Monday, December 28, 2020

 

Leaning In
by Sue Ellen Thompson

Sometimes, in the middle of a crowded store on a Saturday
afternoon, my husband will rest his hand
on my neck, or on the soft flesh belted at my waist,
and pull me to him. I understand

his question: Why are we so fortunate
when all around us, friends are falling prey
to divorce and illness? It seems intemperate
to celebrate in a more conspicuous way

so we just stand there, leaning in
to one another, until that moment
of sheer blessedness dissolves and our skin,
which has been touching, cools and relents,

settling back into our separate skeletons
as we head toward Housewares to resume our errands.


Sue Ellen Thompson, "Leaning In" from  

The Golden Hour. Copyright © 2006

Tuesday, December 1, 2020

 

Translation

Months later, my father and I
discovered his mother’s last word—
deep in the downstairs freezer,
one loaf of dark rye.

Its thaw slowed the hours.

I could not bear
the thought of eating it.
Then the ice subsided. The bread
was firm, fragrant, forgiving.

My father got the knife,
the butter. The slices
held. Together we ate
that Finnish silence.

 

by Susanna Brougham in the

Spring 2020 issue of Beloit

Poetry Journal

 

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

 Eagle Poem
by Joy Harjo

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren't always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon, within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.



"Eagle Poem" by Joy Harjo, from  In Mad Love and War

© Wesleyan University Press, 1990.

Monday, November 16, 2020

 

Winter Morning by James Crews
 

When I can no longer say thank you

for this new day and the waking into it,

for the cold scrape of the kitchen chair

and the ticking of the space heater glowing

orange as it warms the floor near my feet,

I know it’s because I’ve been fooled again

by the selfish, unruly man who lives in me

and believes he deserves only safety

and comfort. But if I pause as I do now,

and watch the streetlights outside flashing

off one by one like old men blinking their

cloudy eyes, if I listen to my tired neighbors

slamming car doors hard against the morning

and see the steaming coffee in their mugs

kissing chapped lips as they sip and

exhale each of their worries white into

the icy air around their faces—then I can

remember this one life is a gift each of us

was handed and told to open: Untie the bow

and tear off the paper, look inside

and be grateful for whatever you find

even if it is only the scent of a tangerine

that lingers on the fingers long after

you’ve finished peeling it.

 

James Crews is the editor of the anthology,

Healing the Divide:  Poems of Kindness and

Connection, Green Writers Press.

 

 

 

 


Monday, November 9, 2020

 

Valediction

I hear before seeing, no need to see
to know morning’s ocarina, plaintive
call, soft strut on leafmeal. It was the first
creature I saw when the needle was done
and my sheepdog limped into last night.
That dove, I thought, will house his sable
spirit, coat feathered like joy in the wind.
Dove comes when my scattered mind

needs herding—bitter anniversaries,
leavings dire as tornadic rumble. Comes
when sky rivers blue, cooing all’s well
after all. Comes not to forbid mourning,
but trills core deep, beyond the senses,
glances back to make sure I follow
its white-tipped tail. Plaintive ocarina,
call me to bear all the light coming.

by Linda Parsons, 2020

 roots
by Lucille Clifton

call it our craziness even,
call it anything.
it is the life thing in us
that will not let us die.
even in death's hand
we fold the fingers up
and call them greens and
grow on them,
we hum them and make music.
call it our wildness then,
we are lost from the field
of flowers, we become
a field of flowers.
call it our craziness
our wildness
call it our roots,
it is the light in us
it is the light of us
it is the light, call it
whatever you have to,
call it anything.


Lucille Clifton, “roots” from How to Carry Water: Selected Poems.

Friday, October 23, 2020

 

A Pasture Poem
by Richard Wilbur

This upstart thistle
Is young and touchy; it is
All barb and bristle,

Threatening to wield
Its green, jagged armament
Against the whole field.

Butterflies will dare
Nonetheless to lay their eggs
In that angle where

The leaf meets the stem,
So that ants or browsing cows
Cannot trouble them.

