Pain Scale • National Poetry Month

Pain Scale

Floating above the gynecologist’s hands,
Dolor looks down at me
with her many expressions.

Someone sketched the eyes, the mouths,
someone pinned them up,
arranged the faces

so they softly say, like this? like this?
The doctor says to choose one,
but I’m no fool, I close my eyes

and the speculum is blind and cool,
widened and distracting.
Like the Chiky? vessel drilling

downhole from the ocean floor
into the untouched mantle,
it shows we’re scarred inside

by what years and use and trespass do.
Every day the women open their eyes
and follow me into the streets,

the cities, like a wind murmur begins
a rumor of waves, the faces of earth
saying let this pain be error upon me writ.

by Catherine Barnett
from Human Hours
courtesy poets.org

Love Song • National Poetry Month

Love Song 

My own dear love, he is strong and bold
      And he cares not what comes after.
His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,
      And his eyes are lit with laughter.
He is jubilant as a flag unfurled—
      Oh, a girl, she’d not forget him.
My own dear love, he is all my world,—
      And I wish I’d never met him.

My love, he’s mad, and my love, he’s fleet,
      And a wild young wood-thing bore him!
The ways are fair to his roaming feet,
      And the skies are sunlit for him.
As sharply sweet to my heart he seems
      As the fragrance of acacia.
My own dear love, he is all my dreams,—
      And I wish he were in Asia.

My love runs by like a day in June,
      And he makes no friends of sorrows.
He’ll tread his galloping rigadoon
      In the pathway of the morrows.
He’ll live his days where the sunbeams start,
      Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart,—
      And I wish somebody’d shoot him.


By Dorothy Parker
courtesy Poetry Foundation

Elegy, Surrounded by Seven Trees • National Poetry Month

Elegy, Surrounded by Seven Trees

for Michele Antoinette Pray-Griffiths


Ordinary days deliver joy easily 
again & I can’t take it. If I could tell you 
how her eyes laughed or describe 
the rage of her suffering, I must 
admit that lately my memories 
are sometimes like a color 
warping in my blue mind. 
Metal abandoned in rain. 

My mother will not move. 

Which is to say that 
sometimes the true color of 
her casket jumps from my head 
like something burnt down 
in the genesis of a struck flame. 
Which is to say that I miss
the mind I had when I had
my mother. I own what is yet. 
Which means I am already
holding my own absence 
in faith. I still carry a faded slip of paper 
where she once wrote a word 
with a pencil & crossed it out. 

From tree to tree, around her grave
I have walked, & turned back 
if only to remind myself 
that there are some kinds of 
peace, which will not be 
moved. How awful to have such 
wonder. The final way wonder itself 
opened beneath my mother’s face 
at the last moment. As if she was 
a small girl kneeling in a puddle 
& looking at her face for the first time, 
her fingers gripping the loud, 
wet rim of the universe. 


by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
courtesy poets.org

Mathematical Limericks • National Poetry Month

Math and literature are like peas and carrots. See below for proof!

Thanks to my friend Beth for finding this, and I apologize if it's a little fussy

Fiere • National Poetry Month

Fiere 

If ye went tae the tapmost hill, Fiere
Whaur we used tae clamb as girls,
Ye’d see the snow the day, Fiere,
Settling on the hills.
You’d mind o’ anither day, mibbe,
We ran doon the hill in the snow,
Sliding and singing oor way tae the foot,
Lassies laughing thegither – how braw.
The years slipping awa; oot in the weather.

And noo we’re suddenly auld, Fiere,
Oor friendship’s ne’er been weary.
We’ve aye seen the wurld differently.
Whaur would I hae been weyoot my jo,
My fiere, my fiercy, my dearie O?
Oor hair micht be silver noo,
Oor walk a wee bit doddery,
But we’ve had a whirl and a blast, girl,
Thru’ the cauld blast winter, thru spring, summer.

O’er a lifetime, my fiere, my bonnie lassie,
I’d defend you – you, me; blithe and blatter,
Here we gang doon the hill, nae matter,
Past the bracken, bothy, bonny braes, barley.
Oot by the roaring Sea, still havin a blether.
We who loved sincerely; we who loved sae fiercely.
The snow ne’er looked sae barrie,
Nor the winter trees sae pretty.
C’mon, c’mon my dearie – tak my hand, my fiere!

by Jackie Kay
from Addressing the Bard: twelve contemporary poets respond to Robert Burns
courtesy Scottish Poetry Library

Differences of Opinion National Poetry Month

1.

HE TELLS HER

He tells her that the earth is flat —
He knows the facts, and that is that.
In altercations fierce and long
She tries her best to prove him wrong.
But he has learned to argue well.
He calls her arguments unsound
And often asks her not to yell.
She cannot win. He stands his ground.

The planet goes on being round.

by Wendy Copecourtesy medium.com

Little Red-Cap • National Poetry Month

Little Red-Cap

At childhood’s end, the houses petered out
into playing fields, the factory, allotments
kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men, 
the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan, 
till you came at last to the edge of the woods. 
It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf. 

He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud 
in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw, 
red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears
he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!
In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me, 
sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink, 

my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.
The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods,
away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place
lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake,
my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer
snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes

but got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night, 
breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem.
I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for
what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?1
Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws
and went in search of a living bird – white dove –

which flew, straight, from my hands to his hope mouth.
One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said,
licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back
of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books.
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head,
warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.

But then I was young – and it took ten years 
in the woods to tell that a mushroom
stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds
are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf
howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out,
season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe

to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon
to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf
as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw 
the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones.
I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up.
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone. 

by Carol Ann Duffy
courtesy poem of the week