Category: Poetry

“My Many Disguises” by Richard Jackson

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry1 Comment

There’s a bit of leftover sun blowing around on the corner.
There’s the quivering branch the robin has just left.
Nothing is complete until we can see it. Even the trees
hold their breath. It may seem forever until you arrive.
There’s the prison of my shadow, these words which are
roadblocks, their elliptical emotions, the night’s refusals.

It may mean the dead need us, after all, to say the unsayable,
to hold in our hands a simple rose, to cup the wind, to feel
the endless longing the heart brings back from its inverted
world, that world whose destiny encases your every breath.

– Richard Jackson, closing lines to “My Many Disguises,” (full poem) from Out of Place: Poems (Ashland Poetry Press, 2014)

“Why Are Your Poems So Dark?” by Linda Pastan

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

Isn’t the moon dark too,
most of the time?

And doesn’t the white page
seem unfinished

without the dark stain
of alphabets?

When God demanded light,
he didn’t banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask
“Why are you sad so often?”

Ask the moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.

Source: Poetry (August 2003); by Linda Pastan

 

“A Day Like Any Other” by Lisel Mueller

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

Such insignificance: a glance
at your record on the doctor’s desk
or a letter not meant for you.
How could you have known? It’s not true
that your life passes before you
in rapid motion, but your watch
suddenly ticks like an amplified heart,
the hands freezing against a white
that is a judgment. Otherwise nothing.
The face in the mirror is still yours.
Two men pass on the sidewalk
and do not stare at your window.
Your room is silent, the plants
locked inside their mysterious lives
as always. The queen-of-the-night
refuses to bloom, does not accept
your definition. It makes no sense,
your scanning the street for a traffic snarl,
a new crack in the pavement,
a flag at half-mast – signs
of some disturbance in the world
because your friend, the morning sun,
has turned its dark side toward you.

– Lisel Mueller, “A Day Like Any Other”

“One” by Thuli Zuma

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry, Spoken Word

“Knowledge does not make us bulletproof. Bones break the same way no matter the intention.”

Thuli Zuma – “One” (Poetry Observed)

via Button Poetry

“On Rain” by C.S. Bhagya

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

This is a poem about rain,
not you,
so you will forgive me
if I only refer to you in the oblique,
fleetingly,
between the L-shaped sounds
of water,
shadowy places,
and a cerise sky.
Sometimes,
when the night is deep
you are out on the streets
and I’m waiting for sleep,
I send out rain
to follow you,
lopsidedly, as if a kind
ghost, as if through an
hourglass
you were seeing
sand at a slant.
So if I open the window a little,
swaying against glass,
test the air
for a possibility of rain,
perhaps you will forget
how, sometimes,
rain is complicated,
rain can break you if it wants.
Who knew, one night
rain under streetlamps
would aspire to the condition
of glow-worms?
This rain is a letter,
how it pulses through,
angling words
out of the slow scent of raw earth,
sudden lights.
But this poem is rain,
on you.

C.S. Bhagya, “On Rain”