brown love is getting the pat down but not the secondary screening
and waiting after you clear to make sure the Sikh man or
the Black woman or the hijabis behind you get through

Brown love is asking the Punjabi guy working at the starbucks
knockoff if all the tea sizes are still the same price
and he says no,
it hasn’t been like that for at least four years,
but he slips you an extra tea bag without talking about it.

Brown love is the unsmiling aunty
at the disabled immigration line
barking
anything to declare? No? No? Have a good day.
and your rice, semolina, kari karo seeds and jaggary all get through
even though they are definitely from countries
where there are insects that could eat america to the ground

Brown love is texting your cousin on whatsapp asking
if she’s ever had a hard time bringing weed tincture in her carry on

brown love is a balm
in this airport of life

where, if we can scrape up enough money
we all end up
because we all came from somewhere
and we want to go there
or we can’t go to there but we want to go to the place we went after that
where our mom still lives even though we fight
or our chosen sis is still in her rent controlled perfect apartment
where we get the luxury of things being like how we remember
we want to go to the place we used to live
and even if gentrification snatched the bakery
with the 75 cent coffee where everyone hung out all night
we can still walk the block where it was
and remember

and the thing about brown love is, nobody smiles.
nobody is friendly. nobody winks. nobody can get away with that
they’re all silently working their terrible 9 dollar an hour
food service jobs where tip jars aren’t allowed
or TSA sucks but it’s the job you can get out of the military
and nobody can get away with being outwardly loving
but we do what we can

brown love is the woman who lets your 1 pound over the 50 pound
         limit bag go
the angry woman who looks like your cousin
who is so tired on the american airlines customer service line
she tags your bag for checked luggage
and doesn’t say anything about a credit card, she just yells Next!
Brown love is your tired cousin who prays you all the way home
from when you get on the subway to when you land and get on another.
This is what we have
We do what we can.

Poetry Thursday, a classic

When Great Trees Fall
~Maya Angelou

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

My Year of Books, part 2, THE LISTS!

Turns out that you can "like" a book for different reasons - some books on my list were notable for the impact they had on me, even though I wouldn't necessarily call all of these my favorites from the list.

Favorites are still the ones I want to own, have on my shelf and read again someday, or at least think I would read again. There are plenty of books I really enjoyed, had great impact, or just plain enjoyed for the ideas/worlds presented, but I wouldn't want to read again.

None of these lists is more important than the other, in my heart, they are just different.

Here are my lists** ... finally ...

Favorites - as in I would read *again*
Nimona - Noelle Stevenson (keeping it til it's due to listen to AGAIN and AGAIN)
The Rules of Magic -Alice Hoffman
The Cutting Season - Attica Locke (already read it twice)
With the Fire on High - Elizabeth Acevedo
Tattoos on the Heart - Fr. Greg Boyle [to be reread everytime I need inspiration/perspective]
Speak - Laurie Halse Anderson [WOW]
The Poet X - Elizabeth Acevedo
The Astonishing Color of After - Emily X. R. Pan
The Museum of Extraordinary Things - Alice Hoffman

Most impactful - as in I am glad I read, probably won't read again
The Muralist - B. A. Shapiro
Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens
Barking to the Choir - Fr. Greg Boyle
Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi
The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
The Line Becomes a River - Francisco Cantu
The Lightkeepers - Abby Geni

Glad I tried, I really enjoyed, but not *favorites*
Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk - Kathleen Rooney
Jojo Moyes - Me Before You (series of three books)
Gennifer Choldenko - Al Capone/Alcatraz (series of four books)
The Bastard of Istanbul - Elif Shafak
The Wildlands - Abby Geni
The Beekeepers' Lament - Hannah Nordhaus
The Story Sisters - Alice Hoffman

New to Me Authors - will keep reading everything they write!
Abbi Geni
Attica Locke
Anne Hillerman [I LOVE her take on the Chee/Leaphorn/Manuelito mysteries]
Elizabeth Acevedo
Alice Hoffman (I am working through her list of books, some I love, some I didn't, but she is GREAT!)
Laura Lippman (worked through all the audio available, ready for next book Ms. Lippman!)
Elif Shafak - please more books on audio!

