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holes of beauty in the grit
A List of Poems That Are There for You////
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To Carry On Living // Yehuda Amichai
Oh, make my bed in the warm air,
let my head rest in heaven
which once was ancient water.
Think about this world
which has done its best
to calm us
so we won't suffer too much
in years to come.
To carry on living is
to avoid meeting
each other again.
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Message shoved into an empty bottle of rosé and tossed into the Hudson on a sad summer night // Nicole Callihan
I drank
have drunk
have drowned
these sorrows
these stars
the smallest
a jillion times
the size of me
a hundred times
the sea
o!
I am small
and dumb
and broken
and so very
very alive
stranger:
I hope
the same
for you
#poetry#Nicole Callihan#American poetry#drinking songs#rosé#despair#wine#the Hudson River#message in a bottle#loving the world anyway#New York City
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Being Sad // Orhan Veli Kanik
I might have resented
The people I love
If love
Hadn't taught me
To be sad and to stay sad.
(translated from the Turkish by Talat Sait Halman)
#poetry#Orhan Veli Kanik#Turkish poetry#Talat Sait Halman#love#sadness#unrequited love#love poetry#micropoetry#love poems#breakup
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Strawberry Moon // Mary Oliver
1.
My great-aunt Elizabeth Fortune
stood under the honey locust trees,
the white moon over her and a young man near.
The blossoms fell down like white feathers,
the grass was warm as a bed, and the young man
full of promises, and the face of the moon
a white fire.
Later,
when the young man went away and came back with a
bride,
Elizabeth
climbed into the attic.
2.
Three women came in the night
to wash the blood away,
and burn the sheets,
and take away the child.
Was it a boy or a girl?
No one remembers.
3.
Elizabeth Fortune was not seen again
for forty years.
Meals were sent up,
laundry exchanged.
It was considered a solution
more proper than shame
showing itself to the village.
4.
Finally, name by name, the downstairs died
or moved away,
and she had to come down,
so she did.
At sixty-one, she took in boarders,
washed their dishes,
made their beds,
spoke whatever had to be spoken,
and no more.
5.
I asked my mother:
what happened to the man? She answered:
Nothing.
They had three children.
He worked in the boatyard.
I asked my mother: did they ever meet again?
No, she said,
though sometimes he would come
to the house to visit.
Elizabeth, of course, stayed upstairs.
6.
Now the women are gathering
in smoke-filled rooms,
rough as politicians,
scrappy as club fighters.
And should anyone be surprised
if sometimes, when the white moon rises,
women want to lash out
with a cutting edge?
#poetry#Mary Oliver#American poetry#strawberry moon#feminist poetry#the moon#poems of protest#poems of rage#misogyny#white moon
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"Don't touch me!" // Natalya Gorbanyevskaya
"Don't touch me!" I scream at passers-by--
they do not even notice me.
Cursing the rooms of other people,
I hang about their anterooms.
But who will knock a window through?
Who will hold out his hand to me?
I am roasting over a slow fire.
(translated from the Russian by Daniel Weissbort)
#poetry#Natalya Gorbanyevskaya#Russian poetry#Daniel Weissbort#poems of rage#anger#window#raging#fire
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A crystal ball // Bob Hicok
Years left to cross the room, take a tulip from the vase,
walk it downstairs, put it on my pillow next to Eve,
go outside and feel horses standing in the dark,
breathing gallons of air, challenging stars
with their beauty, their hooved constellations,
to go down the mountain, stick out my thumb,
hitch into town, buy a gun, chandelier, come home,
shoot my car, my cv, my pacing, hang sparkling light
from the one hole in the sky where I've never seen the moon,
to wait on my knees beside our bed as if I'm seven again,
and praying for a new Stingray bicycle to make a red champion
of my speed and impatience to be older, for the tulip to wake
and kiss Eve, for the sun to wake and give birth to shadows,
to proxy everything it touches as if placing a bet,
double or nothing, I'll take those odds, those evens,
I'll live with a nest of robins in my heart, hatched
and hungry and eager to fly, yes I failed anatomy, yes
I'm full of shit, yes this is the same poem I imagine living
every day but never quite do, there's the dream and the reality,
the ice cream and the empty spoon in the sink, the chance
that Eve will wake and decide I've become a tulip in my sleep,
and go out and tell the horses about my metamorphosis,
who will whinny and shake their heads up and down as they do,
such tall affirmations, such giants of yes, and Eve
will have brown eyes, and carrots for their optimism,
a brand new tulip lover, the sun to her right
and the future to her left, and years and years of more
#poetry#Bob Hicok#American poetry#horses#love#love poems#time#romance#marriage#tulips#tempus fugit#the passage of time#joy#poems of praise#loving the world anyway#more
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My Father Speaks To Me From the Dead // Sharon Olds
I seem to have woken up in the pot-shed,
On clay, on shards, the bright paths
Of slugs kiss-crossing my body. I don’t know
Where to start, with this grime on me.
