Category: Poetry

“Poetry Punishes You for Your Absence” by Julianna Baggott

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry1 Comment

She’s not an easy lover who simply
tilts her head when you appear on the front stoop.

You hope the porch light will cast heavenly redemption
like a church-basement Christmas pageant.

No, there’s scowling, silence. And when finally
she takes you to the tub to wash away the world’s filth,

you’re always shocked, no matter how many times
you’ve strayed, that she doesn’t gently cup your head,

but dunks it, again and again,
a baptism that just won’t take.

“Poetry Punishes You for Your Absence” published in Compulsions of Silk Worms and Bees, (LSU Press) by Julianna Baggott. Copyright © 2007 by Julianna Baggott.

“A Sunset” by Ari Banias

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry, Spoken Word3 Comments

I watch a woman take a photo
of a flowering tree with her phone.
A future where no one will look at it,
perpetual trembling which wasn’t
and isn’t. I have taken photos of a sunset.
In person, “wow” “beautiful”
but the picture can only be
as interesting as a word repeated until emptied.
I think I believe this.
Sunset the word holds more than a photo could.
Since it announces the sun then puts it away.
We went to the poppy preserve
where the poppies were few but generous clumps
of them grew right outside the fence
like a slightly cruel lesson.
I watched your face, just out of reach.
The flowers are diminished by the lens.
The woman tries and tries to make it right
bending her knees, tilting back.
I take a photo of a sunset, with flash.
I who think I have something
to learn from anything learned nothing from the streetlight
that shines obnoxiously into my bedroom.
This is my photo of a tree in bloom.
A thought unfolding
across somebody’s face.

Copyright © 2016 by Ari Banias. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 26, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets. Ari Banias is the author of Anybody (W. W. Norton, 2016). He lives in Berkeley, California.

“I was thinking about our insistence on capturing and memorializing the present as a refusal of the present. And I was thinking about the emphatic little cliché a nature photo so often is, a cliché I find hard to refuse.” —Ari Banias

“Prayer” by Keetje Kuipers

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry5 Comments

Perhaps as a child you had the chicken pox
and your mother, to soothe you in your fever
or to help you fall asleep, came into your room
and read to you from some favorite book,
Charlotte’s Web or Little House on the Prairie,
a long story that she quietly took you through
until your eyes became magnets for your shuttering
lids and she saw your breathing go slow. And then
she read on, this time silently and to herself,
not because she didn’t know the story,
it seemed to her that there had never been a time
when she didn’t know this story—the young girl
and her benevolence, the young girl in her sod house—
but because she did not yet want to leave your side
though she knew there was nothing more
she could do for you. And you, not asleep but simply weak,
listened to her turn the pages, still feeling
the lamp warm against one cheek, knowing the shape
of the rocking chair’s shadow as it slid across
your chest. So that now, these many years later,
when you are clenched in the damp fist of a hospital bed,
or signing the papers that say you won’t love him anymore,
when you are bent at your son’s gravesite or haunted
by a war that makes you wake with the gun
cocked in your hand, you would like to believe
that such generosity comes from God, too,
who now, when you have the strength to ask, might begin
the story again, just as your mother would,
from the place where you have both left off.

“Prayer” by Keetje Kuipers from Beautiful in the Mouth. © BOA Editions, 2010

“Romantics” by Lisel Mueller & Question for Readers

On By Christina's WordsIn Blog News, Poetry10 Comments

Note from Christy: Do you know who read this poem on Garrison Keillor’s audiobook version of Good Poems? Please see questions that follow this post:

  Johannes Brahms and
Clara Schumann

The modern biographers worry
“how far it went,” their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth-century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving us nothing to overhear.

Lisel Mueller, “Romantics” from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems. (Louisiana State University Press, 1996). Copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller.

* Question for my fellow poetry lovers:

Fellow poetry reader Bob S. asked on our post “Garrison Keillor, Good Poems, and “Bear In Mind” by John Martin“ if anyone had a listing of the readers for the audiobook version of Keillor’s Good Poems. (I found a partial list which I shared with Bob in the comments, but I couldn’t answer his primary question, which was…:) More specifically, does anyone know the female who read Lisel Mueller’s poem “Romantics”?

And a follow-up question: How important is it to you to be able to listen to a poem as you read along? I know many people enjoyed listening to Keillor read his daily poem choices at The Writer’s Almanac. Is that (being able to listen to poems) something that would be valuable to readers here? I sometimes link to YouTube videos of poets reading their material, but not regularly; would you like me to do more of that? Or what if I read a poem for you from time to time?

If you know who reads Mueller’s poem on the audio version of Good Poems, please let us know in the comments. And please feel free to share your thoughts on listening to poems. Thank you, friends, for your help. -Christy

“The Poet” by Jane Hirshfield

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry5 Comments

She is working now, in a room
not unlike this one,
the one where I write, or you read.
Her table is covered with paper.
The light of the lamp would be
tempered by a shade, where the bulb’s
single harshness might dissolve,
but it is not; she has taken it off.
Her poems? I will never know them,
though they are the ones I most need.
Even the alphabet she writes in
I cannot decipher. Her chair —
let us imagine whether it is leather
or canvas, vinyl or wicker. Let her
have a chair, her shadeless lamp,
the table. Let one or two she loves
be in the next room. Let the door
be closed, the sleeping ones healthy.
Let her have time, and silence,
enough paper to make mistakes and go on.

Jane Hirshfield from The Lives of the Heart