Joseph to His Brothers

Amiri Baraka

They characterize their lives, and I fill up with mine. Fill up with what I have, with what I see (or need. I make no distinction. As bling men cannot love too quiet beauty. These philosophers rein up their boats. Bring their gifts, weapons to my door. As if that, in itself, was courage, or counting science. The story is a long one. Why I am here like this. Why you should listen, no, so late, and weary at the night. Its heavy rain pushing the grass flat. It is here somewhere. It grows here. Answers. Questions. Noise as stuff as silence. Silver quiet beaten heavy under rains. So little of this we remember. So few portions of our lives, go on.

Civilization and Its Discontents

John Ashbery

A people chained to aurora I alone disarming you Millions of facts of distributed light Helping myself with some big boxes Up the steps, then turning to no neighborhood; The child's psalm, slightly sung In the hall rushing into the small room. Such fire! leading away from destruction. Somewhere in outer ether I glimpsed you Coming at me, the solo barrier did it this time, Guessing us staying, true to be at the blue mark Of threshold. Tired of planning it again and again The cool boy distant, and the soaked-up Afterthought, like so much rain, or roof. The miracle took you in beside him. Leaves rushed the window, there was clear water and the sound of a lock. Now I never see you much any more. The summers are much colder than they used to be In that other time, when you and I were young. I miss the human truth of your smile, The half-hearted gaze of your palms, And all things together, but there is no comic reign Only the facts you put to me. You must not, then. Be very surprised if I am alone: it is all for you, The night, and the stars, and the way we used to be. There is no longer any use in harping on The incredible principle of daylong silence, the dark sunlight As only the grass is beginning to know it, The wreath of the north pole, Festoons for the late return, the shy pensioners Agasp on the lamplit air. What is agreeable Is to hold your hand. The gravel Underfoot. The time for coming near is close. Useless Verbs shooting the other words far away. Since I had already swallowed the poison I could only gaze into the distance at my life Like a saint's, with each day distinct. No heaviness in the upland pastures. Nothing In the forest. Only life under the huge trees Like a coat that has grown too big, moving far away, Cutting swamps for men like lapdogs, holding its own, Performing once again, for you and for me.

Poem for Tyrants

Lenore Kandel

it seems I must love even you easier loving the pretty things the children   the morning glories easier    (as compassion grows) to love the stranger

easy even to realize      (with compassion) the pain and terror implicit in those who treat the world around them with such brutality     such hate

but oh   I am no christ blessing my executioners I am no buddha   no saint nor have I that incandescent strength of faith illuminated

yet   even so you are a sentient being breathing this air even as I am a sentient being breathing this air seeking my own enlightenment I must seek yours

if I had love enough if I had faith enough perhaps I could transcend your path and alter even that

forgive me, then―  I cannot love you yet

On Politics and Poetry

Marwān Makhkhūl

In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political I must listen to the birds and in order to hear the birds the warplanes must be silent.

“Time does not bring relief; you all have lied”

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied Who told me time would ease me of my pain! I miss him in the weeping of the rain; I want him at the shrinking of the tide; The old snows melt from every mountain-side, And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane; But last year’s bitter loving must remain Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide. There are a hundred places where I fear To go,—so with his memory they brim. And entering with relief some quiet place Where never fell his foot or shone his face I say, “There is no memory of him here!” And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

Singing Solo

Huang Xiang

Who am I I am the lonely ghost of a waterfall A poem Living apart from the crowd forever My drifting song follows an itinerant Dream My only audience Silence

For the Graduation [Bolinas, 1973]

Robert Creeley

The honor of being human will stay constant.

The earth, earth, water wet, sun shine.

The world will be as ever round, and all yourselves

will know it, on it, and around and around.

No one knows what will happen. That

is the happiness of the circle, finding you.

Myself I Sing

George Oppen

In the Morning, Before Anything Bad Happens

Molly Brodak

The sky is open all the way.

Workers upright on the line like spokes.

I know there is a river somewhere, lit, fragrant, golden mist, all that,

whose irrepressible birds can’t believe their luck this morning and every morning.

