Perdu • National Poetry Month

Perdu  

I no longer appear

in photos. No one pictures me

in the moment. Poolside, red

plastic cup in hand, smiling faces,

a dripping child on a grandmother’s

damp lap, squinting into the sun. Bride

and groom in white, surrounded by

well-dressed pastel-flocked crowd

on the dark parquet dance floor. Groaning

picnic table, red and white checkered

tablecloth, tanned patriarch flanked by

children and grandchildren biting into

crispy black hot dogs, crunchy pickles,

sticky pink watermelon. Around

the dining table, goofing in the mashed

potatoes, a selfie with Dad. Adorable,
adoring stealth shots: watching tv, nothing

special, Happy Days reruns, teens in

identical superhero t-shirts, stuck in time.

There are no gaps, no holes,

no negative space unfilled.

I am not redacted.

I am naught.

by Chris Fow Cohen

with permission of the author

Spoken Word Poetry: I Think She was a She • National Poetry Month

I Think She Was a She by Leyla Josephine

Tattered Kaddish • National Poetry Month

Tattered Kaddish


Taurean reaper of the wild apple field
messenger from earthmire gleaning
transcripts of fog
in the nineteenth year and the eleventh month
speak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides:

Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel
on ones we knew and loved

Praise to life though its windows blew shut
on the breathing-room of ones we knew and loved

Praise to life though ones we knew and loved
loved it badly, too well, and not enough

Praise to life though it tightened like a knot
on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us

Praise to life giving room and reason
to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable

Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.

by Adrienne Rich
courtesy exceptindreams

How to Leave the World that Worships Should • National Poetry Month

How to Leave the World that Worships Should 


Let faxes butter-curl on dusty shelves.
Let junkmail build its castles in the hush
of other people’s halls. Let deadlines burst
and flash like glorious fireworks somewhere else.
As hours go softly by, let others curse
the roads where distant drivers queue like sheep.
Let e-mails fly like panicked, tiny birds.
Let phones, unanswered, ring themselves to sleep.

Above, the sky unrolls its telegram,
immense and wordless, simply understood:
you’ve made your mark like birdtracks in the sand -
now make the air in your lungs your livelihood.
See how each wave arrives at last to heave
itself upon the beach and vanish. Breathe.


by Ros Barber
courtesy RosBarber.com
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A Visual Poem in Honor of Arbor Day • National Poetry Day

A Visual Poem in Honor of Arbor Day

The Wound Before the Tomb of Walt Whitman • National Poetry Month

The Wound Before the Tomb of Walt Whitman


You who saw the vast oceans
and the peaks of the mountains,
who communed with all the sailors of the world
and you who saw Christ eat the bread of his last supper among the young
and the elders,
you who saw the executioner of Europe
with his ax soaked with blood,
You stepped on the scaffold
and the fields in which mothers cried to their dead children.

Tell me if it is still
possible to announce triumphant justice
and deliver the lessons of the new world.

I’m going to kiss your lips,
they are cold and taste like the word America.


by Fernando Valverde
 Translated by Carolyn Forché
courtesy poets.org

Coming • National Poetry Month

Coming



Coming : 


On longer evenings, 

Light, chill and yellow, 

Bathes the serene

Foreheads of houses. 

A thrush sings, 

Laurel-surrounded

In the deep bare garden, 

Its fresh-peeled voice

Astonishing the brickwork. 

It will be spring soon, 

It will be spring soon—

And I, whose childhood

Is a forgotten boredom, 

Feel like a child

Who comes on a scene

Of adult reconciling, 

And can understand nothing

But the unusual laughter, 

And starts to be happy. 



by Philip Larkin
courtesy English for Students

A Fairy Tale • National Poetry Month

A Fairy Tale

When my father was nine years old, his mother said, “Tommy, I’m taking you to the circus for your birthday. Just you and me, and I’ll buy you anything you want.” The middle child of six, my father thought this was the most incredible, wonderful thing that had ever happened to him—like something out of a fairy tale.

They got in the car, but instead of driving him to the circus, his mother pulled up in front of the hospital and told him to go inside and ask for Dr. So-and-so. After that they’d go to the circus.