Summer will grow old
As will the thistle, letting
A clenched bloom unfold

To which the small hum
Of bee wings and the flash of
Goldfinch wings will come,

Till its purple crown
Blanches, and the breezes strew
The whole field with down.


"A Pasture Poem" by Richard Wilbur, 

from Anterooms. © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

 What if you slept...
             by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in your hand
Ah, what then?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Public Domain

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

 

The New Song
by W. S. Merwin

For some time I thought there was time
and that there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then

there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song

from the book, The Moon Before Morning

Wednesday, October 14, 2020

 O sweet spontaneous
by e e cummings
 
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

               fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and

poked
thee
, has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

         beauty                  how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
         (but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

              thou answerest

them only with

                                spring)
 

"O Sweet Spontaneous" by e e cummings. Public Domain.

Thursday, October 8, 2020

 

Monarchs, Viceroys, Swallowtails 

For years they came tacking in, full sail, 
Riding the light down through the trees,
Over the rooftops, and not just monarchs,
But viceroys, swallowtails, so many
They became unremarkable, showing up
As they did whether we noticed them or not,
Swooping and fanning out at the bright
Margins of the day. So how did we know
Until it was too late, until they quit coming,
That the flowers in the flower beds
Would close their shutters, and the birds
Grow so dull they’d lose the power to sing,
And how later, after the river died,
Others would follow, admirals, buckeyes,
All going off like some lavish parade
Into the great overcrowded silence.
And no one bothered to tell the trees
They wouldn’t be coming back any more,
The huge shade trees where they used 
To gather, every last branch and leaf sagging
Under the bright freight of their wings.

 by Robert Hedin, in Alaska Quarterly Review (2020)

Wednesday, September 23, 2020

Musial
by George Bilgere

My father once sold a Chevy
to Stan Musial, the story goes,
back in the fifties,
when the most coveted object
in the universe of third grade
was a Stan-the-Man baseball card.

No St. Louis honkytonk
or riverfront jazz club
could be more musical
than those three syllables
rising from the tongue of Jack Buck
in the dark mouths
of garages on our street,

where men like my father
stood in their shirt-sleeved exile,
cigarette in one hand, scotch
in the other, radio rising
and ebbing with the Cards.

If Jack Buck were to call
my father's drinking that summer,
he would have said
he was swinging for the bleachers.
He was on a torrid pace.
In any case, the dealership was failing,
the marriage a heap of ash.

And knowing my father, I doubt
if the story is true,
although I love to imagine
that big, hayseed smile
flashing in the showroom, the salesmen
and mechanics looking on
from their nosebleed seats at the edge
of history, as my dark-suited dad
handed the keys to the Man,
and for an instant each man there
knew himself a part of something
suddenly immense,

as when,
in the old myths, a bored god
dresses up like one of us, and falls
through a summer thunderhead
to shock us from our daydream drabness
with heaven's dazzle and razzmatazz.


"Musial" by George Bilgere.

Monday, September 21, 2020

 

In Passing

 

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious

 

by Lisel Mueller

Monday, September 14, 2020

 

And Now It’s September,

 

and the garden diminishes: cucumber leaves rumpled
and rusty, zucchini felled by borers, tomatoes sparse
on the vines. But out in the perennial beds, there’s one last
blast of color: ignitions of goldenrod, flamboyant
asters, spiraling mums, all those flashy spikes waving
in the wind, conducting summer’s final notes.
The ornamental grasses have gone to seed, haloed
in the last light. Nights grow chilly, but the days
are still warm; I wear the sun like a shawl on my neck
and arms. Hundreds of blackbirds ribbon in, settle
in the trees, so many black leaves, then, just as suddenly,
they’re gone. This is autumn’s great Departure Gate,
and everyone, boarding passes in hand, waits
patiently in a long, long line.

 

by Barbara Crooker, first published in Spillway magazine

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

 

At the Pitch
by Maxine Kumin

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.

 

“At the Pitch” by Maxine Kumin from Where I Live: New & Selected Poems.

