April 2011
30 posts
4 tags
April 30, 2011: Wandering Around an Albuquerque...
Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal Naomi Shihab Nye After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, Please come to the gate immediately. Well — one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, Just like my grandma wore,...
4 tags
April 29, 2011: Prayer, Marie Howe
Prayer Marie Howe
Someone or something is leaning close to me now trying to tell me the one true story of my life: one note, low as a bass drum, beaten over and over: It’s beginning summer, and the man I love has forgotten my smell the cries I made when he touched me, and my laughter when he picked me up and carried me, still laughing, and laid me down, among the scattered daffodils on...
4 tags
April 28, 2011: Like Kerosene, Olena Kalytiak...
Like Kerosene Olena Kalytiak Davis Yes, it’s daily that we move into each other—but this morning I was separate even from myself— my hands were shovels, I had mosquito netting for hair, and the insect beating against the night was my heart. My name was hallow and the sky was made of shale when I walked into a part of morning I’ve never seen: the sky still heavy, still smoldering with the...
5 tags
April 27, 2011: from The Wild Geese, Wendell Berry
from The Wild Geese Wendell Berry
Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.
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Read the full poem.
More like this: Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
On this day in…
...
6 tags
April 26, 2011: In Praise of My Bed, Meredith...
In Praise of My Bed Meredith Holmes
At last I can be with you! The grinding hours since I left your side! The labor of being fully human, working my opposable thumb, talking, and walking upright. Now I have unclasped unzipped, stepped out of. Husked, soft, a be-er only, I do nothing, but point my bare feet into your clean smoothness feel your quiet strength the whole length of my body. I close my...
5 tags
April 25, 2011: Three Rivers, Alpay Ulku
Three Rivers Alpay Ulku What are you doing now, Anne-Marie, on the night we would bring home good things to cook and watch movies from the 1940’s, the work week finally at an end. Who will light the stove for you now that I’m not there? I imagine you in our city of bridges, where the mid-West flows into the East and South, singing. What with the apple trees baring...
4 tags
April 24, 2011: Sweet Star Chisel, Dearest Flaming...
Sweet Star Chisel, Dearest Flaming Crumbs in Your Beard Lord, John Rybicki May my body last—last so I can sing apple blossoms blown out of my open mouth and raining their petals onto rag-top convertibles, and fields of wild asparagus; raining their petals onto milk barns and silos and blowing them wide open; petals melting down onto the tongues of men and women hanging their clock faces...
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April 23, 2011: the laughing heart, Charles...
the laughing heart Charles Bukowski
your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is a light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them. you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do...
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April 22, 2011: Northern Pike, James Wright
Northern Pike James Wright
All right. Try this, Then. Every body I know and care for, And every body Else is going To die in a loneliness I can’t imagine and a pain I don’t know. We had To go on living. We Untangled the net, we slit The body of this fish Open from the hinge of the tail To a place beneath the chin I wish I could sing of. I would just as soon we let The living go on...
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April 21, 2011: The Forties, Franz Wright
The Forties Franz Wright And in the desert cold men invented the star
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More by (& about) Franz Wright:
Letter | The Only Animal | The Poem | Publication Date
On this day in…
2010: Prayer of the Backhanded, Jericho Brown 2009: A Primer, Bob Hicok 2008: Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry, Howard Nemerov 2007: Open Letter to the Muse, Kristy Bowen...
3 tags
April 20, 2011: Staying After, Linda Gregg
Staying After Linda Gregg I grew up with horses and poems when that was the time for that. Then Ginsberg and Orlovsky in the Fillmore West when everybody was dancing. I sat in the balcony with my legs pushed through the railing, watching Janis Joplin sing. Women have houses now, and children. I live alone in a kind of luxury. I wake when I feel like it, read what Rilke wrote to Tsvetaeva. At night...
6 tags
April 19, 2011: I Remember, Anne Sexton
I Remember Anne Sexton
By the first of August the invisible beetles began to snore and the grass was as tough as hemp and was no color—no more than the sand was a color and we had worn our bare feet bare since the twentieth of June and there were times we forgot to wind up your alarm clock and some nights we took our gin warm and neat from old jelly glasses while the sun blew out of...
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April 18, 2011: Written in Pencil in the Sealed...
Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car Dan Pagis here in this carload i am eve with abel my son if you see my other son cain son of man tell him that i
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translated from the Hebrew by Stephen Mitchell Other Holocaust poems:
September Song, Geoffrey Hill All There is to Know About Adolph Eichmann, Leonard Cohen
On this day in…
2010: The Moss of His Skin, Anne Sexton 2009: It’s...
5 tags
April 17, 2011: from Narrative: Ali, Elizabeth...
from Narrative: Ali a poem in twelve rounds Elizabeth Alexander 1. My head so big they had to pry me out. I’m sorry Bird (is what I call my mother). Cassius Marcellus Clay, Muhammad Ali; you can say my name in any language, any continent: Ali. 2. Two photographs of Emmett Till, born my year, on my birthday. One, he’s smiling, happy, and the other one is after. His mother did the...
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April 16, 2011: Why They Went, Elizabeth Bradfield
Why They Went Elizabeth Bradfield
that men might learn what the world is like at the spot where the sun does not decline in the heavens. —Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Frost bitten. Snow blind. Hungry. Craving fresh pie and hot toddies, a whole roasted unflippered thing to carve. Craving a bed that had, an hour before entering, been warmed with a stone from the hearth. Always back to Eden—to the time...
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April 15, 2011: Trying to Raise the Dead, Dorianne...
Trying to Raise the Dead Dorianne Laux
Look at me. I’m standing on a deck in the middle of Oregon. There are friends inside the house. It’s not my house, you don’t know them. They’re drinking and singing and playing guitars. You love this song. Remember? “Ophelia.” Boards on the windows, mail by the door. I’m whispering so they won’t think I’m crazy. They don’t know me that well. Where are you...