He went inside and asked for Dr. So-and-so. A nurse told him to follow her into a room where she closed the door and gave him a shot. My father fell asleep, and some hours later, woke up crying in agony with his tonsils gone. A different nurse got him dressed, and sent him outside where his mother was waiting in the car with the engine running. He couldn’t speak on the way home to ask her, “What about the circus?” Days later, when he could, he didn’t. They never mentioned it again.

Fifty-eight years later, he tells this story to his wife, his only explanation, when she asks him, “What are you doing home from church so early?”

He’d walked out in the middle of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," never to return.


by Jennifer L. Knox
courtesy poets.org

Solemnity • National Poetry Month

Solemnity


At the mosque’s entrance      3:30 a.m.     Syrian
women beg wearing black gloves.
Your father’s grandmother was Syrian

before the country was ash. 
Before the government turned 
to kill its people.

What incites that internal blaze?
What says       it is me I will take
or not me      but those whom I claim?

We are claimed after meditation. 
We are walking an empty street 
after pretending to play drums.

After I recognize the heather in air
after we swim in a pool surrounded by azaleas
after your mother smiles observing us

after we sleep in her house       fields
of sunflowers. I’m on a bus
watching them sway.     I’m forgetting

the distance       the inevitable loss
I will hold warm as snow whitens the green. 
What will you hold?

What will you see beyond your hands?
Streets lined with jacarandas
that morph to pines     to a self beneath

ice that wolves trample silently? 
Someone still begs.
Someone still believes in our

innate generosity.
You are waiting for me but refuse to say it.
You believe in returns.

You believe in the planet’s roundness.
You believe in gravity’s inaudible assurance.
You believe in what I doubt.


by Myronn Hardy
courtesy poets.org

i thank You God for most this amazing • National Poetry Month

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened) 



 by e e cummings 

courtesy Interesting Literature

The Truth Machine, As Demonstrated by Judge Judy • National Poetry Month

The Truth Machine, As Demonstrated by Judge Judy

She is not a polygraph, does not cuff
the accused to take their vital signs,
display their heart rates, breathing
patterns, systolic and diastolic pressures,

the perspiration a swipe of Secret
can’t control volleying on a monitor
like the radar of a storm no one can
escape, state of emergency that preempts

even this daytime television show
every thirty minutes as required
by station policies. Instead the Truth
Machine uses her senses to gauge

theirs. She feels their bladders fill
and shift like they’re her own, feels them
rage-clench their fists, cross their arms
in defense or defiance. The Truth Machine

sniffs their bacterial sweat from her bench,
through each impermeable screen. She hears
their tongues un-vivify, dry out
like cellophane, their words sticking

to the plastic of their palates. A latter-
day Medusa, she forces them to look
in her eyes—not over there, not down—
and freeze themselves in the lake effect

reflection of their lies, even the ones so
far removed from hue that they are liquid
paper. The Truth Machine is a goddess
sorting out every bit of human mishegoss,

deconstructing the tzimmes, but sometimes,
as deities and devices can, she happens
on a Perseus so practiced in his terrifying
deceptions that he gets off a shot at her head.

by Jen Karetnick
courtesy Jewish Women Amplified

About God & Things • National Poetry Month

About God & Things

              1

i want to have your child

cuz upon losing you

i’ll have more than memory

            more than ache

            more than greatness

i’ll have laughter

i do not mean to be fatalistic

know the limits put on you black man

me, black woman

when you are killed or imprisoned

desert or separate from me

i’ll continue

fill the void of your absence with

love between me and ours

gods

              2

you love me

in your eyes. don’t say it loud

pain

america will never let you

              3

you’re home. it’s a surprise

you’ve made it thru another day

one more night in your arms

to fuck

merge our bodies merge

give

wealth/freedom

congress cannot legislate away

              4

eyes wide as suns inquire

where’s daddy?

he’s gone away

i love my daddy

i smile

he’s a good maan

eyes wide as suns

burn my hand with a kiss

go outside to play in the streets

god

what god is about

by Wanda Coleman

from Imagoes (Black Sparrow Press)

courtesy Poetry Foundation