Wednesday, August 26, 2020

You don't believe
by William Blake        (public domain)

You don't believe — I won't attempt to make ye.
You are asleep — I won't attempt to wake ye.
Sleep on, sleep on, while in your pleasant dreams
Of reason you may drink of life's clear streams
Reason and Newton, they are quite two things,
For so the swallow and the sparrow sings.
Reason says 'Miracle', Newton says 'Doubt'.
Aye, that's the way to make all Nature out:
Doubt, doubt, and don't believe without experiment.
That is the very thing that Jesus meant
When he said: 'Only believe.' Believe and try,
Try, try, and never mind the reason why.

 

Thursday, August 20, 2020

 

The Sleeping
by Jacinta V. White

There are some who are meant to sleep
and live inside dreams. They come

as visitors to carry
messages from there to now.

You know them. The baby who looks
deeply into your eyes while stealing your heart.

The lover who hypnotizes you,
the old man who speaks in riddles

before falling off to sleep. We shake
them out of selfish yearnings but

do not wake them or chastise them
for not being among the woke.

Some need to sleep so that others
will know what it is like to be alive.

 

“The Sleeping” by Jacinta V. White, from Resurrecting the Bones. Press 53 © 2019.

Tuesday, August 18, 2020

Apple Season
by Joyce Sutphen

The kitchen is sweet with the smell of apples,
big yellow pie apples, light in the hand,
their skins freckled, the stems knobby
and thick with bark, as if the tree
could not bear to let the apple go.
Baskets of apples circle the back door,
fill the porch, cover the kitchen table.

My mother and my grandmother are
running the apple brigade. My mother,
always better with machines, is standing
at the apple peeler; my grandmother,
more at home with a paring knife,
faces her across the breadboard.
My mother takes an apple in her hand,

She pushes it neatly onto the sharp
prong and turns the handle that turns
the apple that swivels the blade pressed
tight against the apple's side and peels
the skin away in long curling strips that
twist and fall to a bucket on the floor.
The apples, coming off the peeler,

Are winding staircases, little accordions,
slinky toys, jack-in-the-box fruit, until
my grandmother's paring knife goes slicing
through the rings and they become apple
pies, apple cakes, apple crisp. Soon
they will be married to butter and live with
cinnamon and sugar, happily ever after.

 

Joyce Sutphen, “Apple Season” from Coming Back to the Body. Copyright © 2000 by Joyce Sutphen.

Monday, July 27, 2020


Rebecca Who Slammed Doors for Fun
And Perished Miserably
by Hilaire Belloc       (Public Domain)

A trick that everyone abhors
In little girls is slamming doors.
A wealthy banker’s little daughter
Who lived in Palace Green, Bayswater
(By name Rebecca Offendort),
Was given to this furious sport.
She would deliberately go
And slam the door like billy-o!
To make her Uncle Jacob start.
She was not really bad at heart,
But only rather rude and wild;
She was an aggravating child…
It happened that a marble bust
Of Abraham was standing just
Above the door this little lamb
Had carefully prepared to slam,
And down it came! It knocked her flat!
It laid her out! She looked like that.
Her funeral sermon (which was long
And followed by a sacred song)
Mentioned her virtues, it is true,
But dwelt upon her vices too,
And showed the dreadful end of one
Who goes and slams the door for fun.

Sarah Byng, Who Could Not Read and Was Tossed into a Thorny Hedge by a Bull

by Hilaire Belloc    (Public Domain)



