Author: Christina's Words

“The darkness around us is deep.” ~ William Stafford

“If You Knew” by Ellen Bass (repost) and “Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry, Repost6 Comments

What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.

A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

“If You Knew” by Ellen Bass from The Human Line

originally posted: 4/18/14

“Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango (12 December 1933 – 24 March 2020). Sadly Dibango died in Paris today from Covid-19, but he left a legacy of music to shine upon the world.

For a much needed smile, watch the above video of his song “Soul Makossa”; the dancing may inspire your own dance party, or at least bring you a moment of joy. Remember, as Bob Marley sang,  “Love would never leave us alone, A-yin the darkness there must come out to light.”

Look for the light my friends, -christy

“Why Bother” by Sean Thomas Dougherty

On By Christina's WordsIn Note From Christy, Poetry17 Comments

Because right now there is someone

Out there with

a wound in the exact shape

 of your words.

 

“Why Bother” by Sean Thomas Dougherty from The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions Ltd. 2018).

Lisel Mueller wrote:

Still, love is the impulse from which poetry springs. Even dark poems, Especially dark poems. To know the worst and write in spite of that, that must be love. To celebrate what’s on the other side of the darkness. Truly great poetry always sprung from love-in-spite-of, like love for a deeply flawed person.

And if it’s true as [William Carlos] Williams wrote, that people die from lack of what is found in poems, then poetry must not be trivial, peripheral, ivory-towerism as it is often accused of being; then we have a responsibility to speak to and for others. Certainly that means acknowledging suffering. But it also means to heal, to bring delight and hope; It implies consolation. How to console without being false, shallow or sentimental. I find that the hardest challenge.

Words for the Year is returning, at least for now … at least until we get to “the other side of the darkness.” Why bother? Because I cannot get Sean Thomas Dougherty’s words out of my mind. Because you or someone out there has “a wound in the exact shape / of (these) words.” Because right now it’s what I can do.

* Poets and publishers, I ask your lenience if in my haste to publish I may not immediately link to your websites and/or source material. Many of my posts will be from my phone where it is difficult to insert forwarding links; triage, if you will, in my rush to heal and console. I promise to edit posts in the near future to add book and/or bio links.

* Friends, I may be slow to reply to comments and emails. I’ll share more personal thoughts in the days ahead. But for now, please know how much I’ve missed you and how I desperately hope you are safe and healthy. Why bother? Because of you, gentle reader.

“If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.” ~ Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel

 

 

“Living Alone” by Elizabeth Burk

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry2 Comments

is easy, no one
telling you what to do
or when to do it

no one questioning why
you’re eating M&Ms
so early in the morning

or peeling a potato
with your fingernails
instead of a knife

no one watching you forget
to screw the top back
on the coffee maker

or put the glass pot under
the spout, spraying coffee
all over the kitchen

no one asking what’s for dinner
as you walk through the door
no one there

to see that living alone
is as easy
as landing on the moon

every night, looking
to claim your place
on an empty planet

with every tentative
weightless
step you take.

“Living Alone” by Elizabeth Burk, from Rattle #34, Winter 2010,
Tribute to Mental Health Workers.

“Shell” by Adam Zagajewski (and an ocean question for readers)

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry9 Comments

At night the monks sang softly
and a gusting wind lifted
spruce branches like wings.
I’ve never visited the ancient cities,
I’ve never been to Thebes
or Delphi, and I don’t know
what the oracles once told travellers.
Snow filled the streets and canyons,
and crows in dark robes silently
trailed the fox’s footprints.
I believed in elusive signs,
in shadowed ruins, water snakes,
mountain springs, prophetic birds.
Linden trees bloomed like brides
but their fruit was small and bitter.
Wisdom can’t be found
in music or fine paintings,
in great deeds, courage,
even love,
but only in all these things,
in earth and air, in pain and silence.
A poem may hold the thunder’s echo,
like a shell touched by Orpheus
as he fled. Time takes life away
and gives us memory, gold with flame,
black with embers.

“Shell” by Adam Zagajewski from Mysticism for Beginners: Poems, translated by Clare Cavanagh (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

* I’m adding a quick unrelated footnote as a favor for a dear reader. He is on the lookout for the perfect Mermaid or Ocean poem to go along with a summer gift for his daughters.

Do you have a favorite poem about the ocean (I suggested Faith Shearin’s “Places I Have Heard the Ocean“) or about Mermaids (I was stumped on that one)? Feel free to reply here or to message me via my contact page if easier. Thanks! Christy

“Sweetness” by Stephen Dunn (repost)

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry6 Comments

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet.

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

“Sweetness” by Stephen Dunn from New and Selected Poems. © Norton, 1994.

*originally shared on December 4, 2015