Category: poems

The holidays are over, the birthdays are over, and now it’s back to work in the gloomy winter. What can be done? Find those “joys far more ordinary” (and turn on your SAD Lamps).

Midwinter Poem
by Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Oh intervals of light in untold sunless days
hardbacked by dusk, there is no guidebook
for the years within a year called winter.
Season of the see-it-through, the out-of-office,
the batten-down. Monied guarantor of the sad
and SAD Lamps alike — hemispheric accidents, all,
of our axial tilt. If not by flying south, what else to do
but stay and bear it? How else to survive, if not by light,
then by joys far more ordinary, unremarkable perhaps,
but good as any that warm the dark days of our lives.

I’m a sucker for poems related to Christmas (and for carols too; this is accurate). I like how this one rambles and is sad but also hopeful–the classic December mix of feelings.

 

Advent
by Heather Christle

It’s hopeless, the stars, the books
about stars, they can’t help themselves
and how could you not love them for it
here in the new week with animals
burying food and everything outlined
in cold and even friends, it’s hopeless,
this mess, this season, all that
is lost and tickets and strangers,
what can I say, only sitting here
on this dark bench waiting for what
I don’t know, I want this world
to remain with me, this holy tumult,
which does not know it loves me
and you, friends, spectacular driveways,
an orange, the vanishing year.

This is a tender one: “I think about them, in their hollows, in forest and field, millions / Of tiny hearts racing and parents trying to cover their nestlings.”

You Too
by John Jeremiah Sullivan

I saw a YouTube video of an owl inside its nest during a storm.
The scientists had installed a hidden camera in its little hollow.
The clip surprised me, in that the owl appeared very frightened.
I hadn’t pictured birds as being scared of thunder and lightning.
They’re at one with nature, I figured. It could never shock them.
But this one staggered backward until its back ran into the wall.
It moved just the way someone will when an earthquake begins,
Or after walking into a hallway only to find a wild animal there.
Ever since seeing that clip, I do not experience storms the same.
Now when the lightning flashes white, and I wait for the boom,
I think about them, in their hollows, in forest and field, millions
Of tiny hearts racing and parents trying to cover their nestlings.
The landscape is full of that feeling. An owl in a video looks up.
Its eyes are big and round, not certain what any of this portends,
And follow the sound of the wind-driven rain outside the room.

I found this yesterday (via the Muppets and poetry account, lol) and it’s so good… Corn like cellos! Or chiaroscuro! “These days are songs, noon air/ that flows like warm honey, the maple trees’ glissando/of fat buttery leaves.” Exactly what it feels like right now.

 

This Time of Year
by Barbara Crooker

when the light leaves early, sun slipping down
behind the beech trees as easily as a spoon
of cherry cough syrup, four deer step delicately
up our path, just at the moment when the colors
shift, to eat fallen apples in the tall grass.
Great grey ghosts. If we steal outside in the dark,
we can hear them chew. A sudden movement,
they’re gone, the whiteness of their tails
a burning afterimage. A hollow pumpkin moon rises,
turns the dried corn to chiaroscuro, shape and shadow;
the breath of the wind draws the leaves and stalks
like melancholy cellos. These days are songs, noon air
that flows like warm honey, the maple trees’ glissando
of fat buttery leaves. The sun goes straight to the gut
like a slug of brandy, an eau-de-vie. Ochre October:
the sky, a blue dazzle, the grand finale of trees,
this spontaneous applause; when darkness falls
like a curtain, the last act, the passage of time,
that blue current; October, and the light leaves early,
our radiant hungers, all these golden losses.

This feels like the spirit of Mary Oliver (“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”)–just lovely, and every list veers off somewhere unexpected but amazing. Alpha Centauri to Delft! Custard to Verdi!

 

The Happiest Day of Your Life
by Michael Lavers

You wake up and hear rain. You wake up
and think there’s not enough rain, not enough
songs about rain or memories of rain.
Of being numbed or warmed by rain.

You wake up. Your eyes are open.
Lilies in a moss-green bowl. Elms through
the window moving their hands like cellists.
Books exist. And paintings. And pillows.

Blue Mountain and Saddle Mountain.
Abundance Creek. Alpha Centauri. Delft.
The woman in your dream was putting down
a crate of oranges, but then you woke up

remembering there is custard.
There is Verdi, there is smoke-filled
late-fall air. And even joy in what
it feels like to grieve. Wanting to sleep

instead of bear what you must.
Like finishing the best book in the world.
You wake up, wanting to try.
You try. Here in the swirling eddies,

in the dark river of time and decay.
There is rain. There is this day. There is
this day and no other. Praise it with trumpets
and zithers. Praise it however you can.

I saved this one because of the lines in the middle: “Your heart, that place/ you don’t even think of cleaning out./ That closet stuffed with savage mementos.”

 

Advice to Myself
by Louise Erdrich

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic–decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

There is indeed a poem for everything, and this is a lovely one. In the words of the poet herself: “spiraled about my 90s kitchen backsplash and had to touch grass (write a poem).”

Before the Guests
by Kate Baer

In the end it’s who we loved —
how we’d sit out on the patio after it had rained,
telling the same stories about the family dog.
How, when invited over for a campfire, a round of cards,
a late night summer swim, we’d pile in the car,
show up empty handed to a house lit up
by familiar conversation. Yes, you can
build whole kingdoms of picture perfect
laundry rooms and remodeled kitchen walls,
but when the light comes from every direction,
ready to carry you to the great unknown,
there is only one thing I’ll care to remember:
August nights, September mornings,
entire seasons spent loving you.

Oh no, another poem about the bittersweet melancholy of knowing summer will end! This time, it’s in sonnet form, which makes me think I should read more formalist poetry.

The Last Warm Saturday
by Jane Greer

The last warm Saturday, the final mowing —
that drone, that fragrance — with the traitor sun
low-angled, making all this not quite right.
Here is a bitter yearly winnowing
of what’s to come from what is in decline,
parsed in the language of the changing light.

I know this language but I cannot speak it.
I learned it from my senses, over time.
It warms me and it makes me cold and mute.
In trying to express its deepest secret,
all I can mumble is its paradigm:
that loss and bliss come from the same root.

Did I realize one pool is closing THIS SUNDAY and the other one is only going to be open on weekdays for another week? Is it darker just a little bit earlier now? Did the light change just enough to make me think, “Oh no, summer is starting to wind down”? Time for Adrienne Rich!

 

Contradictions: Tracking Poems No. 28
by Adrienne Rich

This high summer we love will pour its light
the fields grown rich and ragged in one strong moment
then before we’re ready will crash into autumn
with a violence we can’t accept
a bounty we can’t forgive
Night frost will strike when the noons are warm
the pumpkins wildly growing         the green tomatoes
straining huge on the vines
queen anne and blackeyed susan will straggle rusty
as milkweed stakes her claim
she who will stand at last         dark sticks barely rising
up through the snow             her testament of continuation
We’ll dream of a longer summer
but this is the one we have:
I lay my sunburnt hand
on your table: this is the time we have