Some years ago you heard me sing
My doubts on Alexander Byng.
His sister Sarah now inspires
My jaded Muse, my failing fires.
Of Sarah Byng the tale is told
How when the child was twelve years old
She could not read or write a line.
Her sister Jane, though barely nine,
Could spout the Catechism through
And parts of Matthew Arnold too,
While little Bill who came between
Was quite unnaturally keen
On 'Athalie', by Jean Racine.
But not so Sarah! Not so Sal!
She was a most uncultured girl
Who didn't care a pinch of snuff
For any literary stuff
And gave the classics all a miss.
Observe the consequence of this!
As she was walking home one day,
Upon the fields across her way
A gate, securely padlocked, stood,
And by its side a piece of wood
On which was painted plain and full,
BEWARE THE VERY FURIOUS BULL
Alas! The young illiterate
Went blindly forward to her fate,
And ignorantly climbed the gate!
Now happily the Bull that day
Was rather in the mood for play
Than goring people through and through
As Bulls so very often do;
He tossed her lightly with his horns
Into a prickly hedge of thorns,
And stood by laughing while she strode
And pushed and struggled to the road.
The lesson was not lost upon
The child, who since has always gone
A long way round to keep away
From signs, whatever they may say,
And leaves a padlocked gate alone.
Moreover she has wisely grown
Confirmed in her instinctive guess
That literature breeds distress.


George, Who Played with a Dangerous Toy 
and Suffered a Catastrophe of Considerable Dimensions 
by Hilaire Belloc   (Public Domain)
 

When George’s Grandmamma was told
That George had been as good as gold,
She promised in the afternoon
To buy him an Immense BALLOON.
And so she did; but when it came,
It got into the candle flame,
And being of a dangerous sort
Exploded with a loud report!
The lights went out! The windows broke!
The room was filled with reeking smoke.
And in the darkness shrieks and yells
Were mingled with electric bells,
And falling masonry and groans,
And crunching, as of broken bones,
And dreadful shrieks, when, worst of all,
The house itself began to fall!
It tottered, shuddering to and fro,
Then crashed into the street below—
Which happened to be Savile Row.

When Help arrived, among the Dead
Were Cousin Mary, Little Fred,
The Footmen (both of them), the Groom,
The man that cleaned the Billiard-Room,
The Chaplain, and the Still-Room Maid.
And I am dreadfully afraid
That Monsieur Champignon, the Chef,
Will now be permanently deaf—
And both his aides are much the same;
While George, who was in part to blame,
Received, you will regret to hear,
A nasty lump behind the ear.

Moral:
The moral is that little boys

Should not be given dangerous toys.

Monday, June 22, 2020

So Much of the World
by Gregory Djanikian

So much of the world exists
without us
the mountain in its own steepness
the deer sliding
into the trees becoming
a darkness
in the woods' darkness.
So much of an open field
lies somewhere between the grass
and the dragonfly's drive and thrum
the seed and seedling,
the earth within.
But so much of it lies in someone
standing alone at the edge of a field
with a life apart
feeling for a moment
the plover's cry
on the tongue
the curve and plumb
of the apple bough
in limb and bone.
So much of it between
one thing and another,
days of invitation,
then of release and return.


Gregory Djanikian, “So Much of the World” from Dear Gravity.

Saturday, May 23, 2020

from The Song of Hiawatha
In the green and silent valley,
By the pleasant water-courses,
Dwelt the singer Nawadaha.
In the green and silent valley.
“There he sang of Hiawatha,
Sang the Song of Hiawatha,
Sang his wondrous birth and being,
How he prayed and how be fasted,
How he lived, and toiled, and suffered,
That the tribes of men might prosper,
That he might advance his people!”
Ye who love the haunts of Nature,
Love the sunshine of the meadow,
Love the shadow of the forest,
Love the wind among the branches,
And the rain-shower and the snow-storm,
And the rushing of great rivers
Through their palisades of pine-trees,
And the thunder in the mountains,
Whose innumerable echoes
Flap like eagles in their eyries;—
Listen to these wild traditions,
To this Song of Hiawatha!

"The Song of Hiawatha (excerpt)" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Public Domain.

Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Anyone Can Be President
by Naomi Cochran

Twenty days before the oath
I dream it's me.
Chosen at random.
Standing alone
at a plywood podium.
No one wanted the job.
I'm from northern Wisconsin, I say.
I don't know anything.
I just want people to tell the truth
and be kind.
A man interrupts.
I put my hand over his mouth.
Be quiet, I say.
I believe I have the floor.
 “Anyone Can Be President” by Naomi Cochran, from The Truth about Everything: In 3500 Words or Less. Just a Thought Press © 2019.

