Category: Poetry

“The Altar” by Charles Simic

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

The plastic statue of the Virgin
On top of a bedroom dresser
With a blackened mirror
From a bad-dream grooming salon.
Two pebbles from the grave of a rock star,
A small, grinning windup monkey,
A bronze Egyptian coin
And a red movie-ticket stub.

A splotch of sunlight on the framed
Communion photograph of a boy
With the eyes of someone
Who will drown in a lake real soon.

An altar dignifying the god of chance.
What is beautiful, it cautions,
Is found accidentally and not sought after.
What is beautiful is easily lost.

“The Altar,” by Charles Simic from Night Picnic (Harcourt).

“The Methodist and his Method” by Chad Sweeney

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry2 Comments

Underground in the cemetery
my grandfather preaches to the other corpses.
They clap inside their boxes

nicely arranged in Sunday clothes
in long rows like pews.
His words stir hope

that conditions may change.
Each man has been given his row boat,
he says,

to lie back in and watch the sky
braiding and unbraiding its light.
No one is safer than we are.

“The Methodist and his Method” by Chad Sweeney from Parable of Hide and Seek. © Alice James Books, 2010.

“Oil & Steel” by Henri Cole

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

My father lived in a dirty-dish mausoleum,
watching a portable black-and-white television,
reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
which he preferred to Modern Fiction.
One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease,
except the one that guarded his corpse
found holding a tumbler of Bushmills.
“Dead is dead,” he would say, an antipreacher.
I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet
And some motor oil—my inheritance.
Once I saw him weep in a courtroom—
neglected, needing nursing—this man who never showed
me much affection but gave me a knack
for solitude, which has been mostly useful.

“Oil & Steel” by Henri Cole from Pierce the Skin. © Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2010.

“Incommunicado” by Paul Groves

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry2 Comments

What sort of a marriage is this? She hasn’t
spoken to me all day. I’ve started to blame myself:
something I’ve said must be responsible for
those tears. And when I speak she doesn’t answer;
she just looks disconsolate. Her behaviour
is atypical, hard to fathom; for years
we’ve got on well, with few disputes. Then this.
And why does she put our displayed photographs
in a drawer, prepare lunch only for herself, pick
at her food like a lovesick teenager? I try
to cheer her, but she’s beyond reason, inarticulate,
inscrutable. This is ironic conduct for one
who spent time yesterday in church, though
what she was doing there—it being a Tuesday—
she has not said. “Look,” I say, “be reasonable.
Tell me what’s bothering you.” But she rises, without
answering, and walks through me to the kitchen.

“Incommunicado” by Paul Groves from Wowsers © Seren Books.

“I always turn the radio” by Robin Merrill

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry1 Comment

off
when I stop at the
stop
sign
by the white cross
where you died

I always turn the radio
off
some sort of ceremonial
moment of silence

today
I forgot
for the first time
to turn the radio
off

I was talking
to a new friend

can you forgive me
for forgetting
to turn the radio
off
and also
for living

“I always turn the radio” by Robin Merrill from Laundry and Stories © Moon Pie Press