I let them riot in my mind a few minutes more before the news comes.

In Oklahoma

Carter Revard

When you leave a Real City, as Gertrude Stein did, and go to Oakland, as she did, you can say, as she did, there is no there, there. When you are a Hartford insurance executive, as Wallace Stevens was, and you have never been to Oklahoma, as he had not, you can invent people to dance there, as he did, and you can name them Bonnie and Josie. But a THERE depends on how, in the beginning, the wind breathes upon its surface. Shh: amethyst, sapphire. Lead. Crystal mirror. See, a cow-pond in Oklahoma. Under willows now, so the Osage man fishing there is in the shade. A bobwhite whistles from his fencepost, a hundred yards south of the pond. A muskrat-head draws a nest of Vs up to the pond’s apex, loses them there in the reeds and sedges where a redwing blackbird, with gold and scarlet epaulets flashing, perches on the jiggly buttonwood branch. Purple martins skim the pond, dip and sip, veer and swoop, check, pounce, crisscross each other’s flashing paths. His wife in the Indian Hospital with cancer. Children in various unhappiness. White clouds sail slowly across the pure blue pond. Turtles poke their heads up, watch the Indian man casting, reeling, casting, reeling. A bass strikes, is hooked, fights, is reeled in, pulls away again, is drawn back, dragged ashore, put on the stringer. In Oklahoma, Wally, here is Josie’s father. Something that is going to be nothing, but isn’t. Watch: now he takes the bass home, cleans and fries it. Shall I tell you a secret, Gert? You have to be there before it’s there. Daddy, would you pass them a plate of fish? See friends, it’s not a flyover here. Come down from your planes and you’ll understand. Here.

They

Noelle Kocot

Pathetic bright-dark, crawling with history. Leave it to the angels to judge me.  Gunfire In the distance, I keep my houselights on During the day.  No absence of memory,

Please, I am only just getting started.  It Is precisely the moment to which you “adhere,” Drawing the wounds on a faded photograph. You say your deepest powers only come

Once in a lifetime, you say that we blink Over ourselves.  The limit of anywhere is To forgive, and the classic metaphor for Effort stumbles at a grave.  I am looking for you

Always.  This is the very moment of stepping Outside and being thrown into a glare of light.

In the back of the real

Allen Ginsberg

railroad yard in San Jose     I wandered desolate in front of a tank factory     and sat on a bench near the switchman's shack.

A flower lay on the hay on     the asphalt highway —the dread hay flower     I thought—It had a brittle black stem and     corolla of yellowish dirty spikes like Jesus' inchlong     crown, and a soiled dry center cotton tuft     like a used shaving brush that's been lying under     the garage for a year.

Yellow, yellow flower, and     flower of industry, tough spiky ugly flower,     flower nonetheless, with the form of the great yellow     Rose in your brain! This is the flower of the World.

Aeschylus; Joanne Kyger

do you remember

Emmett Williams

To Know Ourselves...

Aimé Césaire

925

Emily Dickinson

Struck, was I, not yet by Lightning — Lightning — lets away Power to perceive His Process With Vitality. Maimed — was I — yet not by Venture — Stone of stolid Boy — Nor a Sportsman's Peradventure — Who mine Enemy? Robbed — was I — intact to Bandit — All my Mansion torn — Sun — withdrawn to Recognition — Furthest shining — done — Yet was not the foe — of any — Not the smallest Bird In the nearest Orchard dwelling Be of Me — afraid. Most — I love the Cause that slew Me. Often as I die Its beloved Recognition Holds a Sun on Me — Best — at Setting — as is Nature's — Neither witnessed Rise Till the infinite Aurora In the other's eyes.

924

Emily Dickinson

Love—is that later Thing than Death— More previous—than Life— Confirms it at its entrance—And Usurps it—of itself—

Tastes Death—the first—to hand the sting The Second—to its friend— Disarms the little interval— Deposits Him with God—

Then hovers—an inferior Guard— Lest this Beloved Charge Need—once in an Eternity— A smaller than the Large—