Poetry Wednesday: Sink Your Fingers into the Darkness of My Fur

Sink Your Fingers into the Darkness of My Fur


Up until this sore minute, you could turn the key, pivot away.
But mine is the only medicine now
wherever you go or follow.
The past is so far away, but it flickers,
then cleaves the night. The bones
of the past splinter between our teeth.
This is our life, love. Why did I think
it would be anything less than too much
of everything? I know you remember that cheap motel
on the coast where we drank red wine,
the sea flashing its gold scales as sun
soaked our skin. You said, This must be
what people mean when they say
I could die now. Now
we’re so much closer
to death than we were then. Who isn’t crushed,
stubbed out beneath a clumsy heel?
Who hasn’t stood at the open window,
sleepless, for the solace of the damp air?
I had to get old to carry both buckets
yoked on my shoulders. Sweet
and bitter waters I drink from.
Let me know you, ox you.
I want your scent in my hair.
I want your jokes.
Hang your kisses on all my branches, please.
Sink your fingers into the darkness of my fur.



by Ellen Bass, courtesy of The Academy of American Poets

Poetry Wednesday: Home

Home

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

by Warsan Shire (British-Somali poet)

courtesy Genius.com

After Our Daughter's Wedding • Poetry Wednesday

After Our Daughter's Wedding
While the remnants of cake
and half-empty champagne glasses
lay on the lawn like sunbathers lingering
in the slanting light, we left the house guests
and drove to Antonelli's pond.
On a log by the bank I sat in my flowered dress and cried.
A lone fisherman drifted by, casting his ribbon of light.
"Do you feel like you've given her away?" you asked.
But no, it was that she made it
to here, that she didn't
drown in a well or die
of pneumonia or take the pills.
She wasn't crushed
under the mammoth wheels of a semi
on highway 17, wasn't found
lying in the alley
that night after rehearsal
when I got the time wrong.
It's animal. The egg
not eaten by a weasel. Turtles
crossing the beach, exposed
in the moonlight. And we
have so few to start with.
And that long gestation—
like carrying your soul out in front of you.
All those years of feeding
and watching. The vulnerable hollow
at the back of the neck. Never knowing
what could pick them off—a seagull
swooping down for a clam.
Our most basic imperative:
for them to survive.
And there's never been a moment
we could count on it.


by Ellen Bass 
From Mules of Love
courtesy The Writer's Almanac

Poetry Wednesday: Interrogative, and a New Poet Laureate

Congratulations to America's new Poet Laureate! Here is a poem from her book Duende.

Interrogative

Related Poem Content Details

1. Falmouth, Massachusetts, 1972

Oak table, knotted legs, the chirp

And scrape of tines to mouth.

Four children, four engines

Of want. That music.

What did your hand mean to smooth

Across the casket of your belly?

What echoed there, if not me—tiny body

Afloat, akimbo, awake or at rest?

Every night you fed the others

Bread leavened with the grains

Of your own want. How

Could you stand me near you,

In you, jump and kick tricking

The heart, when what you prayed for

Was my father’s shadow, your name

In his dangerous script, an envelope

Smelling of gun-powder, bay rum,

Someone to wrestle, sing to, question,

Climb?

                        2. Interstate 101 South, California, 1981

Remember the radio, the Coca-Cola sign

Phosphorescent to the left, bridge

After bridge, as though our lives were

Engineered simply to go? And so we went

Into those few quiet hours

Alone together in the dark, my arm

On the rest beside yours, our lights

Pricking at fog, tugging us patiently

Forward like a needle through gauze.

Night held us like a house.

Sometimes an old song

Would fill the car like a ghost.

                                    3. Leroy, Alabama, 2005

There’s still a pond behind your mother’s old house,

Still a stable with horses, a tractor rusted and stuck

Like a trophy in mud. And the red house you might

Have thrown stones at still stands on stilts up the dirt road.

A girl from the next town over rides in to lend us

Her colt, cries when one of us kicks it with spurs.

Her father wants to buy her a trailer, let her try her luck

In the shows. They stay for dinner under the tent

Your brother put up for the Fourth. Firebugs flare

And vanish. I am trying to let go of something.

My heart cluttered with names that mean nothing.

Our racket races out to the darkest part of the night.

The woods catch it and send it back. 

                        4. But let’s say you’re alive again—

Your hands are long and tell your age.

You hold them there, twirling a bent straw,

And my reflection watches, hollow-faced,

Not trying to hide. The waiters make it seem

Like Cairo. Back and forth shouting

That sharp language. And for the first time

I tell you everything. No shame

In my secrets, shoddy as laundry.

I have praised your God

For the blessing of the body, snuck

From pleasure to pleasure, lying for it, 

Holding it like a coin or a key in my fist.

I know now you’ve known all along.

I won’t change. I want to give

Everything away. To wander forever.