I take the spider glue-net, plug
Of the dead, out of my mouth, let's see
If where I have been I can do this.
I love your feet. I love your knees,
I love your our my legs, they are so
long because they are yours and mine
both. I love your—what can I call it,
between your legs, we never named it, the
glint and purity of its curls. I love
your rear end, I changed you once,
washed the detritus off your tiny
bottom, with my finger rubbed
the oil on you; when I touched your little
anus I crossed wires with God for a moment.
I never hated your shit—that was
your mother. I love your navel, thistle
seed fossil, even though
it's her print on you. Of course I love
your breasts—did you see me looking up
from within your daughter’s face, as she nursed?
I love your bony shoulders and you know I
love your hair, thick and live
as earth. And I never hated your face,
I hated its eruptions. You know what I love?
I love your brain, its halves and silvery
folds, like a woman’s labia.
I love in you
even what comes
from deep in your mother—your heart, that hard worker,
and your womb, it is a heaven to me,
I lie on its soft hills and gaze up
at its rosy vault.
I have been in a body without breath,
I have been in the morgue, in fire, in the slagged
chimney, in the air over the earth,
and buried in the earth, and pulled down
into the ocean—where I have been
I understand this life, I am matter,
your father, I made you, when I say now that I love you
I mean look down at your hand, move it,
that action is matter's love, for human
love go elsewhere.
#poetry#Sharon Olds#American poetry#fathers & daughters#death#elegy#mourning#mortality#love#cremation#fire
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Life During Wartime // Major Jackson
But the daydream collapses and time returns us
to corners where hustling boys expire
like comets at the suburbs of your thalamus.
Gunshots weaken the houses; hope vanishes
like old cellphones. Blood darkens a stoop;
the mouth is disagreeable. But then, one late morning,
a sunshower baptizes shadows on a street. The steaming
scent of a wet sidewalk ordains your stylus,
and in a lot not far from here a girl in braids grabs
the wrist of a boy, running through a cloud of rubble.
#poetry#Major Jackson#American poetry#Black American poetry#war#life during wartime#boys & girls#rain#joy
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Ben Okri // The Void
I was talking to a builder
of bridges and asked
how he built the structure
that brings two warring elements
together. This was his answer.
What is a bridge?
A land divided, or the gap
between? Most see a unity
wrought through necessity
and compromise, mutual
respect, or cohabitation.
But he was interested in the space
separating these two lands
that perhaps are one hope.
And thinking of the vacuum
made him forge a
rare concept, one worthy
of an old myth. He built
a bridge that acknowledged
the empty space.
To walk that bridge
is to feel the swaying danger
of the wind and the heights,
the howling drop. No one
can walk the bridge without
respect, holding on carefully
to the ropes on either side,
aware of the beauty
and the depths and rocks,
the pitiless desert all around.
Its strangest feature
is the gap that runs through
the center. Neither half meet.
The gap is for thermal expansion
of the tough material.
It’s not the two territories
that deserve it, but the rage
and the void between.
That’s where history falls through.
We need a new kind of bridge, not one that
brings these irreconcilable
peoples together but that reminds
them every day into what emptiness
they both can fall. And there is no
end to that fall, not now or for
all of history to come. Perhaps
the madness will make them
create the kind of bridge that has
never been built before. Not a bridge
of peace, but of a terror for a world
in which peace can never be.
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Names of Horses // Donald Hall
All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.
In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine
clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;
and after noon's heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.
Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,
and lay the shotgun's muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.
For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground - old toilers, soil makers:
O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.
