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“I Am Offering this Poem” by Jimmy Santiago Baca

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry
I am offering this poem to you,
since I have nothing else to give.
Keep it like a warm coat
when winter comes to cover you,
or like a pair of thick socks
the cold cannot bite through,

 

                         I love you,

 

I have nothing else to give you,
so it is a pot full of yellow corn
to warm your belly in winter,
it is a scarf for your head, to wear
over your hair, to tie up around your face,

 

                         I love you,

 

Keep it, treasure this as you would
if you were lost, needing direction,
in the wilderness life becomes when mature;
and in the corner of your drawer,
tucked away like a cabin or hogan
in dense trees, come knocking,
and I will answer, give you directions,
and let you warm yourself by this fire,
rest by this fire, and make you feel safe

 

                         I love you,

 

It’s all I have to give,
and all anyone needs to live,
and to go on living inside,
when the world outside
no longer cares if you live or die;
remember,

 

                         I love you.

 

Jimmy Santiago Baca, “I Am Offering this Poem” from Immigrants in Our Own Land and Selected Early Poems. Copyright © 1990 by Jimmy Santiago Baca.

Featured

“You Reading This Be Ready” by William Stafford

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

~ William Stafford

From Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems, Graywolf Press.

“Lead” by Mary Oliver

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry3 Comments

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

 

Mary Oliver, (New and Selected Poems Volume Two), Beacon Press.

 

“Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard” by Kay Ryan

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry2 Comments

A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn-out place;
beneath her hand
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space—
however small —
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn’t
be so hard.

“Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard” by Kay Ryan, from The Niagara River, (Grove/Atlantic, Inc. 2005)

“Ordinary Days” by Stephen Dunn

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

The storm is over; too bad, I say.
At least storms are clear
about their dangerous intent.

Ordinary days are what I fear,
the sneaky speed
with which noon arrives, the sun

shining while a government darkens
a decade, or a man
falls out of love. I fear the solace

of repetition, a withheld slap in the face.
Someone is singing
in Portugal. Here the mockingbird

is a crow and a grackle, then a cat.
So many things
happening at once. If I decide

to turn over my desk, go privately wild,
trash the house,
no one across town will know.

I must insist how disturbing this is–
the necessity
of going public, of being a fool.

“Ordinary Days” by Stephen Dunn, from New and Selected Poems 1974-1994, (W.W. Norton and Company, 1995)

“At Seventy-Five: Re-Reading An Old Book” by Hayden Carruth

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry4 Comments

My prayers have been answered, if they were prayers. I live.
I’m alive, and even in rather good health, I believe.
If I’d quit smoking I might live to be a hundred.
Truly this is astonishing, after the poverty and pain,
The suffering. Who would have thought that petty
Endurance could achieve so much?
And prayers –
Were they prayers? Always I was adamant
In my irreligion, and had good reason to be.
Yet prayer is not, I see in old age now,
A matter of doctrine or discipline, but rather
A movement of the natural human mind
Bereft of its place among the animals, the other
Animals. I prayed. Then on paper I wrote
Some of the words I said, which are these poems.

“At Seventy-Five: Re-Reading An Old Book” by Hayden Carruth, from Doctor Jazz, Copper Canyon Press.

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies… (Bradbury) (repost)

On By Christina's WordsIn Quote2 Comments

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

~ Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

*originally shared on 12/22/15