The woman the boy became • National Poetry Month

The woman the boy became

Born more brawn than most,
Born warm.
Born close to ghosts.
Born storm.
Born old.
Grew young.
You could tell she wasn’t from
The same place as the rest,
Born strong. 
Born wrong.

She grew.

Growing is what anyone would do.
Given the particulars
She knew what she knew
She was ridiculous. 
Born too smart and too dumb.
Born to hold the world under her tongue.

Don’t swallow yet.

She felt

All the things that others didn’t feel,
Or if they did,
They did a lot to conceal what the feelings were.

She felt skies and bricks and rain.
She felt it all
It made her fall
And weep beneath a crawling dawn
When everything was ruined; torn.

She felt ill.
But she felt still.

How many yous have you been?
How many,
Lined up inside, 
Each killing the last?

How many times have you
Seen yourself change,
Felt yourself splitting in half?

When does it happen? There in the moment?
Or when you look back and say
- that’s when my changing began?

Born hero.
Born freak. Born weirdo.

Born blind.
Born seeing.

Born man.

She stands.

The hillside beneath her is crumbling. 
The sky frowns.
The land wants to return to the sea.

She is food for the gulls and it’s humbling. 
But this is not all
That she was born to be.

All of the things in her life that have happened.
All of the changes.
All of the strangers.

All of the nights and the days in her heart
Have been present since the start.

You don’t learn.
You remember.

Born with it all in your chest.
Born first.
Learn last.
Burn fast like paper
Unless you’re wet logs.

Wet dogs shelter in her caves when they get lost.
Howl with her.

She has been touched without asking. 
Punched by a madman.
Drunk in a bad town.
When she puts her hands down
And feels what’s beneath
She feels all the grief
Of the world.
Lay a wreath
For the girls.

She will march
Till she feels the tarmac respond. 
She will die for our wrongs.
We won’t notice.

She is fire
And sleet and granite,
Space rock shattering the planet. 
She wants to stop it spinning in its tracks like a dumb child.

She will be prophet one day. 
For a moment
She soaks up all that she can
She will own it
This filthy body this life
The dethronement of all that was precious
In favour of all that is tepid.
Opponents mean nothing. She’s Titan.
Born of the first breed.
Born in the last days.
Frightened of nothing that bleeds. 
The more that you hate her
The less that she needs.

All of her childhood passed in a flash
When she woke on her back in a clearing.
Time to be me now.

How many yous will you carry,
Weeping and desperate to marry?
How many yous will you churn out?
Turn out the light for the night.
She has burned out but she’ll be alright. 
She is coming up.
Child of her time.

Red morning. 
Blood on the tips of the thorns,
And the awning is dripping
With all of our scorn. We were born in
Days that will fill you with porn and with boredom
Grey little faces march in the squadron to warsongs
Penned by cynical fiends,
The latest big hit that cements the routine. 
Sell us the download. 
And kill all our dreams.

She rises.
She will see through the disguises.
They stab knives in her thighs.
See the swell of her iris?
She survives.
She will run till the cities are vanquished.
And all the children are gods again.

by Kate Tempest

courtesy kaleidoscopetodd

listen to her read it here

Iowa City: Early April • National Poetry Month

Iowa City: Early April

This morning a cat—bright orange—pawing at the one patch of new grass in the sand-and tanbark-colored leaves.

And last night the sapphire of the raccoon's eyes in the beam of the flashlight.

He was climbing a tree beside the house, trying to get onto the porch, I think, for a wad of oatmeal

Simmered in cider from the bottom of the pan we'd left out for the birds.

And earlier a burnished, somewhat dazed woodchuck, his coat gleaming with spring,

Loping toward his burrow in the roots of a tree among the drying winter's litter

Of old leaves on the floor of the woods, when I went out to get the New York Times.

And male cardinals whistling back and forth—sireeep, sreeep, sreeep—

Sets of three sweet full notes, weaving into and out of each other like the triplet rhymes in medieval poetry,

And the higher, purer notes of the tufted titmice among them,

High in the trees where they were catching what they could of the early sun.