2018 reads I should I have written about
There There - Tommy Orange
Leaving Atlanta - Tayari Jones
An American Marriage - Tayari Jones
The Mars Room - Rachel Kushner
The Untelling - Tayari Jones

In Other Words - Jhumpa Lahiri

You Don't Have to Say You Love Me - Sherman Alexie

The House of Broken Angels - Luis Alberto Urrea

Hunger - Roxane Gay

Children of Blood and Bone - Tomi Adeyemi

**These lists are probably more in timeframe order, going backwards from the most recent I read, not in how much I liked them! :)

My Year of 144+ books.... part 1

I was writing this really long intro to my favorite books of the year, and then I realized I was doing that thing I hate ... making someone read to the end to get to what was promised.

So, instead, I am dividing up the post. I SWEAR this is not a dangling parts post. I really already wrote and POSTED part 2!

...

I set myself a seemingly impossible goal of 12 books per month as my goal for 2019. April was nearly my undoing as I got behind by 8 books. But I used May, June and July to get back in the game. I started choosing "lighter" books, in part, because my book clubs were killing me with long, involved family trauma books. I needed a vacation from my heavy books. But, I also needed lighter fare that I could just get through more quickly to catch up.

I learned a few things. I relax by reading serial killer books. I don't know if others have this as their beach read style. I tried romance novels. But I spent more time gagging and being horrified by the inner monologue of all the female leads than listening to the books.

Sometimes you just have to give up on a book. You don't have to slog through every last word of a book that you hate. Goodreads was not my friend on this. If I said I was "currently reading" something, which was my standard habit: start a book, mark it on Goodreads. It seemed like the easiest way to do it. Then I felt guilty about abandoning the book when I hated it.

Here's how I solved that problem: 1) I created a shelf called "tried-and-hated", and 2) try books for the first forty pages before marking it "currently reading".

I didn't want to lose credit for a book who I had read passed its usefulness, but had already wasted significant hours trying to get into it. And then I wouldn't have to leave a book in the currently reading limbo forever.

Trying books was a hard concept for me because I needed to get through so many books in a month, but necessary, and, in the end, useful. I would go through a library's online available list and download three or four. Then I would try one. And if I didn't immediately love it, go on to the next one. At first, I would send it back to the library if it wasn't love at first listen. Then I realized the issue.

After just finishing a book I had come to love in the listening, any book I tried was never good enough. But I didn't have the luxury of time to savor the book before starting a new one. So, sampling was great. I would listen to a chapter on one, then another and another until the one that would ultimately be my next book was clear. That didn't mean that I abandoned all the others. Since I had already listened to the first chapter, I would go back and give each another try. Sometimes in the second listen, a book would hit. Others never hit, and I sent them back to the library for others to peruse.

If you need to get through a lot books really quickly, trying new things and giving up on them if they are not your cup of tea is the ticket. At the end of the year, you also have a really diverse set of books.

I am trying to figure out which books I liked the best. As I look through my list, I am pleased by the diverse sample of books. It also makes me want to set my sights on new challenges for myself.

This year, I tried to read more Black women writing mysteries. Since I am listening, it turns out to be harder than you think because so many books I want are not available in audio, or not available through the library on audio.

I like some romance books, but there are also lots of romance novels that are not for me.

I really, really like serial killer books. I still don't know what about them makes me feel unencumbered and relaxed. That introspection is for another post.

Lists tomorrow...

HEY

I am not dead.

I am not writing.

I am just over here living life and feeling overwhelmed.

I might hate everyone and everything less if I unloaded over here more often. But that doesn't seem like a friendly way to use this space.

So, just dropping in to say that I have drafts in the folder, and they will be out next week.

I PROMISE.

Happy New YEAR, almost.