XIII (Dedications) — National Poetry Month

This is one of my favorite poems of all time. Adrienne Rich drew me in from the first line. How did she know me? How did she know you? The magic of poetry!

XIII (Dedications)

I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a gray day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains' enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running
up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

by Adrienne Rich
from An Atlas of a Difficult World

The Cat's Song — National Poetry Month

The Cat's Song

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother's forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I'll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,
says the cat, although I am more equal than you.
Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?
Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?

Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.
My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.
My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
walking round and round your bed and into your face.

Come I will teach you to dance as naturally
as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.
Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word

of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass. 

by Marge Piercy

The Truth About Northern Lights — National Poetry Month

The Truth About Northern Lights

I’m not right. I’m interfered with
and bent as light. I tried to use the spots,
for months I tried with rings. 
Only now I’m thinking in cracks
that keep a modern light
lunged. I keep the porch light on
to burn you off in ghosted purls,
the licks of which filament me.
My Day-Glo tongue’s cutthroat.
Though I’m not clear,
I’m a sight whose star stares back:
it’s a new kind of dead;
it hides its death in my cinched
testicle. That bright burr makes me
unreal and itch. By the time
I’m something else, you’re making weather
with so-and-so. Drama tenants you;
it wades in queasy waves,
mottled to the marrow.

by Christine Hume
courtesy poets.org

Tell Me a Story — National Poetry Month

Tell Me a Story

[ A ]

Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood
By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard
The great geese hoot northward.

I could not see them, there being no moon
And the stars sparse.  I heard them.

I did not know what was happening in my heart.

It was the season before the elderberry blooms,
Therefore they were going north.

The sound was passing northward.
[ B ]

Tell me a story.

In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.

Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

by Robert Penn Warren
courtesy poets.org and Shenandoah

A Woman is Apologizing — National Poetry Month

A Woman is Apologizing

To the jackass whose shoulder clipped her
on the sidewalk, the guy who kept walking
didn’t flinch. She’s apologizing in classrooms
with her hand half up: sorry to waste
time, can you explain that again?
She’s apologizing for her
messy living room, what she is
wearing or not wearing.
She’s ringing her neighbors:
sorry to bother you, can you turn
the music down? Tapping the grocer:
I’m so sorry, these tomatoes have fungus.
Right now, she’s hesitating
to say her ideas or ask her questions or claim
her raise because she thinks
you’ll think she’s selfish, brash.
Ungrateful. Unreasonable.
Unlikable. Unfeminine.
Tonight a woman is apologizing
for everything she wants to say.
Her sentences weighed down.
Mouth struggling to get
words out, if she chooses
to speak at all.

by Carrie Sernaker
courtesy Ms. Magazine

Remember — National Poetry Month

When was the last time you memorized a poem? Why not remember Remember?

Remember

Remember me when I am gone away,

         Gone far away into the silent land;

         When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

         You tell me of our future that you plann'd:

         Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

         And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

         For if the darkness and corruption leave

         A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

         Than that you should remember and be sad.

by Christina Rosetti

Courtesy The Poetry Foundation and The Times ("30 Great Poems Everyone Should Know")

A Certain Lady — National Poetry Month

A Certain Lady

Oh, I can smile for you, and tilt my head,

And drink your rushing words with eager lips,

And paint my mouth for you a fragrant red,
And trace your brows with tutored finger-tips.
When you rehearse your list of loves to me,
Oh, I can laugh and marvel, rapturous-eyed.
And you laugh back, nor can you ever see
The thousand little deaths my heart has died.
And you believe, so well I know my part,
That I am gay as morning, light as snow,
And all the straining things within my heart
You'll never know.