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The Health of Us // Claudia Rankine
We heard health care and we thought public option
we thought reaching across the street across the lines
across the aisle was the manifestation of not a red state
not a blue state but these united states we thought
we could be sure of ourselves in this one way sure
of our human element our basic decency
and if justice was how love showed itself in public then love
was defined by access to care when someone anyone
thought that cough that burned the chest
was probably nothing but who knew that fever
after three days that inability to breathe to sleep
to wake in justice in love we thought
we were ready to be just as good to be better
and despite all the ways we exist alone no one
would be on their own we were ready to take a stab
at a kind of human kind of union we were ready to check-up
to look after in this one way we were ready
to care for each other we were ready to see
our range of possibilities as a precious commodity
to know every other as another to live in the width
of our being and we weren’t ignorant or stupid or naïve
or idealists or socialists or communists or Canadians
we understood the private options would still keep us
alive longer we understood the private options
would treat the disease not the symptoms
the private options meant access to specialists
to privacy to elective procedures to a team of doctors
to radiology imaging to brand-name drugs we understood
the impossibility of real equality but this single shift
toward a national community we thought
despite being founded on genocide and sustained by slavery
in God’s country we thought we were ready
to see sanity inside the humanity we thought
the improbability of the face on capitol hill meant possibility.
#poetry#Claudia Rankine#American poetry#Black American poetry#healthcare#American racism#politics#equality#poems of protest#poems of rage#America#despair
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Words for My Daughter // Hayden Carruth
Alas, that earth's mere measure strains our blood
And makes more airy still this parentage.
The bond is all pretending, and you sleep
When my affections leap
And gasp at old hope vainly in my night's cage.
Dear marvelous alien snippet, yes, you move
Like a down-raining cloud in my mind, a bird
Askim on low planes under lightning thought,
An alter-image caught
In gossamer seed, my most elusive word.
There must be some connection, more than mood,
The yearning wit of loneliness, and mor
Than meets the law on that certificate.
Strangers do not create
Alliances so deep and dark and sore.
Yet we are strangers. I remember you
When you began, a subtle soft machine;
And you remember me, no, not at all;
Or maybe you recall
A vacancy where someone once was seen.
I can address you only in my mind,
Or, what's the same, in this untouching verse.
We are the faceless persons who exist
Airily, as a gist
Of love to warp the loves that we rehearse.
Strangers we are, a father and a daughter,
This Hayden and this Martha. And this song,
Which turns so dark when I had meant it light,
Speaks not at all of right
And not at all, since they are dim, of wrong.
Distance that leaves me powerless to know you
Preserves you from my love, my hurt. You fare
Far from this room hidden in the cold north;
Nothing of me goes forth
To father you, lost daughter, but a prayer.
That some small wisdom always may endure
Amidst your weariness; that lovers may
Be kind to you; that beauty may arouse
You; that the crazy house
May never, never be your home: I pray.
November to January, 1953-54
#poetry#Hayden Carruth#American poetry#fathers & daughters#parents & children#advice#mental health#crazy house#insane asylum#madness#longing#prayer#separation#family
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the experiment // Juan Felipe Herrera
they went south
they came north
they went south
they came north
this was their wilderness it went on decade after decade
their wilderness their desert their omnipresent exodus
they were packed separated
filtered into a bus
ordered to return after due processing yes
yet joy and happiness
continued
#poetry#Juan Felipe Herrera#American poetry#Boston Review#migration#migrants#south#north#immigrant songs#loving the world anyway#joy
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Laylat Al-Qadr // Yasmin Belkhyr
I don't own any mirrors. In sleep, I scrape ticks off the windows. Once, a bird startled itself into the apartment and I was alone. If I throw a nickel off the bridge, I'm thinking about my niece. While the city slept, sound dripped slow down the street. An unnatural thing. The festering mess to suddenly dampen and quiet. None of the wounded dogs moaned. None of the children woke curled around ghosts. During the day, I wore a loose dress and bought pastries from a bakery and thought of all the people I'd like to touch. At night, I imagined the ways I could sink. My little fears and aches, the stupid rust in my chest. Define: daughter. Define: obligation. Define: heartless. I swear, I'd be better if I could. The girl was named Rumisa and I read to her in English and that's all you need to know.
