Tag Archives: Poem of the Week

March 29, 2012 · 3:52 pm

Poem of the Week: Diagnosis:Birds in the Blood by Anna Journey

The hummingbird’s nervous embroidery
through beach fog by our back

patio’s potato vine
reminds me of my mother’s southern

drawl from the kitchen: She’s flying,
flying like bird! I’ve heard that

as a child I involuntarily flapped my hands
at my side during moments

of intense concentration. I’d flutter
over a drawing, a doll, a blond hamster

in a shoebox maze. There are ways
to keep from breaking

apart. My guardians. My avian
blood. I believed

birds bubbled inside me—my own
diagnosis—though the doctors called it

something else: a harmless
twitch. A body’s

crossed wires. The lost
birds of my childhood

nerves have never
returned. But when you held

my elbow as we walked the four
blocks to the boardwalk,

we saw the brief
dazzle of a black-

chinned hummingbird—the first
I’d ever seen. It sheened

and tried to sip
from my sizzled wrists’

vanilla perfume. I knew
a single one

from the magic
flock had finally found me.

–
A big thank you to Alison McGhee for her curation of these beautiful poems.
For more about Anna Journey, please click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Journey
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March 11, 2012 · 6:22 pm

Poem of the Week – Philip Levine – You Can Have It

My brother comes home from work
and climbs the stairs to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop
one by one. You can have it, he says.

The moonlight streams in the window
and his unshaven face is whitened
like the face of the moon. He will sleep
long after noon and waken to find me gone.

Thirty years will pass before I remember
that moment when suddenly I knew each man
has one brother who dies when he sleeps
and sleeps when he rises to face this life,

and that together they are only one man
sharing a heart that always labors, hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

All night at the ice plant he had fed
the chute its silvery blocks, and then I
stacked cases of orange soda for the children
of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time

with always two more waiting. We were twenty
for such a short time and always in
the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt
and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.

In 1948 in the city of Detroit, founded
by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes
of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,
no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,

for there was no such year, and now
that year has fallen off all the old newspapers,
calendars, doctors’ appointments, bonds,
wedding certificates, drivers licenses.

The city slept. The snow turned to ice.
The ice to standing pools or rivers
racing in the gutters. Then bright grass rose
between the thousands of cracked squares,

and that grass died. I give you back 1948.
I give you all the years from then
to the coming one. Give me back the moon
with its frail light falling across a face.

Give me back my young brother, hard
and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse
for God and burning eyes that look upon
all creation and say, You can have it.

–
Many thanks to Alison McGhee for her curation of these lovely poems.
For more information on Philip Levine, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/philip-levine
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February 28, 2012 · 3:19 pm

Poem of the Week: Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

A big thank you to Alison McGhee for her thoughtful curation of these beautiful poems.

–
For more information on W.H. Auden, please click here: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/120
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February 19, 2012 · 7:10 pm

Poem of the Week: The Cinnamon Peeler’s Wife by Michael Ondaatje

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbor to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler’s wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
– your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers…

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grasscutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume.
and knew
what good is it
to be the lime burner’s daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in an act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler’s wife. Smell me.

 

Thank you Michael Ondaatje for creating so many beautiful word sculptures.

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February 16, 2012 · 4:31 pm

Poem of the Week: Overheard by Ross Gay

It’s a beautiful day
the small man said from behind me
and I could tell he had a slight limp
from the rasp of his boot against the sidewalk
and I was slow to look at him
because I’ve learned to close my ears
against the voices of passersby, which is easier than closing
them to my own mind,
and although he said it I did not hear it
until he said it a second or third time
but he did, he said It’s a beautiful day and something
in the way he pointed to the sun unfolding
between two oaks overhanging a basketball court
on 10th Street made me, too
catch hold of that light, opening my hands
to the dream of the soon blooming
and never did he say forget the crick in your neck
nor your bloody dreams; he did not say forget
the multiple shades of your mother’s heartbreak,
nor the father in your city
kneeling over his bloody child,
nor the five species of bird this second become memory,
no, he said only, It’s a beautiful day,
this tiny man
limping past me
with upturned palms
shaking his head
in disbelief.
–

A big thank you to Alison McGhee for curating these poems.
For more information on Ross Gay, please click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Gay
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February 2, 2012 · 6:25 pm

Poem of the Week – June the Horse by Jim Harrison

Sleep is water. I’m an old man surging
upriver on the back of my dream horse
that I haven’t seen since I was ten.
We’re night riders through cities, forests, fields.

I saw Stephanie standing on the steps of Pandora’s Box
on Sheridan Square in 1957. She’d never spoken
to me but this time, as a horse lover, she waved.

I saw the sow bear and two cubs. She growled
at me in 1987 when I tried to leave the cabin while her cubs
were playing with my garbage cans. I needed a drink
but I didn’t need this big girl on my ass.

We swam up the Neva in St. Petersburg in 1972
where a girl sat on the bank hugging a red icon
and Raskolnikov, pissed off and whining, spat on her feet.