Oh, I can laugh and listen, when we meet,
And you bring tales of fresh adventurings, --
Of ladies delicately indiscreet,
Of lingering hands, and gently whispered things.
And you are pleased with me, and strive anew
To sing me sagas of your late delights.
Thus do you want me -- marveling, gay, and true,
Nor do you see my staring eyes of nights.
And when, in search of novelty, you stray,
Oh, I can kiss you blithely as you go ....
And what goes on, my love, while you're away,
You'll never know.

by Dorothy Parker

courtesy Poem Hunter

Vocational Training — National Poetry Month

Vocational Training

I sound so much like my mother

that when people called our house for help,
I’d have to stop them halfway through
their stories. Hold on, I’d say, I’m not her.
When I went with her on calls, I hovered
in doorways, holding her equipment, watched
her walk to the center of what was wrong.
I knew I could memorize facts, anatomy,
the math of giving oxygen or shock,
but I needed her to teach me what the body
wanted. What I learned was common sense:
Apply pressure to bleeding. Stay as calm
as you can. I’ll never have her hands,
the power I saw her wield, but sometimes
I feel her voice in my mouth: Get some ice
and you’ll be fine. It doesn’t need stitches,
it’s only a scratch. Even when I’m the one
speaking, my mother’s voice knows what to do.

by Carrie Shipers 
from Family Resemblances
courtesy The Writer's Almanac

A Little History — National Poetry Month

A Little History

Some people find out they are Jews.

They can’t believe it.

They had always hated Jews.

As children they had roamed in gangs on winter nights in the old

    neighborhood, looking for Jews.

They were not Jewish, they were Irish.

They brandished broken bottles, tough guys with blood on their

    lips, looking for Jews.

They intercepted Jewish boys walking alone and beat them up.

Sometimes they were content to chase a Jew and he could elude

    them by running away. They were happy just to see him run

    away. The coward! All Jews were yellow.

They spelled Jew with a small j jew.

And now they find out they are Jews themselves.

It happened at the time of the Spanish Inquisition.

To escape persecution, they pretended to convert to Christianity.

They came to this country and settled in the Southwest.

At some point oral tradition failed the family, and their

    secret faith died.

No one would ever have known if not for the bones that turned up

    on the dig.

A disaster. How could it have happened to them?

They are in a state of panic--at first.

Then they realize that it is the answer to their prayers.

They hasten to the synagogue or build new ones.

They are Jews at last!

They are free to marry other Jews, and divorce them, and intermarry

    with Gentiles, God forbid.

They are model citizens, clever and thrifty.

They debate the issues.

They fire off earnest letters to the editor.

They vote.

They are resented for being clever and thrifty.

They buy houses in the suburbs and agree not to talk so loud.

They look like everyone else, drive the same cars as everyone else,

    yet in their hearts they know they’re different.

In every minyan there are always two or three, hated by 

    the others, who give life to one ugly stereotype or another:

The grasping Jew with the hooked nose or the Ivy League Bolshevik

    who thinks he is the agent of world history.

But most of them are neither ostentatiously pious nor

    excessively avaricious.

How I envy them! They believe.

How I envy them their annual family reunion on Passover,

    anniversary of the Exodus, when all the uncles and aunts and

    cousins get together.

They wonder about the heritage of Judaism they are passing along

    to their children.

Have they done as much as they could to keep the old embers

    burning?

Others lead more dramatic lives.

A few go to Israel.

One of them calls Israel “the ultimate concentration camp.”

He tells Jewish jokes.

On the plane he gets tipsy, tries to seduce the stewardess.

People in the Midwest keep telling him reminds them of Woody

    Allen.

He wonders what that means. I’m funny? A sort of nervous

    intellectual type from New York? A Jew?

Around this time somebody accuses him of not being Jewish enough.

It is said by resentful colleagues that his parents changed their

    name from something that sounded more Jewish.

Everything he publishes is scrutinized with reference to “the

    Jewish question.”

It is no longer clear what is meant by that phrase.

He has already forgotten all the Yiddish he used to know, and

    the people of that era are dying out one after another.

The number of witnesses keeps diminishing.

Soon there will be no one left to remind the others and their

    children.

That is why he came to this dry place where the bones have come

    to life.

To live in a state of perpetual war puts a tremendous burden on the

    population. As a visitor he felt he had to share that burden.

With his gift for codes and ciphers, he joined the counter-

    terrorism unit of army intelligence.

Contrary to what the spook novels say, he found it possible to

    avoid betraying either his country or his lover.

