poems

Here’s a lovely little poem for Wednesday, something to remember as we keep on fighting the good fight. We can be the last leaves.

You Can’t
by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat
translated by Fady Joudah

They will fall in the end,
those who say you can’t.
It’ll be age or boredom that overtakes them,
or lack of imagination.
Sooner or later, all leaves fall to the ground.
You can be the last leaf.
You can convince the universe
that you pose no threat
to the tree’s life.

from You Can Be the Last Leaf, 2022

The trees are a few months away from actual leaves but the buds are there. Soon.

The Trees
by Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

This starts with birds (great! we love birds) and then veers into Monet (cool, ok) and ends with maybe the best depiction of grief over time I’ve ever read (oh my god that took a turn). But that’s what art is for, right? Giving you an expression for something you didn’t have before. “All the same but for the light.”

Everything Is a Sign Today
by Amanda Moore

Feather in the grass, stippled and striped:
hawk, I think. And then a man
blocking the sidewalk, child on his back,
both of them pointing binoculars toward the treetop
where I know a great horned owl nests, though I’ve never seen it.
All these birds: creatures I might never have known
had I not spent my childhood filling her feeders, naming
each genus from our perch at her kitchen table.
A falcon swoops down beside me on the path
gripping some rodent in its talons, twisting the body to kill.
Like the time a heron a few feet from our picnic blanket
plucked a whole mouse from its burrow and swept away. She had been
delighted, said we, too, should grab something special
of our own that day. Turning toward home,
I bend to collect a wrinkled postcard at the curb:
an advertisement for the Monet exhibit. How I loved
those paintings when I was younger, all of them nearly the same:
haystack, haystack, haystack. The only difference
the season and time of day, which is to say
they are like this grief these months later:
all the same but for the light.

This was another one from the Hell’s Backbone Grill newsletter and it feels really appropriate for getting used to a new job and starting the long trek through January, after all the celebrations are over. (Bonus, it’s the first time I’ve seen “bindweed” used in a poem.)

Though It Is Tough to Choose It
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Even a small discontent is enough to shut us down,
convince us that the world is cold and indifferent.
Everywhere there’s evidence of this: The slush

that falls on your car seat when you open the car door.
The carrion eaters with their great black wings
that linger beside the road. You pray for sun,

and it gets darker. Someone asks
you a question, and you see your whole life
fold into one small envelope of failure.

Then one day you hit against the same
impassable wall you always hit and this time you fall
to your knees, not because you are weak,

but because at last you are ready to be opened.
Oh sweet failure, how it leads us.
Any unhappy ending is only an invitation

to crawl into the blank pages
of the next unwritten chapter.
It was never success that transformed us—

always the breaking. Not the breaking itself,
but the mystery inside pushing through us
like bindweed through pavement

making cracks in everything
we think we know so that the world
can come streaming in.

Poems are everywhere–this one was in a Hell’s Backbone Grill email. It’s lovely and something to remember as we (I) fight the crowds and the traffic for the end of the year.

Big Lesson
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Today it feels so simple:
we are here to take care of each other.
How could we ever forget?
As if soil could forget
it is here to feed the trees.
As if trees could forget
they are here to feed the soil.
How could anything
ever get in the way of generosity?
How could we ever greet each other
with any words besides,
How can I help you?
As if light could forget
it is here to help illuminate.
As if dark could forget
it is here to help us heal.

I believe this is from a children’s book but it feels appropriate anyway.

November comes
And November goes,
With the last red berries
And the first white snows.

With night coming early,
And dawn coming late,
And ice in the bucket
And frost by the gate.

The fires burn
And the kettles sing,
And earth sinks to rest
Until next spring.

This is by Kyle “Guante” Tran Myhre and is part of a longer prose poem called, “To Throw a Wrench in the Blood Machine.”  That last line–let it motivate you:

Voting As Fire Extinguisher

When the haunted house catches fire:
a moment of indecision.

The house was, after all, built on bones,
and blood, and bad intentions.

Everyone who enters the house feels
that overwhelming dread, the evil
that perhaps only fire can purge.

It’s tempting to just let it burn.
And then I remember that there are children inside.

After the full poem, the author adds “additional commentary,” which includes this realistic look at how things are (and why voting still matters):

We already know that status-quo loving liberals aren’t going to save us. But for organizers, having a status-quo loving liberal in office is materially different than having an open fascist–especially when it comes to trans rights, reproductive justice, climate, and other issues where there is real daylight between the two otherwise-aligned capitalist parties. Elections aren’t just about choosing your allies; they can also be about choosing your opponents.

I saw this on the Poetry Is Not A Luxury Instagram and it really hit me: I, too, was an indoor child, and “I never wondered. I read.” This is by Dorianne Laux.

Moon in the Window

I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

Let’s just jump right into LITERATURE for the week, because it finally got cold here and I put another quilt on the bed and it was cozy while we all slept together (Toby even joined us!). I’m always going to think of otters now.

Sleeping With You
by Ellen Bass

Is there anything more wonderful?
After we have floundered
through our separate pain

we come to this. I bind myself to you,
like otters wrapped in kelp, so the current
will not steal us as we sleep.

Through the night we turn together,
rocked in the shallow surf,
pebbles polished by the sea.

Toby is not sad–he’s the happiest he’s been in five months, a daily miracle–but he does just meow, like he’s telling us “I YEARN” and we don’t know what it is he yearns for. Maybe he’s wondering why he’s so small, like this poem says:

My Cat is Sad
by Spencer Madsen

my cat is sad.
no one else in his family is a cat
we are all human except for him
he is excluded from most things
and no one tells him why
he just wants to play
and be loved
he looks at us with wonder
and disappointment
he says hello i am a cat what is my existence
what is that / why it and not me / please can you look at me and love me too
can i have some of your food please im sorry i dont like my food so much
do you want to play with my toys? this one is my favourite
do you like me
are we brothers
why didnt i grow up
why am i so small
can you help me be happy
where are you going