Category: Poetry

“Looking Back” by Sarah Brown Weitzman

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

I meant to return
long before this
but in looking back
we learn too much
of loss.
I dreaded that.

Now going through the house
and my parents’ lives
too revealed
by what they saved
what they left behind
for me to find
I feel nothing
but pain for the past
trying to separate
like old clothes
crumbling in a chest
what does not last
from what I can keep
trying to understand
how I fell
so short of what I intended
to do with my life.
How life twists and turns
against us. How a childhood
is not really understood
until it is lived
a second time
in memory.
How wonderful
and how terrible
it seems now
because it is gone
and because it was mine.

–Sarah Brown Weitzman

from Rattle #14, Summer 1999

“Song After Sadness” by Katie Ford

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

Despair is still servant
to the violet and wild ongoings
of bone. You, remember, are
that which must be made
servant only to salt, only
to the watery acre that is the body
of the beloved, only to the child
leaning forward into
the exhibit of birches
the forest has made of bronze light
and snow. Even as the day kneels
forward, the oceans and strung garnets, too,
kneel, they are all kneeling,
the city, the goat, the lime tree
and mother, the fearful doctor,
kneeling. Don’t say it’s the beautiful
I praise. I praise the human,
gutted and rising.

Katie Ford

“A Pretty Song” by Mary Oliver

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry7 Comments

From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.
Which is the only way to love, isn’t it?

This isn’t a play ground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.
Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods

that hold you in the center of my world.
And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song.
And I say to my heart: rave on.

– Mary Oliver, Thirst

 

Happy Birthday to Mary Oliver (born September 10, 1935) who turns 80 today. Rave on, Mary, rave on.

(If you too love Mary’s work, don’t miss the post “Poems, Prayers, and Mary Oliver” featured at LoraKim Joyner’s A Year’s Risings with Mary Oliver. The blog is a “must follow” for Mary Oliver fans; while it’s not often updated, there are plenty of posts and poems to read in her archives.)

“For the Young Who Want To” by Marge Piercy

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry1 Comment

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don’t have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.’s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else’s mannerisms

is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you’re certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

Marge Piercy

“How lucky we are That you can’t sell A poem” by Gregory Orr

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

How lucky we are
That you can’t sell
A poem, that it has
No value. Might
As well
Give it away.

That poem you love,
That saved your life,
Wasn’t it given to you?

– from Gregory Orr’s Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved