Tag Archives: Poem of the Week

November 29, 2011 · 12:43 am

Poem of the Week: Then I Walked Through the World by Leah Goldberg

Then I walked through the world
as though someone adored me.
Laughter unfurled through heaps of stones,
and a wind through fathomless skies.

Then I walked through the world
as though someone dreamed me fair.
Across the night abysses bloomed
and the sea’s mirrors painted my face,
as though someone were writing poems about me.

I walked, until I reached an utter stillness within:
then, it seemed, something might begin.

—

A million thanks to Alison McGhee as always for curating these beauties.
For more information on Annie Kantar, please click here: http://www.smartishpace.com/poet_index/?alpha=k
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For more information on Leah Goldberg, please click here: http://israel.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=3170
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November 9, 2011 · 3:15 am

Poem of the Week: Two Countries by Naomi Shihab Nye

Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step,
swept away by someone who never saw
it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,
slept by itself, knew how to raise a
see-you-later hand. But skin felt
it was never seen, never known as
a land on the map, nose like a city,
hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque
and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.

Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries.
And skin remembers–silk, spiny grass,
deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.

—
Many thanks to Alison McGhee for her curation of these beautiful poems.
For more information on Naomi Nye, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/naomi-shihab-nye
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October 12, 2011 · 10:33 pm

Poem of the Week: Meeting at an Airport by Taha Muhammad Ali

You asked me once,
on our way back
from the midmorning
trip to the spring:
“What do you hate,
and who do you love?”

And I answered,
from behind the eyelashes
of my surprise,
my blood rushing
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure…
I love the spring
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”
And you laughed…
and the almond tree blossomed
and the thicket grew loud with nightingales.

…A question
now four decades old:
I salute that question’s answer;
and an answer,
as old as your departure;
I salute that answer’s question…

…And today,
it’s preposterous,
here we are at a friendly airport
by the slimmest of chances,
and we meet.
Ah, Lord!
we meet.
And here you are
asking—again,
it’s absolutely preposterous—
I recognized you
but you didn’t recognize me.
“Is it you?!”
But you wouldn’t believe it.
And suddenly
you burst out and asked:
“If you’re really you,
What do you hate
and who do you love?!”

And I answered—
my blood
fleeing the hall,
rushing in me
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure,
and I love the spring,
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”

And you wept,
and flowers bowed their heads,
and doves in the silk of their sorrow stumbled.

—

Many thanks to Alison McGhee for her generous curation of these mighty fine poems.
For more information on Taha Muhammad Ali, please click here: http://www.poetryinternational.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=3181
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October 5, 2011 · 9:13 pm

Poem of the Week: From New Hampshire by Rosanna Warren

  It’s not your mountain
     but I almost expect
     to meet you here

I think you have taken a long late evening walk
Your heavy shoes glisten with dew
I hear your footsteps pause on the dirt road

     and I know you are picking out
     the dark mass of the sleeping
     mountain from the dark

mass of night and testing the heaviness of each
Your hands are small but they know weights and measures
You are a connoisseur of boundaries

     You loved the bears
     because they pass between
     leaving their stories

in fat pudding turds on the grass
Here it’s raspberries they’re after not our
sour Vermont apples     No matter     You will find them

     When they hoot in courtship
     you always hoot back
     more owl than bear

They don’t mind     They always answer you
And tonight I imagine you’re out waiting up for them
by the berries, which is why you don’t cross

     the dew-sopped lawn
     don’t press open the
     warped screen door

of the kitchen where I sit late     by a single glowing bulb

—
For more information on Rosanna Warren, please click here: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/188

Many thanks to Alison McGhee for her thoughtful curation of these beautiful poems.
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September 23, 2011 · 2:05 pm

A Poem for Emily by Miller Williams – Poem of the Week



Small fact and fingers and farthest one from me,
a hand’s width and two generations away,
in this still present I am fifty-three.
You are not yet a full day.

When I am sixty-three, when you are ten,
and you are neither closer nor as far,
your arms will fill with what you know by then,
the arithmetic and love we do and are.

When I by blood and luck am eighty-six
and you are someplace else and thirty-three
believing in sex and God and politics
with children who look not at all like me,

sometime I know you will have read them this
so they will know I love them and say so
and love their mother. Child, whatever is
is always or never was. Long ago

a day I watched awhile beside your bed,
I wrote this down, a thing that might be kept
awhile, to tell you what I would have said
when you were who knows what and I was dead
which is I stood and loved you while you slept.

—

Thanks to Alison McGhee for curating these beautiful poems.
For more information on Miller Williams, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/miller-williams
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September 10, 2011 · 5:48 pm

Poem of the Week: Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio by James Wright



In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each others’ bodies.

—

A big thank you to Alison McGhee who generously curates and shares these beautiful poems.
For more information on James Wright, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/james-wright
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August 24, 2011 · 3:34 am

Poem of the Week: A Time Past by Denise Levertov


 The old wooden steps to the front door
where I was sitting that fall morning
when you came downstairs, just awake,
and my joy at sight of you (emerging
into golden day –
the dew almost frost)
pulled me to my feet to tell you
how much I loved you:those wooden steps
are gone now, decayed
replaced with granite,
hard, gray, and handsome.
The old steps live
only in me:
my feet and thighs
remember them, and my hands
still feel their splinters.Everything else about and around that house
brings memories of others – of marriage,
of my son. And the steps do too: I recall
sitting there with my friend and her little son who died,
or was it the second one who lives and thrives?
And sitting there ‘in my life,’ often, alone or with my husband.
Yet that one instant,
your cheerful, unafraid, youthful, ‘I love you too,’
the quiet broken by no bird, no cricket, gold leaves
spinning in silence down without
any breeze to blow them,
is what twines itself
in my head and body across those slabs of wood
that were warm, ancient, and now
wait somewhere to be burnt.

—
A big thank you to Alison McGhee for curating these lovely poems.

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July 23, 2011 · 11:06 pm

Poem of the Week: From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

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For more information on Li-Young Lee, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/li-young-lee
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Thanks to Alison McGhee for her generous curation of these lovely poems.

Blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

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July 8, 2011 · 1:20 pm

Poem of the Week: Letter to Laundry on the Line by Russ Kesler

All day our business carries us past you,
white blaze at the corner of the eye.
Even the hands that pinned you there
have turned for a while to other things.

Still, we should acknowledge
your humility, your readiness
to shape yourselves to our uses.
You remind us of what transpires
while we are elsewhere,
how the shadows of hawks and clouds
conform to the landscape,
how the songbirds’ proofs
fill the silence and fall out of it.

You swing in a sweet wind,
semblance of our bodies,
bright squares sun dried.
In our absence, you try on
the days we have left.

—
For more information on Russ Kesler, please click here: http://www.public-republic.net/authors/russ-kesler/
—
Thanks to Alison McGhee for passing on these wonderful poems!

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June 6, 2011 · 5:29 am

Poem of the Week: Fog by Dorianne Laux

The first of us must have looked up at the night agog,
so many stars, so much light falling down, the bugs
back then big as fists, so many rivers and ponds clogged
with fish we skewered them on sticks, made a fire, bred dogs
from wolves to keep us warm, safe, pines wrapped in fog
or morning mist, the sheep braying beside us, groggy,
their bellies filled with wet grass, the feral pigs become hogs
in a pen, cloven hooves slathered in mud. We built jagged
fences to keep what we didn’t want out, what we did, in, logs
were dragged through a field by horses, a house rose, mugs
placed on a shelf, a table set with plates. Then the nagging
began: Who left the feedbag in the rain? Who forgot to plug
the hole with a rag? The children grew, little quagmires
we sank into. We fed them, scrubbed them, raised them, rang
a bell for supper, school, for the one who died, the soggy
earth taking her back, the others running unaware, tagging
each other in the dusk, calling out numbers. But still the vague
unrest in the dark looking up at the moon, the old dog wagging
his flea-laden tail, barking for no reason they could tell, zagging
off like an uncle, drunk on busthead whiskey, back into the trees.

—

Thanks to Alison Mcghee for kindly curating the poems that are posted here.

For more information on Dorianne Laux, please click here: http://www.doriannelaux.com/index.html
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