And a doe and two yearlings, picking their way along the worrying path they'd made through the gully, their coats the color of the forest floor,

Stopped just at the roots of the great chestnut where the woodchuck's burrow was,

Froze, and the doe looked back over her shoulder at me for a long moment, and leapt forward,

Her young following, and bounded with that almost mincing precision in the landing of each hoof

Up the gully, over it, and out of sight. So that I remembered

Dreaming last night that a deer walked into the house while I was writing at the kitchen table,

Came in the glass door from the garden, looked at me with a stilled defiant terror, like a thing with no choices,

And, neck bobbing in that fragile-seeming, almost mechanical mix of arrest and liquid motion, came to the table

And snatched a slice of apple, and stood, and then quietened, and to my surprise did not leave again.

And those little captains, the chickadees, swift to the feeder and swift away.

And the squirrels with their smoke-plume tails trailing digging in the leaves to bury or find buried—

I'm told they don't remember where they put things, that it's an activity of incessant discovery—

Nuts, tree-fall proteins, whatever they forage from around the house of our leavings,

And the flameheaded woodpecker at the suet with his black-and-white ladderback elegant fierceness—

They take sunflower seeds and stash them in the rough ridges of the tree's bark

Where the beaks of the smoke-and-steel blue nuthatches can't quite get at them—

Though the nuthatches sometimes seem to get them as they con the trees methodically for spiders' eggs or some other overwintering insect's intricately packaged lump of futurity

Got from its body before the cold came on.

And the little bat in the kitchen lightwell—

When I climbed on a chair to remove the sheet of wimpled plastic and let it loose,

It flew straight into my face and I toppled to the floor, chair under me,

And it flared down the hall and did what seemed a frantic reconnoiter of the windowed, high-walled living room.

And lit on a brass firelog where it looked like a brown and ash

grey teenaged suede glove with Mephistophelean dreams,

And then, spurt of black sperm, up, out the window, and into the twilight woods.

All this life going on about my life, or living a life about all this life going on,

Being a creature, whatever my drama of the moment, at the edge of the raccoon's world—

He froze in my flashlight beam and looked down, no affect, just looked,

The ringtail curled and flared to make him look bigger and not to be messed with—

I was thinking he couldn't know how charming his comic-book robber's mask was to me,

That his experience of his being and mine of his and his of mine were things entirely apart,

Though there were between us, probably, energies of shrewd and respectful tact, based on curiosity and fear—

I knew about his talons whatever he knew about me—

And as for my experience of myself, it comes and goes, I'm not sure it's any one thing, as my experience of these creatures is not,

And I know I am often too far from it or too near, glad to be rid of it which is why it was such a happiness,

The bright orange of the cat, and the first pool of green grass-leaves in early April, and the birdsong—that orange and that green not colors you'd set next to one another in the human scheme.

And the crows' calls, even before you open your eyes, at sunup.

by Robert Hass

from Sun Under Wood: New Poems

courtesy Poetry Foundation

The Poem Grace Interrupted • National Poetry Month

The Poem Grace Interrupted


There once was a planet who was both
sick and beautiful. Chemicals rode through her
that she did not put there.
Animals drowned in her eyeballs
that she did not put there—
animals she could not warn
against falling in because
she was of them, not
separable from them.
Define sick, the atmosphere asked.
So she tried: she made
a whale on fire
somehow still
swimming and alive.
See? she said. Like that,
kind of. But the atmosphere did
not understand this, so the planet progressed in her argument.
She talked about the skin
that snakes shed, about satellites that circled her
like suitors forever yet never
said a word.
She talked about the shyness
of large things, how a blueberry dominates
the tongue that it dies on.
She talked and talked and
the atmosphere started nodding—
you could call this
a revolution, or just therapy.
Meanwhile the whale spent the rest of his
life burning (etc., etc., he sang a few songs).
When he finally died
his body, continuing
to burn steadily, drifted down
to the ocean floor.
And although the planet
had long since forgotten him—he was merely one
of her many examples—he became
a kind of god in the eyes
of the fish that saw him as he fell. Or
not a god exactly, but at least something
inexplicable. Something strange and worth
briefly turning your face toward.

