Category: poems

I try to be careful about sunscreen but I’m at the age where any sun exposure really brings all the latent UV damage to the surface of my skin. (Oh well, I’m not going to avoid the life-giving daystar.) Looking in the mirror and thinking about all the summers past reminded me of this poem

 

Dark Charms
by Dorianne Laux

Eventually the future shows up everywhere:
those burly summers and unslept nights in deep
lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.
Here’s the corner store grown to a condo,
the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,
the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail
no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.
The clear water we drank as thirsty children
still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then
we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often.
The old tunes play and continue to move us
in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,
lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.
We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the keys to lost names.

 

Anne Helen Petersen linked this in her newsletter a couple of weeks ago and now I have words for what I feel when I see initials in trees when we’re out hiking.

 

Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America

by Matthew Olzmann

Fuck the NRA. And the politicians in their pocket. This is Langston Hughes, from 1938.

Kids Who Die

This is for the kids who die,
Black and white,
For kids will die certainly.
The old and rich will live on awhile,
As always,
Eating blood and gold,
Letting kids die.

Kids will die in the swamps of Mississippi
Organizing sharecroppers
Kids will die in the streets of Chicago
Organizing workers
Kids will die in the orange groves of California
Telling others to get together
Whites and Filipinos,
Negroes and Mexicans,
All kinds of kids will die
Who don’t believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment
And a lousy peace.

Of course, the wise and the learned
Who pen editorials in the papers,
And the gentlemen with Dr. in front of their names
White and black,
Who make surveys and write books
Will live on weaving words to smother the kids who die,
And the sleazy courts,
And the bribe-reaching police,
And the blood-loving generals,
And the money-loving preachers
Will all raise their hands against the kids who die,
Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets
To frighten the people—
For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people—
And the old and rich don’t want the people
To taste the iron of the kids who die,
Don’t want the people to get wise to their own power,
To believe an Angelo Herndon, or even get together

Listen, kids who die—
Maybe, now, there will be no monument for you
Except in our hearts
Maybe your bodies’ll be lost in a swamp
Or a prison grave, or the potter’s field,
Or the rivers where you’re drowned like Leibknecht

But the day will come—
You are sure yourselves that it is coming—
When the marching feet of the masses
Will raise for you a living monument of love,
And joy, and laughter,
And black hands and white hands clasped as one,
And a song that reaches the sky—
The song of the life triumphant
Through the kids who die.

 

 

I think it’s pretty well established that I’m a sucker for a modern sonnet but this one is especially wonderful–the rhyme of “glasses” and “asses”! (First seen on the Poetry Is Not a Luxury Instagram.)

 

Make Out Sonnet
by F. Douglas Brown

The first time I saw two men kissing, I was six,
Living in 1970s L.A. My mom took care
Of an elderly woman who found herself in a fix
And moved into a complex of all men, bare
Chested men, with cutoff jeans and tinted glasses.
My mother’s friend gave me chocolates that matched
Her skin—this must be heaven. These sons’ asses
Peeked out beneath their shorts, but watched
Over her better than mom. Took donations for heat,
A sofa and a new wig—all changed her mood.
They even did her laundry. They did sweet
Better than honey. Did family better than blood.
And between duties, two men always off alone
So desire, like the dishes, could also get done.

Well this is appropriate:

Ethics for Republicans
by Marge Piercy

An embryo is precious;
a woman is a vessel.

A fertilized egg is a person;
a woman is indentured to it.

An embryo is sacred until birth.
After that, he/she is on their own.

Abortion is murder. Rape,
incest are means to an end:

that precious fertilized egg
housed in an expendable body.

Let us make babies and babies
and babies; children are something

else, probably future criminals,
probably welfare cheats whose

education hikes taxes. You
can freely dispose of them.

This is new enough to not have live text anywhere, sorry–but it’s so great. This and yesterday’s post are via my friend Mike, an excellent curator.

Really feeling this one:

 

Tired
by Langston Hughes

I am so tired of waiting,
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two –
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.

Every time I’m about ready to unsubscribe from The Writer’s Almanac (so, every time they feature a famous white guy), there’s a poem that stops me. This isn’t a particularly deep one but it’s fun to see the sonnet form be so casual and it does contain some excellent advice.

Go For a Brisk Walk
by Gene Guntzel

Go for a brisk walk every day
Either around dawn or sunset
And you may run into Chopin or Monet,
Charlotte Bronte or a mysterious brunette
Who turns out to be Maria Callas.
Bessie Smith, Jack Benny, you never knew,
The Duke of Earl slipping away from the palace,
Kafka and his fiancée strolling in the snow.
Melville whose book you meant to read,
Cornelius Vanderbilt, Princess Diana, Van Gogh,
Out walking, despite all they’ve been through.
“To comprehend a nectar requires sorest need,”
Said Emily Dickinson. (She’s here, too.)
Life is hard. Oh Lord, the miseries we bear
And yet it’s good to get out in the open air.

Honestly, the last four years have felt like some level of emergency for me, starting with Mom getting sick, going through a pandemic, and now with WW3 on the horizon. Our hearts have gone through a lot and they’re still ready to be broken again. Our good brave stupid hearts (that last line!).

 

Meditations in an Emergency
by Cameron Awkward-Rich

I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds
& the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside.
I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in
Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents
beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old
women hawking roses, & children all of them,
break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I
love the world. I run from end to end like fingers
through her hair. There are no borders, only wind.
Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the
institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand
on my stupid heart.