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Signs
by Luci Shaw

In time of drought, let us be
thankful for this very gentle rain,

a gift not to be disdained
though it is little and brief,

reaching no great depth, barely
kissing the leaves' lips. Think of it as

mercy. Other minor blessings may
show up—tweezers for splinters,

change for the parking meter,
a green light at the intersection,

a cool wind that lifts away summer's
suffocating heat. An apology after

a harsh comment. A word that opens
an unfinished poem like a key in a lock.
“Signs” by Luci Shaw from Eye of the Beholder. Paraclete Press © 2018.

Tuesday, April 21, 2020




Bring me the sunflower, let me plant it
in my field parched by the salt sea wind,
and let it show the blue reflecting sky
the yearning of its yellow face all day.

Dark things tend to brightness, bodies
die out in a flood of colors,
colors in music. So disappearing is
the destiny of destinies.

Bring me the plant that leads the way
to where blond transparencies
rise, and life as essence turns to haze;
bring me the sunflower crazed with light.

From Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones, 1925)
By Eugenio Montale, translated by Jonathan Galassi

Monday, April 13, 2020

Changing the Front Porch Light for Thanksgiving 
To balance there, again, in the early dark,
three rungs up on the old stepladder,
afraid to go any higher, it wobbles so—
to reach out and find the first set-screw
stripped of its thread, barely holding the lip
in place—to stretch even farther, twisting
the next one to break the rust, turning
the last with the tips of your fingers until
the white globe drops down smooth and round
in your hands, and you see inside a pool
of intermingled wings and bodies, so dry
it stirs beneath your breath. To watch them
flutter, again, across the grass, when you
climb down and shake them out in the wind.
by Jared Carter

Saturday, April 4, 2020

Meeting the Light Completely 
Even the long-beloved
was once
an unrecognized stranger.

Just so,
the chipped lip
of a blue-glazed cup,
blown field
of a yellow curtain,
might also,
flooding and falling,
ruin your heart.

A table painted with roses.
An empty clothesline.

Each time,
the found world surprises—
that is its nature.

And then
what is said by all lovers:
"What fools we were, not to have seen."
 by Jane Hirshfield  (Ledger: Poems, from Knopf, Inc.)

Friday, April 3, 2020

Hard Facts (Especially)
by Hayden Saunier
Most everything we're taught
is wrong.
Especially fixed rules
about small engine
repair in adverse
marine conditions,
walking on ice,
and anything
to do with people.
Especially our own
strange selves.
And so the door
to the ordinary miracle
swings open.

“Hard Facts (Especially)” by Hayden Saunier 
from How to Wear This Body. Terrapin Books © 2017.

Monday, March 23, 2020

Proximity 
The young possum foraging
outside my office window
seems unconcerned by my presence—
after all, I'm the one who's trapped.
I snack on almonds, watch
it nibble whatever it can find,
and though I am inclined to share,
I know that opening the window
will change the world.
Karen Head

Thursday, March 12, 2020

"Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook,
while the abundance around us continues to shimmer
on its own."
 
(Naomi Shihab Nye)

Tuesday, March 10, 2020

The Return 
We are heartened
when each year
the barn swallows
return.

They find their old nests,
teach their young to fly,
lining up on the barn roof
for their first flight.

They remind us,
for now, some rituals
of this good earth
continue.
Jonathan Greene, "The Return," from Afloat, (Broadstone Books, 2019)
The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

“The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens. Public domain.

Monday, February 10, 2020

For the Sake of Strangers
No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waiting patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another—a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them—
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.
     by Dorianne Laux, from Poetry of Presence:
     An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, Grayson Books


Wednesday, January 1, 2020


December 
On the fire escape, one
stupid petunia still blooms,
purple trumpet blowing
high notes at the sky long
after the rest of the band
has packed up
and gone home.
By Sarah Freligh (Sad Math, Moon City Press)