Here is a pot of tea. Let’s share it

Slowly, like sisters.

by Tracy K. Smith

courtesy of The Poetry Foundation

At the Pitch • Poetry Wednesday

At the Pitch If I could only live at the pitch that is near madness, Eberhart wrote but there was his wife Betty hanging onto his coattails for dear life to the end of her life. No one intervened when my mother’s brother’s wife ran off with the new young rabbi every woman in the congregation had a crush on. They rose unleashed, fleeing west into the sooty sky over Philadelphia in a pillar of fire, at the pitch that is near madness touching down in the outskirts of Pittsburgh. Cleveland. Chicago. O westward! O fornication! I was sixteen. Eberhart had written his poem before he sailed off to World War II and a boy had just put his tongue in my mouth which meant he could make me do anything. No one holding onto his coattails, no one onto my skirt until my father switched on the back porch light. by Maxine Kumin from Where I Live: New & Selected Poems courtesy The Writer's Almanac

On Alcohol • Poetry Wednesday

On Alcohol

my first drink was in my mother

my next, my bris. doctor spread red

wine across my lips. took my foreskin

•

every time i drink     i lose something

•

no one knows the origins of alcohol. tho surely an accident

before sacrament. agricultural apocrypha. enough grain stored up

for it to get weird in the cistern. rot gospel. god water

•

brandy was used to treat everything

from colds to pneumonia

frostbite to snake bites

tb patients were placed on ethanol drips

tonics & cough medicines

spooned into the crying mouths of children

•

each friday in synagogue a prayer for red

at dinner, the cemetery, the kitchen

spirits

•

how many times have i woke

strange in an unfamiliar bed?

my head neolithic

•

my grandfather died with a bottle in one hand

& flowers in the other. he called his drink his medicine

he called his woman

    she locked the door

•

i can only half blame alcohol for my overdose

the other half is my own hand

that poured the codeine    that lifted the red plastic again & again &

•

i’m trying to understand pleasure     it comes back

in flashes    every jean button thumbed open to reveal

a different man     every slurred & furious permission

•

i was sober a year before [          ] died

•

every time i drink     i lose someone

•

if you look close at the process of fermentation

you’ll see tiny animals destroying the living body

until it’s transformed into something more volatile

•

the wino outside the liquor store

mistakes me for his son

by Sam Sax

(Listen to the poet read this poem, courtesy Poetry Foundation)

I am Waiting • Poetry Wednesday

I Am Waiting

I am waiting for my case to come up   

and I am waiting 

for a rebirth of wonder 

and I am waiting for someone 

to really discover America 

and wail 

and I am waiting   

for the discovery 

of a new symbolic western frontier   

and I am waiting   

for the American Eagle 

to really spread its wings 

and straighten up and fly right 

and I am waiting 

for the Age of Anxiety 

to drop dead 

and I am waiting 

for the war to be fought 

which will make the world safe 

for anarchy 

and I am waiting 

for the final withering away 

of all governments 

and I am perpetually awaiting 

a rebirth of wonder 

I am waiting for the Second Coming   

and I am waiting 

for a religious revival 

to sweep thru the state of Arizona   

and I am waiting 

for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored   

and I am waiting 

for them to prove 

that God is really American 

and I am waiting 

to see God on television 

piped onto church altars 

if only they can find   

the right channel   

to tune in on 

and I am waiting 

for the Last Supper to be served again 

with a strange new appetizer 

and I am perpetually awaiting 

a rebirth of wonder 

I am waiting for my number to be called 

and I am waiting 

for the Salvation Army to take over 

and I am waiting 

for the meek to be blessed 

and inherit the earth   

without taxes 

and I am waiting 

for forests and animals 

to reclaim the earth as theirs 

and I am waiting 

for a way to be devised 

to destroy all nationalisms 

without killing anybody 

and I am waiting 

for linnets and planets to fall like rain 

and I am waiting for lovers and weepers 

to lie down together again 

in a new rebirth of wonder 

I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed   

and I am anxiously waiting 

for the secret of eternal life to be discovered   

by an obscure general practitioner 

and I am waiting 

for the storms of life 

to be over 

and I am waiting 

to set sail for happiness 

and I am waiting 

for a reconstructed Mayflower 

to reach America 

with its picture story and tv rights 

sold in advance to the natives 

and I am waiting 

for the lost music to sound again 

in the Lost Continent 

in a new rebirth of wonder 

I am waiting for the day 

that maketh all things clear 

and I am awaiting retribution 

for what America did   

to Tom Sawyer   

and I am waiting 

for Alice in Wonderland 

to retransmit to me 

her total dream of innocence 

and I am waiting 

for Childe Roland to come 

to the final darkest tower 

and I am waiting   

for Aphrodite 

to grow live arms 

at a final disarmament conference 

in a new rebirth of wonder 

I am waiting 

to get some intimations 

of immortality 

by recollecting my early childhood 

and I am waiting 

for the green mornings to come again   

youth’s dumb green fields come back again 

and I am waiting 

for some strains of unpremeditated art 

to shake my typewriter 

and I am waiting to write 

the great indelible poem 

and I am waiting 

for the last long careless rapture 

and I am perpetually waiting 

for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn   

to catch each other up at last 

and embrace 

and I am awaiting   

perpetually and forever 

a renaissance of wonder

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

from These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems

courtesy The Poetry Foundation