by Mikko Harvey
courtesy poets.org

We have no choice in the bodies that hold us • National Poetry Month

We have no choice in the bodies that hold us

Thing of dirt and water and oxygen marked by thinking
and reacting and a couch
one may or may not be permitted
to sleep on. He may not permit me
to touch him or to take the bone
from his mouth, but he does, and that’s a choice
based on many factors, not the least of which
is his own desire to let me
do these things. How I could ever
think or feel myself more
deserving of a single thing than
this being, whom I call by a name the same way
my parents chose a name for me. The same way my genes
went expressing themselves to make my face exactly
my face. This isn’t special. Or this is special. But it’s one
answer, the same, for us both.

by Holly Amos
courtesy poets.org

Now What • National Poetry Month

Now What


And so I sat at a tall table
in an Ohio hotel,
eating delivery:
cheese bread



with garlic butter, only it was
not butter, but partially
hydrogenated soy
bean oil



and regular soybean oil and it
came in a little tub like
creamer that’s also not
dairy.



America in 2019
means a poem will have to
contain dairy that is,
in fact,



not dairy. On Instagram: a man
has bought a ten foot by four
foot photo of a bridge
he lives



beside, bridge he can see just outside
his window, window which serves
as a ten foot by four
foot frame.



My materialist mind, I can’t
shake it. Within a perfect
little tub of garlic
butter,



a relief of workers, of sickles,
fields of soy. We were tanners
pushed to the edge of the
city



once, by the stench, the bubble of vats
of flesh and loosening skin,
back when the city pulled,
leather



bucket by leather bucket, its own
water from wells. Then we worked
the cafeterias
at the



petroleum offices of the
British. Then, revolution—



Simple.

by Solmaz Sharif
courtesy poets.org

The Body Remembers • National Poetry Month

The Body Remembers


I stood on one foot for three minutes & didn’t tilt
the scales. Do you remember how quickly

we scrambled up an oak leaning out over the creek,
how easy to trust the water to break

our glorious leaps? The body remembers
every wish one lives for or doesn’t, or even horror.

Our dance was a rally in sunny leaves, then quick
as anything, Johnny Dickson was up opening

his arms wide in the tallest oak, waving
to the sky, & in the flick of an eye

he was a buffalo fish gigged, pleading
for help, voiceless. Bigger & stronger,

he knew every turn in the creek past his back door,
but now he was cooing like a brown dove

in a trap of twigs. A water-honed spear
of kindling jutted up, as if it were the point

of our folly & humbug on a Sunday afternoon, right?
Five of us carried him home through the thicket,

our feet cutting a new path, running in sleep
years later. We were young as condom-balloons

flowering crabapple trees in double bloom
& had a world of baleful hope & breath.

Does Johnny run fingers over the thick welt
on his belly, days we were still invincible?

Sometimes I spend half a day feeling for bones
in my body, humming a half-forgotten

ballad on a park bench a long ways from home.
The body remembers the berry bushes

heavy with sweetness shivering in a lonely woods,
but I doubt it knows words live longer

than clay & spit of flesh, as rock-bottom love.
Is it easier to remember pleasure

or does hurt ease truest hunger?
That summer, rocking back & forth, uprooting

what’s to come, the shadow of the tree
weighed as much as a man.


by Yusef Komunyakaa
courtesy poet.org

XIII (Dedications) • National Poetry Month

It's National Poetry Month, and that means a new poem on Hedgehog Lover every day in April. Let me know if there's a poem you'd like to see on the site, or feel free to share one of your own for publication.

Today, I share with you one of my favorites. 


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. (1990-91)

by Adrienne Rich
from Atlas of a Difficult World