Category: poems

I’m in the middle of Summer Melancholy and I don’t know why (other than all the unsettling things). This poem gets at that feeling of melancholy in the middle of abundance, and that last line! That last word! Genius.

 

U-Pick Orchards
by Danusha Laméris

We used to pick cherries over the hill
where we paid to climb wooden ladders
into the bright haven above our heads, the fruit
dangling earthward. Dark, twinned bells
ringing in some good fortune just beyond
our sight. I have lived on earth long enough
to know good luck arrives only on its way
to someone else, for it must leave you to the miracle
of your own misfortune, lest you grow weary
of harvest, of cherries falling from the crown of sky
in mid-summer, of hours of idle. Let there be
a stone of suffering. Let the fruit taste of sweetness
and dust. Let grief your heart split so precisely
you must hold, somehow, a memory of cherries—
tart talismans of pleasure—in the rucksack
of your soul. Taut skin, sharp blessing.
Luminous, ordinary and acute.

Poet Andrea Gibson died yesterday at 49, after 5 years with cancer. Their poem “Say Yes” never fails to make me cry but I hadn’t been keeping up with their more recent things. I don’t know where this falls in their chronology but I saw it posted yesterday and wow–“the darkness/ also contains truths that could/ bring the light to its knees.”

 

Grief Astronomer
by Andrea Gibson

A difficult life is not less
worth living than a gentle one.
Joy is simply easier to carry
than sorrow. And your heart
could lift a city from how long
you’ve spent holding what’s been
nearly impossible to hold.
This world needs those
who know how to do that.
Those who could find a tunnel
that has no light at the end of it,
and hold it up like a telescope
to know the darkness
also contains truths that could
bring the light to its knees.
Grief astronomer, adjust the lens,
look close, tell us what you see.

Imagine my delight to find a poem expanding on one of  Doc’s favorite phrases: “There’s a lot going on.” It is indeed a lot! Especially lately!

 

It’s a Lot
by Jon Sands

It’s a lot to open your eyes in the morning,
to taste your own unbrushed mouth, to hear
thousands of voices and believe your own.
It’s a lot to lose even one friend,
to not be heard, or to be heard, and still
be paranoid that people hate you. It’s a lot
to put your heart on another’s train tracks,
to not take a loved one hostage with your own fear,
with what you don’t want to know about yourself.
Once, to explain how cold I’d become,
I confessed my love to a friend who didn’t
love me back. I felt the words leave my chest,
genuine, desperate, gone. It was a lot.
ConEd bills, job applications, small talk.
A lot to shake hands, raise eyebrows, debate
about basketball, eye contact over beer.
It’s a lot to hide behind a new shirt, old jeans,
to grow a beard, or eat a whole pizza,
to practice restraint, or to jog, voluntarily.
It’s a lot to remember a birthday,
let alone purchase a card and mail it,
to love people as imperfect as you are.
It’s a lot to not get your feelings hurt,
to let emotions pass through you,
to see your mother look like your grandmother.
It’s all very necessary, but it’s still a lot—
to say I’ve been good as a mannerism,
to say I haven’t as a fact. It’s a lot,
as well, to include the good things,
to not make a caricature of your sadness,
to only get your jump shot so good, and still
to have it fall left, to attend the dentist. It’s a lot
to be a good husband, an inattentive uncle,
to not know how to respond to an email—
so to say nothing. It’s a lot, maybe the most,
to say nothing. Yes.
To say nothing, and therefore continue
holding that nothing inside you.
That is by far the most.

Well this is appropriate. Because I had to look it up: “dios del chisme,” the god of gossip.

 

poem where no one is deported
by José Olivarez

now i like to imagine la migra running
into the sock factory where my mom
& her friends worked. it was all women

who worked there. women who braided
each other’s hair during breaks.
women who wore rosaries, & never

had a hair out of place. women who were ready
for cameras or for God, who ended all their sentences
with si dios quiere. as in: the day before

the immigration raid when the rumor
of a raid was passed around like bread
& the women made plans, si dios quiere.

so when the immigration officers arrived
they found boxes of socks & all the women absent.
safe at home. those officers thought

no one was working. they were wrong.
the women would say it was god working.
& it was god, but the god

my mom taught us to fear
was vengeful. he might have wet his thumb
& wiped la migra out of this world like a smudge

on a mirror. this god was the god that woke me up
at 7am every day for school to let me know
there was food in the fridge for me & my brothers.

i never asked my mom where the food came from,
but she told me anyway: gracias a dios.
gracias a dios del chisme, who heard all la migra’s plans

& whispered them into the right ears
to keep our families safe.

