cinaed

This present tragedy will eventually

turn into myth, and in the mist

of that later telling the bell tolling

now will be a symbol, or, at least,

a sign of something long since lost.

This will be another one of those

loose changes, the rearrangement of

hearts, just parts of old lives

patched together, gathered into

a dim constellation, small consolation.

Look, we will say, you can almost see

the outline there: her fingertips

touching his, the faint fusion

of two bodies breaking into light.

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk

down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs

to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”

when someone sneezes, a leftover

from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.

And sometimes, when you spill lemons

from your grocery bag, someone else will help you

pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.

We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,

and to say thank you to to the person holding it. To smile

at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress

to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,

and for the driver in the red pick-up to let us pass.

We have so little of each other, now. So far

from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.

What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these

fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,

have my seat,” “Go ahead - you first,” “I like your hat.”

And whom do I call my enemy?

An enemy must be worthy of engagement.

I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.

It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.

The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.

It sees and knows everything.

It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.

The door to the mind should only open from the heart.

An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.

Burn all your bridges

just so that you can build them again

with thicker ropes.

Hurt all the people you love

and then commit every felony to win them back.

Drown yourself in bleach until not even Heaven's light

can compare to how bright you can burn.

Turn yourself inside out

and paint your organs the color of what you see

in your dreams.

This is the art of

living with a ticking heart, a grenade you

throw through windows to make a

point that language

has no room for.

This is how I destroyed you.

And this,

is how I kept you alive.

Dig yourself a ditch, six

feet deep, and bury everything that you've ever

said, everything that you've never

meant, and everything that has

burned you and left you with nothing

but ash.

Your first time out of the country

of your own skin, I didn’t bring a map.

You always hated that I’d been lucky

enough to pick my way through streets

I couldn’t pronounce to find cathedrals,

graveyards. If you were a city, you said,

I’d only like to know your suburbs.

If you were a city, I said, I’d like to know

your poor neighborhoods, your inner parts.

Read your graffiti. Drink your tap water.

Feel your smog and dirt stick to my sweat.

Hear your orchestra of sirens and gunshots.

I’d know which of your streets to walk.

If you were a city, I’d expect to be robbed.

for John Fogelman

There are some things we just don't talk about--

Not even in the morning, when we're waking,

When your calloused fingers tentatively walk

The slope of my waist:

How love's a rust-worn boat,

Abandoned at the dock--and who could doubt

Waves lick their teeth, eyeing its hull? We're taking

Our wreckage as a promise, so we don't talk.

We wet the tired oars, tide drawing us out.

We understand there's nothing to be said.

Both of us know the dangers of this sea,

Warned by the tide-worn driftwood of our pasts--.

But we've already strayed from the harbor. We thread

A slow wake though the water--then silently,

We start to row, and will for as long as this lasts.

Even if I now saw you

only once,

I would long for you

through worlds,

worlds.

- Izumi Shikibu (976-1030), in The Ink Dark Moon, translated by Jane Hirshfield

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane,

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

The news would pour out of various devices

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

"Song of Five Friends"

by Yun Sŏndo

Translation by Larry Gross

You ask how many friends I have? Water and stone, bamboo and pine.
The moon rising over the eastern hill is a joyful comrade.
Besides these five companions, what other pleasure should I ask?

I’m told clouds are nice, that is, their color; but often they grow dark.
I’m told winds are pleasing, that is, their sound, but they fade to silence;
So I say only water is faithful and neverending.

Why do flowers fade and die so soon after that glorious bloom?
Why does green grass curl to yellow after sending its spears so high?
Could it be that only stone stands strong against the elements?

Look at this, it isn’t a tree, and it isn‘t a grass either;
How can it stand so erect when its insides are empty?
Bamboo, I praise you in all seasons, standing green no matter what

In summer fragile flowers bloom; in autumn they lose their leaves.
But Mr. Pine, see how he disdains winter’s frost and snow—
See him thrust himself to heaven and down to earth’s eternal spring.

Though you’re small, you glide so high, blessing everyone with light;
What other flame can beam so brightly in the blackness of our night?
Moon, you watch but keep silent; isn’t that what a good friend does?

"We are hard on each other"

Margaret Atwood

i)

We are hard on each other
and call it honesty,
choosing our jagged truths
with care and aiming them across
the neutral table.

The things we say are
true; it is our crooked
aims, our choices
turn them criminal.

ii)

Of course your lies
are more amusing:
you make them new each time.

