Category: poems

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.

Another good one from Naomi Shihab Nye, author of one of my favorites.

 

Shoulders
by Naomi Shihab Nye

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

More poetry this week, but it’s more of the feel good variety. (I’ve never thought of the people that birds fly over; now I always will.) Naomi Shihab Nye is a favorite.

 

Messages from Everywhere

light up our backyard.
A bird that flew five thousand miles
is trilling six bright notes.
This bird flew over mountains and valleys
and tiny dolls and pencils
of children I will never see.
Because this bird is singing to me,
I belong to the wide wind,
the people far away who share
the air and the clouds.
Together we are looking up
into all we do not own
and we are listening.

Naomi Shihab Nye,
from Everything Comes Next, 1994

This is by Darius Simpson, from the most recent issue of American Poetry Review.

 

Instead of Raising Wages the Gov’t

raised the roof clean off an entire Black section of the city
inflated gas prices to the size of a senator’s helium ego
built an unstable bridge made of worn hundred dollar bills
over the atlantic to make a plantation(democracy) of new territory
sent a blank check to a settler colony and said make a wish
sent a fleet of drones to a peaceful town and said i wish you would
sent donation emails to people who struggled to pay rent this month
disappeared into a secret castle the day after the polls closed
spun a fairytale about civic duty to euthanize the masses
printed accidentally honest election stickers that said vote and die
told protesters the best way to resist was to play a part in the circus
i say we deserve better and my peers call me an extremist
gov’t says we gotta kill entire villages and my peers call it sacrifice
or worse my peers change the channel or worse my peers bat
barely an eye and forgive the last genocide for the sake of peace
if we don’t get tired of writing beautiful poems after catastrophes
i fear soon the ink will run red and the rivers dry and the words out