Category: poems

You know I love a sonnet, and this one has some great parts–“we’re all peninsulas, I guess, joined to the mainland, part of the shore”–plus it feels appropriate for the week before Thanksgiving.

 

Sonnet from the Ephesians
by Barbara Crooker

Ephesians 1:16

I do not cease to give thanks, especially in November
even as we lose an hour of light, drawing
the curtains at 4:30 to keep out the cold. To remember
you are dust seems appropriate now. Crows are cawing

black elegies in the bare trees. Just past the Day of the Dead,
and I’m thankful for every friend who has blessed
my life, gold coins in a wooden chest. Who said
no man is an island? We’re all peninsulas, I guess,

joined to the mainland, part of the shore. We’re the sticks
in the bundle that can’t be broken. Even if
it doesn’t seem that way, the bickering of politics,
the blather on the nightly news. Maybe we speak in hieroglyphs,
unclear, always missing the mark? So let me be plain.
I’m grateful for the days of sun. I’m grateful for the rain.

We did yard work (planting iris) (not literally) and have been watching stupid movies to keep us from being tempted to look at the devil’s butthole. We can all still make a fist.

 

Making a Fist
by Naomi Shihab Nye

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass. My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

This is a nice one, especially if you wake up creaky and cranky and wanting to run away into the forest or just sleep all day like your cat.

 

To Be a Person
by Jane Hirshfield

To be a person is an untenable proposition.

Odd of proportion,
upright,
unbalanced of body, feeling, and mind.

Two predators’ eyes
face forward,
yet seem always to be trying to look back.

Unhooved, untaloned fingers
seem to grasp mostly grief and pain.
To create, too often, mostly grief and pain.

Some take,
in witnessed suffering, pleasure.
Some make, of witnessed suffering, beauty.

On the other side—
a creature capable of blushing,
who chooses to spin until dizzy,
likes what is shiny,
demands to stay awake even when sleepy.

Learns what is basic, what acid,
what are stomata, nuclei, jokes,
which birds are flightless.
Learns to play four-handed piano.
To play, when it is needed, one-handed piano.

Hums. Feeds strays.
Says, “All together now, on three.”

To be a person may be possible then, after all.

Or the question may be considered still at least open—
an unused drawer, a pair of waiting work-boots.

This is a sad one but the world is sad right now–Israel spreading its attacks into Lebanon, people in the path of hurricanes still being told to show up to work. That last stanza really sums it up.

 

What They Did Yesterday Afternoon
by Warsan Shire

they set my aunts house on fire
i cried the way women on tv do
folding at the middle
like a five pound note.
i called the boy who use to love me
tried to ‘okay’ my voice
i said hello
he said warsan, what’s wrong, what’s happened?

i’ve been praying,
and these are what my prayers look like;
dear god
i come from two countries
one is thirsty
the other is on fire
both need water.

later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.

I try not to post too many poems from week to week, but it’s almost fall; it’s a poetic time. I saw this one on the Poetry Is Not a Luxury account. “This test again” sure sums up how I feel about sunset at 7:30, ha.

 

September
by Joseph Fasano

And now the first winds
purr what they’ve been learning
like a children’s choir
flipping through their hymnals.

This test again, this wintering,
this bite.

Summer, Summer’s roads are over-

And all these leaves,
this foliage on your shoulders-
like all the ghosts of childhood’s
wild silence
laying on their hands
as though to guide you.
It is time to fall into your life.

This was in the most recent Hell’s Backbone Grill newsletter and it’s really giving me Mary Oliver vibes. “There are many ways/ to face the dark” indeed.

 

Crickets
By Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

When they sing
it is a kind of love,
a pure-toned,
full-bodied ringing
born of friction.
You could say
it’s just a wingstroke
that makes a pulse of sound
that joins with all
the other pulses
to form a river of music,
and you would be right.
But there are many ways
to face the dark.
One is to hide.
One is to prowl.
One is to bring
the bright music
of your body
and offer it
to the night.
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

I saw this last week after I decided I had just won the war against the wasps trying to build something under the eaves. (I would go out every night and spray off their progress with the hose; I thought that was kinder than wasp spray but then I read this.)

 

The Yellow Jackets
by Janel Pineda

When they began nesting on the eaves of our home
the summer we were almost without one
I couldn’t find it in me to do anything
but watch one after the other, drifting
determinedly toward our roof.

They spent July busying themselves
with my father’s roses, picking
at caterpillars, taking refuge from the heat.
I watched their queen carry half her weight
in chewed-up wood, then use it to build
her hiding place on my porch.

Something tells me I should have gotten rid of them,
but what sense did it make? To rid myself
of what I could live peacefully beside?
To take their home while we begged to be
allowed to keep ours?

This is a gentle little one. The weather in it reminds me of that E.B. White letter from last Thursday–“things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly.”

 

Against Panic
by Molly Fisk

You recall those times, I know you do, when the sun
lifted its weight over a small rise to warm your face,
when a parched day finally broke open, real rain
sluicing down the sidewalk, rattling city maples
and you so sure the end was here, life a house of cards
tipped over, falling, hope’s last breath extinguished
in a bitter wind. Oh, friend, search your memory again–
beauty and relief are still there, only sleeping.

Kind of late today (just got distracted) but I saw this–“I want a president” by Zoe Leonard–after the debate a couple weeks ago, and yes. “And I want to know why this isn’t possible.”

 

Some context: I can’t find this as text, just the image of the text, and that’s because it’s treated more as visual art now. (It’s even in the Whitney.) From The Guardian:

Originally intended to be published as “a statement” in an underground LGBT magazine, I Want a President was written in the run-up to the 1992 US presidential race. This took place at the height of the AIDS epidemic, a medical issue turned political crisis that was, in the previous decade, catastrophically silenced by Ronald Reagan.
[…] In 2016, it was mounted on a colossal scale beneath the High Line, the New York park built on an old elevated railway line.