On the Rhône in the Camargue fighting bulls
bellowed at us from a marsh and 10,000 flamingos
took flight for Africa.

This night-riding is the finest thing I do at age seventy-two.
On my birthday evening we’ll return to the original
pasture where we met and where she emerged from the pond
draped in lily pads and a coat of green algae.
We were children together and I never expected her return.

One day as a brown boy I shot a wasp nest with bow and arrow,
releasing hell. I mounted her from a stump and without
reins or saddle we rode to a clear lake where the bottom
was covered with my dreams waiting to be born.
One day I’ll ride her as a bone-clacking skeleton.
We’ll ride to Veracruz and Barcelona, then up to Venus.

–

Thanks to Alison McGhee for her curation of these beautiful poems.
For more information on Jim Harrison, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/jim-harrison
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January 21, 2012 · 5:53 pm

Poem of the Week: Ocean Ghazal by Alison Mcghee

Ocean Ghazal

He came spiraling back up the stairs, all four flights, two at a time
Dark coat flying, dark eyes searching, something more to tell her, that last time.

At night by the ocean, salt spray and laughter and a dive in dark water.
Kisses, soft, then silence and her body, alive with longing. It was time.

A stranger on a yellow windsurfer like his, slicing through the northern ocean.
Curving the board back and forth to shore before her, the girl displaced in time.

Memory conjures a face, floating beyond the streaks of the bus window.
Please, please tell her what you didn’t, those last weeks, running out of time.

Pesto is garlic and basil, oil and cheese. Salt. Dip your finger in green,
deep green its taste, green your finger in her mouth, green still seen in time.

When someone dies where do his memories go? Memories only you two know?
You are so much older now than that day he left you behind in time.

 

 

 

Big thank you to Alison McGhee for sharing this beautiful poem.

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January 13, 2012 · 5:28 am

Poem of the Week: If thou must love me, let it be for nought by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love’s sake only. Do not say
‘I love her for her smile—her look—her way
Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day’—
For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may
Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry,—
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity.

–
A big thank you to Alison McGhee for her generous curation of all these beautiful poems.
For more information on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, please click here: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/152
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January 5, 2012 · 4:38 pm

Poem of the Week: Roofmen by Patricia Fargnoli

Over my head the roofmen are banging shingles into place
and over them the sky shines with a light that is
almost past autumn, and bright as copper foil.

In the end I will have something to show for their hard labor–
unflappable shingles, dry ceilings, one more measure of things
held safely in a world where safety is impossible.

In another state, a friend tries to keep on living
though his arteries are clogged,
though the operation left a ten-inch scar

and, near his intestines, an aneurysm blossoms
like a deformed flower. His knees and feet
burn with constant pain.

We go on. I don’t know how sometimes.
For a living, I listen eight hours a day to the voices
of the anxious and the sad. I watch their beautiful faces

for some sign that life is more than disaster–
it is always there, the spirit behind the suffering,
the small light that gathers the soul and holds it

beyond the sacrifices of the body. Necessary light.
I bend toward it and blow gently.
And those hammerers above me, bend into the dailiness

of their labor, beneath concentric circles: a roof of sky,
beneath the roof of the universe,
beneath what vaults over it.

And don’t those journeymen
hold a piece of the answer– the way they go on
laying one gray speckled square after another,

nailing each down, firmly, securely.

–

BIG BIG thank you to Alison McGhee for curating these beautiful poems.
For more information on Patricia Fargnoli, please click here:http://www.joefargnoli.com/
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December 6, 2011 · 2:26 pm

Poem of the Week: The Woman Who Shoveled the Sidewalk by Stanley Plumly


She clearly needed more than money,
which, anyway, wasn’t much.
Her dog, one of those outlawed fighting breeds,
black-and-white and eyes too far apart,
kept snapping at the leash, the cash
I placed as simply as I could into her open hand.
Her small stalled car was what she lived in,
the death seat and backseat all-purposed into piles.
She was desperate so she blessed me.
I could almost feel my mother standing there,
the way she’d greet the lost after the war.
A woman vulnerable is powerful.
Poverty in all the texts grants grace
to the raveled and unwashed,
just as the soul we assign to what is singing
in the trees, even in winter, lives
in the face and voice of the least.
You could see the random child in her,
who had got, today, this far.
You could hear, under her words, silence.
There wasn’t that much snow, enough
to take its picture if you left it untouched.
Her companionable, hostile dog was what she had,
who stayed in the car while she started in earnest,
as if the work were wages. Young, off
or still on drugs—I couldn’t tell—
she was alone in every hard detail.
Each day is lifted, then put back down.
Tomorrow’s snow turns back into the rain.
I had to be somewhere but knew when
I got home she’d be gone. And the walk,
from start to finish, would be clean.

—
Big thank you to Alison McGhee who curates these beautiful poems.
For more information on Stanley Plumly, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/stanley-plumly
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