I think it’s the expected “back at work after time off” vibes but this week does feel really hard. This one is a good reminder that things WILL be hard, but that’s OK.

 

For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper
by Joseph Fasano

Now I let it fall back
in the grasses.
I hear you. I know
this life is hard now.
I know your days are precious
on this earth.
But what are you trying
to be free of?
The living? The miraculous
task of it?
Love is for the ones who love the work.

It’s cara cara orange season and I’ve been buying bags of them and they’re so pink! and sweet! “But then I peel an orange” and yeah, it’s all pretty amazing when you think about it.

I Feel God in This Chili’s Tonight
by Lyndsay Ruth

Have you had a strawberry lately?
Seen a little birdie drink from a puddle?
Beheld how the mist kisses the lake?
Pondered the voting system of bees?
I’m often awestruck
at the spiritual fixation on the afterlife
when this one is right here, right now–begging
for the kind of care and curiosity that
devout folks seem to save for Kingdom Come
Some days I look around and think,
What in the hee-haw hell is this?
But then I peel an orange or play the piano or
hear a person I love laugh so hard they honk
And I have no doubt that what I’m glimpsing
right here, right now
is heaven

This has a line that’s on theme for the month (“What were you wearing? Something hopeful to show the world you hoped?”) and also a construction that makes me want to be in a poetry analysis class again–it looks like a sonnet and the internal rhymes make it feel like one, but it technically isn’t. Whatever it is, it’s a delight, like all of Ada’s poems.

 

While Everything Else Was Falling Apart
by Ada Limón

In the Union Square subway station nearly fifteen
years ago now, the L train came clanking by
where someone had fat-Sharpied a black heart
on the yellow pillar you leaned on during a bleak day
(brittle and no notes from anyone you crushed upon).
Above ground, the spring sun was the saddest one
(doing work, but also none). What were you wearing?
Something hopeful to show the world you hoped?
A tall man was learning from a vendor how to pronounce
churro. High in the sticky clouds of time, he kept
repeating churro while eating a churro. How to say
this made you want to live? No hand to hold
still here it was: someone giving someone comfort
and someone memorizing hard how to ask for it again.

This is a good one for spring and for remembering we weren’t meant to work until we die.

 

Giving Notice
by Joy Sullivan

One day soon, you’ll rise from your desk or quietly excuse yourself
from the meeting or turn the car around in the middle of the street.
Anything might trigger it. An open window. A sunny day in April.
Daffodils panting in a mason jar. Call it madness. Call it glorious

disappearance. Call it locomotion. Do what you should have done
years ago. Let your body out to pasture. Fill your calendar with nothing
but sky. Surrender to the woods. To cicadas and sap beetles. To the moths,
the color of memory and dream. Wear dusk like an ancient cloak. Hurry—

there’s still time to creature—to pluck all the wild cloudberries and carry
them home. Even now, you can hear coyotes crying at the canyon’s edge.
Grow back your hackles and howl. This was always your first chorus,
the mother tongue, a feral hymn you know by heart.

The Poets.org Instagram account shared this one four days ago and it was a good interruption to the doom scroll. We didn’t sign up for this but “you might as well/ get up and at it, pestilence be damned.”

 

Incantation of the First Order
by Rita Dove

Listen, no one signed up for this lullaby.
No bleeped sheep or rosebuds or twitching stars
will diminish the fear or save you from waking

into the same day you dreamed of leaving—
mockingbird on back order, morning bells
stuck on snooze—so you might as well

get up and at it, pestilence be damned.
Peril and risk having become relative,
I’ll try to couch this in positive terms:

Never! is the word of last resorts,
Always! the fanatic’s rallying cry.
To those inclined toward kindness, I say

Come out of your houses drumming. All others,
beware: I have discarded my smile but not my teeth.

This was written in 2018, which in hindsight seems like a golden dream compared to how things are going in the second administration. There’s something to be said for adverbs being cathartic, though. “Things got ugly suddenly embarrassingly forcefully,” indeed.

 

American Sonnet For The New Year
by Terrence Hughes

Things got terribly ugly incredibly quickly
Things got ugly embarrassingly quickly
actually Things got ugly unbelievably quickly
honestly Things got ugly seemingly infrequently
initially Things got ugly ironically usually
awfully carefully Things got ugly unsuccessfully
occasionally Things got ugly mostly painstakingly
quietly seemingly Things got ugly beautifully
infrequently Things got ugly sadly especially
frequently unfortunately Things got ugly
increasingly obviously Things got ugly suddenly
embarrassingly forcefully Things got really ugly
regularly truly quickly Things got really incredibly
ugly Things will get less ugly inevitably hopefully