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

Poem in Your Pocket Day • National Poetry Month

Happy Poem in Your Pocket Day! 

Print this poem to share with friends and family, and keep a copy of it in your pocket. Thanks to the Academy of American Poets for sharing their poem with us, and visit the website for others to read and share.



Making History 

Blue and White Orlon Snowflake Sweater, Blue Snowpants, Red Galoshes 
—Smoky Hill AFB, Kansas, 1955 

Somebody took a picture of a class 
standing in line to get polio shots, 
and published it in the Weekly Reader. 
We stood like that today. And it did hurt. 
Mrs. Liebel said we were Making History, 
but all I did was sqwunch up my eyes and wince. 
Making History takes more than standing in line 
believing little white lies about pain. 
Mama says First Negroes are History: 
First Negro Telephone Operator, 
First Negro Opera Singer At The Met, 
First Negro Pilots, First Supreme Court Judge. 
That lady in Montgomery just became a First 
by sqwunching up her eyes and sitting there.

by Marilyn Nelson

courtesy poets.org

I'll Remember You As You Were, Not As What You'll Become • National Poetry Month

I'll Remember You As You Were, Not As What You'll Become

If you are fearful, America,
I can tell you I am too. I worry
about my body—the way, lately,
it marches itself over curbs and
barriers, lingers in the streets
as a form of resistance.

The streets belong to no one
and everyone and are a guide
for motion, but we are so numerous
there is no pavement left on which to
release our bodies, like a river spilling
over a dam, so instead my body
thrums next to yours in place.

When we stop traffic or hold
hands to form a human chain,
we become a neon OPEN sign
singing into the night miles from
home when the only home left
is memory, your body, my body,
our scars, the dark punctuated
with the dying light of stars.


by Erica Meitner
courtesy Love's Executive Order