#poetry#Yasmin Belkhyr#Moroccan poetry#American poetry#dream songs#superstition#magic#nights of power#ghosts
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Why Are You Writing These // Alice Notley
to try to remember
what you is that nothing much happens for
17 years it was rich
living in isolation in a populous city
remember when I hated my neighbor because he was noisy
I didn’t hate him I couldn’t look at him I wanted to
kick him out he held raves every weekend
I called the cops a lot and worked with a certain policeman
who discovered my neighbor had been arrested in Bordeaux
for breaking furniture he finally stopped paying rent
had to leave then the gardienne and I gave thumbs-up signs
across rue des Messageries she has since moved to Valencia
I’m interested in how totally against him I was
you could say I have sensitive ears that simply react
his mother came up from Toulouse once to help him clean
we were overrun with mice she caught seven
one morning with glue traps excuse me she said I’m the mother of
your neighbor who’s sometimes noisy do you have mice
I tried to tell her I’d seen them slide down the gas-pole like firemen
but I didn’t have the French for that and French firemen don’t
she had a dream of moving to San Diego
I don’t mind any of it except for my ears
I was born receptive and sound shakes me up
I have a poem in which the universe is like a vocal cord
it must also be an ear infinite reception
music destroys thought poetry is it I couldn’t have
been bothered to tell this story in prose A decision was
taken after time began to maintain a prose universe
I have been bored ever since and keep to myself
though contrarily trying to save you from the materials
of your destructive lives masses of noise anything
to forget what and maybe I am only a nerve
or am nerve if you could remember shut up and remember
or is it not remember I am in a state of vibration
every possible sound available why or is it only
something to do the one thing to do or is it only
Helen Morgan again singing Why was I born / Why am I living
I have nothing to show for my time but poems
what do you have
#poetry#Alice Notley#American poetry#France#neighbours#neighbors#detached observation#noisy neighbours#noisy neighbors#I am only a nerve#diary#Helen Morgan#writing#time#why do I write#funny#mice#we have mice
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Malcolm // Welton Smith
Malcolm
i cannot move
from your voice,
there is no peace
where i am. the wind
cannot move
hard enough to clear the trash
and far away i hear my screams.
the lean, hard-bone face
a rich copper color.
the white smile. the
thin nose and broad
nostrils. Betty - in the quiet
after midnight, your hand
soft on her back, you kiss
her neck softly
below her right ear.
she would turn
to face you and arch up -
her head moving to your chest.
her arms sliding
round your neck, you breathe deeply,
it is quiet, in this moment
you know
what it was all about
your voice
is inside me; i loaned
my heart in exchange
for your voice.
in harlem, the long
avenue blocks, the miles
from heart to heart,
a slobbering emaciated man
once a man of god sprawled
on the sidewalk, he clutches
his bottle, pisses on himself
demands you respect him
because his great grandmother
was one-eighth cherokee.
in this moment, you knew.
in berkeley the fat
jewess moves the stringy brown
hair from her face saying
she would like to help you -
give you some of her time.
you knew.
in birmingham, "get a move
on you, girl, you bet'not
be late for Sunday school."
not this morning -
it is a design, you knew.
sometimes
light plays on my eyelashes
when my eyes
are almost closed -
the chrome blues and golds
the crimson and pale
ice green the swift movements
of lights through my lashes -
fantastic -
the sound of mecca
inside you. you knew.
the man
inside you; the men
inside you fought,
fighting men inside you
made a frenzy
smelling like shit,
you reached into yourself -
deep - and scooped your frenzy
and rolled it to a slimy ball
and stretched your arm back
to throw
now you pace the regions
of my heart, you know
my blood and see
where my tears are made.
i see the beast
and hold my frenzy;
you are not lonely -
in my heart there are many
unmarked graves.
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from "Second April" // Bob Kaufman
"Be ye not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed
by the renewing of your mind." Romans 12
O man in inner basement core of me, maroon obliteration smelling futures
of green anticipated comings, pasts denied, now time to thwart time,
time to frieze illusionary motion on far imagined walls, stopped bleeding
moondial clocks, booming out dead hours-gone … gone … gone •..
gone … on to second April, ash-smeared crowns, perfect, conically
balanced, pyramid-peaked heads, shuddering, beamed on lead-held
cylinders-on granite-flowered windows, on frigid triumphs, unmolded
of shapes, assumed aspects, transparent lizards, shattered glaciers, in-
fant mountains, formed once, all time given to disappearance, specula-
tion, investigation of holes, rocks, caught freaks, in skin sandals, ten million
light years dripped screaming, hot dust rotted eyes, ages in clawing eyes,
insanities packed in century-long nights, pointed timeward to now. Hollow
out trees, release captive satans, explode roses, sentence grass to death,
stab rivers, rage down insane clouds, unchain snowy lamaistic peaks, de-
hydrate oceans, suck up deserts, nail sky to scattered earth, in air, we
come, to second April.
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