This was the life: strange bedrooms, the perfume of other men’s

    wives.

As a spy he has a unique mission: to get his name on the front 

    page of the nation’s newspaper of record. Only by doing that 

    would he get the message through to his immediate superior.

If he goes to jail, he will do so proudly; if they’re going to

    hang him anyway, he’ll do something worth hanging for.

In time he may get used to being the center of attention, but

    this was incredible:

To talk his way into being the chief suspect in the most 

    flamboyant murder case in years!

And he was innocent!

He could prove it!

And what a book he would write when they free him from this prison:

A novel, obliquely autobiographical, set in Vienna in the twilight

    of the Hapsburg Empire, in the year that his mother was born.

by David Lehman

From Valentine Place

courtesy poets.org

Pesach Sameach!

Poem in Your Pocket Day: Invictus — National Poetry Month

It's Poem in Your Pocket Day! Print the poem below and carry it around in your pocket. Pull it out from time to time, re-read it, think about it, share it with a friend, discuss it with a colleague.

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

      Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

      For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

      I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

      My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

      Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

      Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

      How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

      I am the captain of my soul.

by W.E. Henley

courtesy The Poetry Foundation

The Moose — National Poetry Month

The Moose

For Grace Bulmer Bowers

From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats 
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;

where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats’
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches,

through late afternoon
a bus journeys west,
the windshield flashing pink,
pink glancing off of metal,
brushing the dented flank
of blue, beat-up enamel;

down hollows, up rises,
and waits, patient, while
a lone traveller gives
kisses and embraces
to seven relatives
and a collie supervises.

Goodbye to the elms,
to the farm, to the dog.
The bus starts.  The light
grows richer; the fog,
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hens’ feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage roses
and lupins like apostles;

the sweet peas cling
to their wet white string
on the whitewashed fences;
bumblebees creep
inside the foxgloves,
and evening commences.

One stop at Bass River.
Then the Economies 
Lower, Middle, Upper;
Five Islands, Five Houses,
where a woman shakes a tablecloth
out after supper.

A pale flickering.  Gone.
The Tantramar marshes 
and the smell of salt hay.
An iron bridge trembles 
and a loose plank rattles
but doesn’t give way.

On the left, a red light
swims through the dark:
a ship’s port lantern.
Two rubber boots show,
illuminated, solemn.
A dog gives one bark.

A woman climbs in 
with two market bags,
brisk, freckled, elderly.
“A grand night.  Yes, sir,
all the way to Boston.”
She regards us amicably.

Moonlight as we enter 
the New Brunswick woods,
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb’s wool
on bushes in a pasture.

The passengers lie back.
Snores.  Some long sighs.
A dreamy divagation
begins in the night,
a gentle, auditory,
slow hallucination. . . .

In the creakings and noises,
an old conversation
--not concerning us,
but recognizable, somewhere,
back in the bus:
Grandparents’ voices

uninterruptedly
talking, in Eternity:
names being mentioned,
things cleared up finally;
what he said, what she said,
who got pensioned;

deaths, deaths and sicknesses;
the year he remarried;
the year (something) happened.
She died in childbirth.
That was the son lost
when the schooner foundered.

He took to drink. Yes.
She went to the bad.
When Amos began to pray
even in the store and
finally the family had
to put him away.

“Yes . . .” that peculiar
affirmative.  “Yes . . .”
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means “Life’s like that.
We know it (also death).”

Talking the way they talked 
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on,
dim lamplight in the hall,
down in the kitchen, the dog
tucked in her shawl.

Now, it’s all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
--Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of 
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus’s hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man’s voice assures us
“Perfectly harmless. . . .”

Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
“Sure are big creatures.”
“It’s awful plain.”
“Look! It’s a she!”

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

“Curious creatures,"
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r‘s.
“Look at that, would you.”
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,

by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there’s a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.

by Elizabeth Bishop
courtesy poets.org

Ozone Journal — Pulitzer Prize Award and National Poetry Month

Ozone Journal

 
Bach’s cantata in B-flat minor in the cassette,
we lounged under the greenhouse-sky, the UVBs hacking
at the acids and oxides and then I could hear the difference
 
between an oboe and a bassoon
at the river’s edge under cover—
trees breathed in our respiration;
 
there was something on the other side of the river,
something both of us were itching toward—
 
radical bonds were broken, history became science.
We were never the same.

