Category: Poetry

“Natural Disasters” by Faith Shearin

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During natural disasters two enemy animals
will call a truce, so during a hurricane
an owl will share a tree with a mouse
and, during an earthquake, you might find
a mongoose wilted and shivering
beside a snake. The bear will sit down
in a river and ignore the passing salmon
just as the lion will allow the zebra
to walk home without comment.
I love that there are exceptions.
At funerals and weddings, for example,
the aunts who never speak nod
politely to one another. When my mother
was sick even the prickly neighbors
left flowers and cakes at our door.

“Natural Disasters” by Faith Shearin from Telling the Bees. © Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015.

“Alive Together” by Lisel Mueller

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Speaking of marvels, I am alive
together with you, when I might have been
alive with anyone under the sun,
when I might have been Abelard’s woman
or the whore of a Renaissance pope
or a peasant wife with not enough food
and not enough love, with my children
dead of the plague. I might have slept
in an alcove next to the man
with the golden nose, who poked it
into the business of stars,
or sewn a starry flag
for a general with wooden teeth.
I might have been the exemplary Pocahontas
or a woman without a name
weeping in Master’s bed
for my husband, exchanged for a mule,
my daughter, lost in a drunken bet.
I might have been stretched on a totem pole
to appease a vindictive god
or left, a useless girl-child,
to die on a cliff. I like to think
I might have been Mary Shelley
in love with a wrongheaded angel,
or Mary’s friend, I might have been you.
This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless,
our chances of being alive together
statistically nonexistent;
still we have made it, alive in a time
when rationalists in square hats
and hatless Jehovah’s Witnesses
agree it is almost over,
alive with our lively children
who–but for endless ifs–
might have missed out on being alive
together with marvels and follies
and longings and lies and wishes
and error and humor and mercy
and journeys and voices and faces
and colors and summers and mornings
and knowledge and tears and chance.

 

“Alive Together” by Lisel Mueller from Alive Together. © Louisiana State University Press, 1996.

“Invitation” by Mary Oliver

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Oh do you have time
to linger
for just a little while
out of your busy

and very important day
for the goldfinches
that have gathered
in a field of thistles

for a musical battle,
to see who can sing
the highest note,
or the lowest,

or the most expressive of mirth,
or the most tender?
Their strong, blunt beaks
drink the air

as they strive
melodiously
not for your sake
and not for mine

and not for the sake of winning
but for sheer delight and gratitude –
believe us, they say,
it is a serious thing

just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.
I beg of you,

do not walk by
without pausing
to attend to this
rather ridiculous performance.

It could mean something.
It could mean everything.
It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote:
You must change your life.

 

Mary Oliver, “Invitation,” A Thousand Mornings (New York: Penguin Books, 2013).

“katherine with the lazy eye. short. and not a good poet” by francine j. harris

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read by the poet:

 
This morning, I heard you were found in your McDonald’s uniform.
 
I heard it while I was visiting a lake town, where empty woodsy highways
turn into waterside drives. I’d forgot
 
my toothbrush and was brushing with my finger, when a friend
who didn’t know you said he heard it like this: You know Katherine. Short.
 
with a lazy eye. Poet. Not a very good one. Yeah, well she died. the blue
 
on that lake fogs off into the horizon like styrofoam. The picnic tables
full of white people. I ask them where the coffee is. They say at Meijer.
 
I wonder if you thought about getting out of Detroit. When you read at the open mike
you’d point across the street at McDonald’s and told us to come see you.
 
Katherine with the lazy eye. short and not a good poet, I guess I almost cried.

I don’t know why, because I didn’t like you. This is the first time I remembered your name.
 
I didn’t like how you followed around a married man. That your poems sucked
and that I figured they were all about the married man.
 
That sometimes you reminded me of myself, boy crazy. That sometimes
I think people just don’t tell me that I’m kind of, well…slow.
 
Katherine with the lazy eye, short. and not a good poet.
I didn’t like your lazy eye always looking at me. That you called me
 
by my name. I didn’t
like you, since the first time I saw you at McDonald’s.
 
You had a mop. And you were letting some homeless dude
flirt with you. I wondered then, if you thought that was the best
 
you could do. I wondered then if it was.
 
Katherine with the lazy eye, short, and not a good poet.
You were too silly to wind up dead in an abandoned building.
 
I didn’t like you because, what was I supposed to tell you. What.
Don’t let them look at you like that, Katherine. Don’t let them get you alone.
 
You don’t get to laugh like that, like nothing’s gonna get you. Not everyone
will forgive the slow girl. Katherine
 
with the fucked up eye, short. Poetry sucked, musta’ knew better. I avoided you
in the hallway. I avoided you in lunch line. I avoided you in the lake.
 
I avoided you. My lazy eye. Katherine with one hideous eye, shit.
Poetry for boys again, you should have been immune. you were supposed
 
to be a cartoon. your body was supposed to be as twisted as
it was gonna get. Short. and not a good poet. Katherine
 
with no eye no more. I avoided you, hated it, when you said my name. I
really want to leave Detroit. Katherine the lazy short.
 
not a good poet. and shit. Somewhere someone has already asked
what was she like, and a woman has brought out her wallet and said
 
This is her. This is my beautiful baby.
 
—from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

Francine J. Harris (website) (bio) (amazon)

__________

francine j. harris: “I have always been somewhat nervous about this poem. When I first wrote it, it felt like a dirty little secret, something I only shared with a couple close friends. I’ve had lots of discussions about what it means to write others’ lives into your work. About what is sacred and what is exploitive. What I like about this poem is that in talking about ‘Katherine’ (which is not her real name) I figured out something about myself. In so much art which attempts to tell other people’s stories, I am often suspicious of the narrators. I want to know what their motives are. Eventually I gathered my nerve and read ‘Katherine’ at that open mike. It was well received, and afterwards, we talked about it.” (website)

“Moondog” by Susan Donnelly

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He just stood there,
at the corner of 43rd Street
and Sixth Avenue,
nearly seven feet tall,
dressed as a Viking.
Everyone, it seemed,
in New York in the ’60s
knew Moondog. They said
he’d been a stockbroker,
from a rich family.
They said he was blind.

I was writing a novel that year,
but didn’t know how,
and falling in love,
and everything moved so fast,
but the Viking was motionless.
I know he wrote songs,
but I never heard any.
He just stared outward.
I’d wake up, write myself dizzy,
then go walking, fast,
through the streets.

One day, a stranger
stopped me: JFK had been shot!
This was in midtown. The bells
of St. Patrick’s began tolling
and I joined all the others
going up the cathedral steps.
I’d seen the President
just last month — young,
glinting like silver,
in a limousine going up Madison
to the Hotel Carlyle.
He waved to all of us
and we waved back, cheering…

Or are these tears
for the broken love,
the unreadable novel?
Anyway, the years.

“Moondog” by Susan Donnelly, from Transit. © Iris Press, 2001.