April 14, 2011: Happiness (3), Jean Valentine
Happiness (3) Jean Valentine The moment you turned to me on W. 4th St. Your gentleness to me The hard winter grass here under my shoes The frost I knelt in the frost to your parents The warm light on the right hand side of your face The light on the Buddha’s eyelids I knelt to my parents Their suffering How much sleep there...
1 tag
April 13, 2011: Graves We Filled Before the Fire,...
Graves We Filled Before the Fire Gabrielle Calvocoressi Some lose children in lonelier ways: tetanus, hard falls, stubborn fevers that soak the bedclothes five nights running. Our two boys went out to skate, broke through the ice like battleships, came back to us in canvas bags: curled fossils held fast in ancient stone, four hands reaching. Then two sad beds wide enough for planting wheat or...
4 tags
April 12, 2011: Now That I Am in Madrid and Can...
Now That I Am in Madrid and Can Think Frank O’Hara
I think of you and the continents brilliant and arid and the slender heart you are sharing my share of with the American air as the lungs I have felt sonorously subside slowly greet each morning and your brown lashes flutter revealing two perfect dawns colored by New York see a vast bridge stretching to the humbled outskirts with only you...
4 tags
April 11, 2011: Across a Great Wilderness without...
Across a Great Wilderness without You Keetje Kuipers
The deer come out in the evening. God bless them for not judging me, I’m drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe and make strange noises at them— language, if language can be a kind of crying. The tin cans scattered in the meadow glow, each bullet hole suffused with moon, like the...
5 tags
April 10, 2011: Consolation for Tamar, A.E....
Consolation for Tamar A.E. Stallings
on the occasion of her breaking an ancient pot You know I am no archeologist, Tamar, And that to me it is all one dust or another. Still, it must mean something to survive the weather Of the Ages—earthquake, flood, and war— Only to shatter in your very hands. Perhaps it was gravity, or maybe fated— Although I wonder if it had not waited Those years in...
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April 9, 2011: Death, Is All, Ana Božičević
Death, Is All Ana Božičević
I woke up real early to write about death (the lake through the trees) from the angle of the angel. There’s the kind of angel that when I say Someone please push me out of the way Of this bad poem like it was a bus.—well, it comes running & tackles me and oh, it’s divine football—Or in the dream when the transparent buses came barreling towards us:—it...
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April 8, 2011: Getting Away with It, Jack Gilbert
Getting Away with It Jack Gilbert
We have already lived in the real paradise. Horses in the empty summer street. Me eating the hot wurst I couldn’t afford, in frozen Munich, tears dropping. We can remember. A child in the outfield waiting for the last fly ball of the year. So dark already it was black against heaven. The voices trailing away to dinner, calling faintly in the immense...
6 tags
April 7, 2011: Boston, Aaron Smith
Boston Aaron Smith
I’ve been meaning to tell you how the sky is pink here sometimes like the roof of a mouth that’s about to chomp down on the crooked steel teeth of the city, I remember the desperate things we did and that I stumble down sidewalks listening to the buzz of street lamps at dusk and the crush of leaves on the pavement, Without you here...
8 tags
April 6, 2011: Pluto, Maggie Dietz
Pluto Maggie Dietz
Don’t feel small. We have all been demoted. Go on being moon or rock or orb, buoyant and distant, smallest craft ball at Vanevenhoven’s Hardware spray-painted purple or day-glow orange for a child’s elliptical vision of fish line, cardboard and foam. No spacecraft has touched you, no flesh met the luster of your heavenly body. Little cold one, blow your...
6 tags
April 5, 2011: Now comes the long blue cold, Mary...
Now comes the long blue cold Mary Oliver
Now comes the long blue cold and what shall I say but that some bird in the tree of my heart is singing. That same heart that only yesterday was a room shut tight, without dreams. Isn’t it wonderful—the cold wind and spring in the heart inexplicable. Darling girl. Picklock.
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On this day in…
2010: Jackie Robinson, Lucille Clifton 2009: In the...
4 tags
April 4, 2011: I Said to Poetry, Alice Walker
I Said to Poetry Alice Walker
I said to Poetry: “I’m finished with you.” Having to almost die before some weird light comes creeping through is no fun. “No thank you, Creation, no muse need apply. I’m out for good times— at the very least, some painless convention.” Poetry laid back and played dead until this morning. I wasn’t sad or anything, ...
5 tags
April 3, 2011: Expecting, Kevin Young
Expecting Kevin Young
Grave, my wife lies back, hands cross her chest, while the doctor searches early for your heartbeat, peach pit, unripe
plum–pulls out the world’s worst boom box, a Mr. Microphone, to broadcast your mother’s lifting belly.
The whoosh and bellows of mama’s body and beneath it: nothing. Beneath the slow stutter of her heart: nothing.
The doctor trying again to find...
6 tags
April 2, 2011: Onset, Kim Addonizio
Onset Kim Addonizio
Watching that frenzy of insects above the bush of white flowers, bush I see everywhere on hill after hill, all I can think of is how terrifying spring is, in its tireless, mindless replications. Everywhere emergence: seed case, chrysalis, uterus, endless manufacturing. And the wrapped stacks of Styrofoam cups in the grocery, lately I can’t stand them, the shelves of...
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April 1, 2011: New York Poem, Terrance Hayes
New York Poem Terrance Hayes
In New York from a rooftop in Chinatown one can see the sci-fi bridges and aisles of buildings where there are more miles of shortcuts and alternative takes than there are Miles Davis alternative takes. There is a white girl who looks hi- jacked with feeling in her glittering jacket and her boots that look made of dinosaur skin and R is saying to her I love...