By Peter Balakianfrom "Ozone Journal," awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize

Ripe Cherries — National Poetry Month

Ripe Cherries

I read that the men,
on their way to Gettysburg,
stopped along the road
to pick and eat ripe cherries.

That the fruit should not
go to waste.

That they should take
such pleasure before battle.

That the oldest among them
should shake the trees
and the youngest gather
the fallen fruit.
That they should aim rifles
with the taste of cherries
against their teeth.

by Athena Kildegaard
from Bodies of Light
courtesy The Writer's Almanac

The Owl — National Poetry Month

The Owl

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;

Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof

Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest

Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,

Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.

All of the night was quite barred out except

An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,

No merry note, nor cause of merriment,

But one telling me plain what I escaped

And others could not, that night, as in I went.

And salted was my food, and my repose,

Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice

Speaking for all who lay under the stars,

Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

By Edward Thomas

courtesy Poetry Out Loud

Now I Pray — National Poetry Month

Now I Pray

Ashen face, wool hat bobbing,

the young boy’s eyes dart to me,

then up at the man pulling a rolling

suitcase, whose hand he holds,

then back at me. His legs move

as if without gravity. The man asks:

Do you know a church on this street

that serves free food? I want to say

I know. That the names of churches

on an Avenue called Americas roll

out of me. I want to tell you

it is temporary, their condition:

suitcase, darting eyes, seeking free

food at 9 pm in a big city on a school night.

I want to tell you I don’t for a moment

wonder if that is really the boy’s father

or uncle or legitimate caretaker — 

something in the handholding and

eyes, having watched too many

episodes of Law and Order. I want

to tell you I take them to a restaurant

and pay for a warm meal or empty

my wallet not worrying how

offensive that might be because

in the end hunger is hunger.

I want to tell you I call someone

who loves them — that there is someone — 

and say your guys are lost, can

you come? I want to tell you I sit

down on the sidewalk at the corner

of Waverly and pray — that all

passing by, anonymous shoes

marking the pavement, join

in a chorus of prayer humming

like cicadas in the Delta. I want to

tell you the boy and the man eat food

encircled by the warmth of bodies.

I want to turn the cold night into a feast.

I will tell you I am praying.

by Kathy Engelcourtesy
Courtesy Poetry Foundation

Cotton Candy — National Poetry Month

Cotton Candy

We walked on the bridge over the Chicago River
for what turned out to be the last time,
and I ate cotton candy, that sugary air,
that sweet blue light spun out of nothingness.
It was just a moment, really, nothing more,
but I remember marveling at the sturdy cables
of the bridge that held us up
and threading my fingers through the long
and slender fingers of my grandfather,
an old man from the Old World
who long ago disappeared into the nether regions.
And I remember that eight-year-old boy
who had tasted the sweetness of air,
which still clings to my mouth
and disappears when I breathe.

by Edward Hirsch

courtesy poets.org, which suggests this as a possible poem to share on Poem in Your Pocket Day this year. Have you chosen yours?

The Young See Age as Old-Fashioned — National Poetry Month

The Young See Age as Old-Fashioned

Somewhere, say, between a moral failure
And an avoidable foible. If the old fools
Just took the trouble to go to the gym... When you're hale
You're hearty enough to fear, far-off
The little puff: the black silencer
Screwed to the barrel of the future,
Short or long as that may prove. The furtive
Earwig of the unconventional cell,
Slick of lymph leaking out, in answer,
Or, nicer, surely, the shy embolism
Ambling through those precincts of familiarity,
The old elm-lined neighborhoods of the cerebrum,
Or—much better!—battering the chest like the old D-train
Taking its tunnel: whump.
All this is just imagining the actuarial worst.
Not age, which often comes first.

by Richard Kenney
courtesy Poetry Daily