"I am offering this poem to you, since I have nothing else to give." ~Jimmy Santiago Baca
I have to tell you,
there are times when
the sun strikes me
like a gong,
and I remember everything,
even your ears.
–Dorothea Grossman via Poetry Magazine (March 2010)
* Happy Birthday, Mom. I miss you every day.
“My mother is a poem
I’ll never be able to write,
though everything I write
is a poem to my mother.”
“Moonshadow” by Cat Stevens (Yusuf)
There are spirit presences
Around my bed
Waiting for me to die.
They are in no great hurry
Nor am I.
Do not fear death,
I whisper to my keepers.
Fear life if it goes on too long.
For the lost losers
Make winners weepers.
It’s so quiet tonight
I can hear the angels breathing.
Our hands are transparent,
As veined as autumn leaves.
I rest in their arms
And sense the mist rising.
“In the Night,” by Carolyn Kizer from Cool, Calm & Collected Poems 1960-2000 (Copper Canyon Press).
Now, when he and I meet, after all these years,
I say to the bitch inside me, don’t start growling.
He isn’t a trespasser anymore,
Just an old acquaintance tipping his hat.
My voice says, “Nice to see you,”
As the bitch starts to bark hysterically.
He isn’t an enemy now,
Where are your manners, I say, as I say,
“How are the children? They must be growing up.”
At a kind word from him, a look like the old days,
The bitch changes her tone; she begins to whimper.
She wants to snuggle up to him, to cringe.
Down, girl! Keep your distance
Or I’ll give you a taste of the choke-chain.
“Fine, I’m just fine,” I tell him.
She slobbers and grovels.
After all, I am her mistress. She is basically loyal.
It’s just that she remembers how she came running
Each evening, when she heard his step;
How she lay at his feet and looked up adoringly
Though he was absorbed in his paper;
Or, bored with her devotion, ordered her to the kitchen
Until he was ready to play.
But the small careless kindnesses
When he’d had a good day, or a couple of drinks,
Come back to her now, seem more important
Than the casual cruelties, the ultimate dismissal.
“It’s nice to know you are doing so well,” I say.
He couldn’t have taken you with him;
You were too demonstrative, too clumsy,
Not like the well-groomed pets of his new friends.
“Give my regards to your wife,” I say. You gag
As I drag you off by the scruff,
Saying, “Goodbye! Goodbye! Nice to have seen you again.”
Carolyn Kizer, “Bitch” from Mermaids in the Basement. Copyright © 1984 by Carolyn Kizer. Copper Canyon Press.
A little bit of hammering
goes a long way toward making
the kind of noise I want my heart
to look up to—or have you ever
gone into a woods and applauded the light
that fights its way to the ground,
and the shadows, and the explosions
of feathers where blue jays
have been ripped into the bright
and hungry future of hawks—
and there’s this—writing an etude
by pushing pianos off a cliff
until one of them howls or whispers
just so—like a vagrant
slipping into a clean bed
or a man lifting a dying child
toward the sun and begging help,
rescue—if my eyes could speak,
they’d be mouths—the tongues
of my fingers ask to be words
against your skin—and when I
was a librarian, I lost my job
for exhorting patrons to sing
“Bye Bye Miss American Pie”—
it’s not what we do here, I was told—
yet I know this is a world
made by volcanoes, and don’t want
to keep this awareness of kaboom
to myself—so have picked up
my zither and begun walking
and strumming like an idiot
who thinks music is all
a body needs to feed itself—
and though I haven’t eaten
in years, I have been fed.
“My Most Recent Position Paper” by Bob Hicok. Copyright © 2016 by Bob Hicok. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 28, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
“American Pie” by Don McLean
The biography of the bee
is written in honey
and is drawing
to a close.
Soon the buzzing
plainchant of summer
will be silenced
for good;
the flowers, unkindled
will blaze
one last time
and go out.
And the boy nursing
his stung ankle this morning
will look back
at his brief tears
with something
like regret,
remembering the amber
taste of honey.
Poem copyright ©2002 by Linda Pastan,“The Death of the Bee,” from If Bees Are Few: A Hive of Bee Poems, Ed., James P. Lenfestey, (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2016). Originally published in Last Uncle,(W. W. Norton & Co., 2002).
Words ... for the Time Being 