Your truths, painful and boring
repeat themselves over & over
perhaps because you own
so few of them

iii)

A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?

iv)

Does the body lie
moving like this, are these
touches, hairs, wet
soft marble my tongue runs over
lies you are telling me?

Your body is not a word,
it does not lie or
speak truth either.

It is only
here or not here.

"Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal" by Naomi Shihab Nye

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.

Well — one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her
Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she
Did this.

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?

The minute she heard any words she knew — however poorly used -
She stopped crying.

She thought our flight had been canceled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late,

Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and
Would ride next to her — Southwest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.

Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.

Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.

She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies — little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts — out of her bag —
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo — we were all covered with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers —
Non-alcoholic — and the two little girls for our flight, one African
American, one Mexican American — ran around serving us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.

And I noticed my new best friend — by now we were holding hands —
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,

With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

Not a single person in this gate — once the crying of confusion stopped
— has seemed apprehensive about any other person.

They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.

Not everything is lost.

"The City"
Constantine P. Cavafy

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Translated By Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

"The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart"

Jack Gilbert

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

"Insomnia" by Dana Gioia

Now you hear what the house has to say.
Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,
the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,
and voices mounting in an endless drone
of small complaints like the sounds of a family
that year by year you've learned how to ignore.

But now you must listen to the things you own,
all that you've worked for these past years,
the murmur of property, of things in disrepair,
the moving parts about to come undone,
and twisting in the sheets remember all
the faces you could not bring yourself to love.

How many voices have escaped you until now,
the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,
the steady accusations of the clock
numbering the minutes no one will mark.
The terrible clarity this moment brings,
the useless insight, the unbroken dark.

"Immigrant Blues"

Li-Young Lee

People have been trying to kill me since I was born,

a man tells his son, trying to explain

the wisdom of learning a second tongue.

It’s an old story from the previous century

about my father and me.

The same old story from yesterday morning

about me and my son.

It’s called “Survival Strategies

and the Melancholy of Racial Assimilation.”

It’s called “Psychological Paradigms of Displaced Persons,”

called “The Child Who’d Rather Play than Study.”

Practice until you feel

the language inside you, says the man.

But what does he know about inside and outside,

my father who was spared nothing

in spite of the languages he used?

And me, confused about the flesh and the soul,

who asked once into a telephone,

Am I inside you?

You’re always inside me, a woman answered,

at peace with the body’s finitude,

at peace with the soul’s disregard

of space and time.

Am I inside you? I asked once

lying between her legs, confused

about the body and the heart.

If you don’t believe you’re inside me, you’re not,

she answered, at peace with the body’s greed,

at peace with the heart’s bewilderment.

It’s an ancient story from yesterday evening

called “Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,”

called “Loss of the Homeplace

and the Defilement of the Beloved,”

called “I want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs.”

Someone is doing a "post your favorite poem" meme, so I thought I'd join in.

**
**

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?

I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city—

white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is

this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of

where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.

- "Atlantis- A Lost Sonnet" by Eavan Boland

"I don’t know much about death and the sorriest lesson I’ve learned
is that words, my most trusted guardians against chaos,
offer small comfort in the face of anyone’s dying."
~Alison Hawthorne Deming “Inside the Wolf”

"No, I said, he was a failure.
You can’t remember
a nobody’s name, that’s why
they’re called nobodies.
Failures are unforgettable."
~ “Failure” by Philip Schultz

"There’s nothing terribly wrong with feeling lost, so long as that feeling precedes some plan on your part to actually do something about it. Too often a person grows complacent with their disillusionment, perpetually wearing their 'discomfort' like a favorite shirt."
~Jhonen Vasquez

“Of course, I want to
save the world, she said,
but I was hoping to do it
from the comfort
of my regular life.”
~ “Regular Life” by Brian Andreas

Current Mood: blank

"Murmurings In A Field Hospital"
by Carl Sandburg

[They picked him up in the grass where he had lain two
days in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs.]

Come to me only with playthings now…
A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes
Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers…
Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories
Of days that never happened anywhere in the world…

No more iron cold and real to handle,
Shaped for a drive straight ahead.
Bring me only beautiful useless things.
Only old home things touched at sunset in the quiet…
And at the window one day in summer
Yellow of the new crock of butter
Stood against the red of new climbing roses…
And the world was all playthings.

Current Mood: awake

Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.
- "Under One Small Star" by Wislawa Szymborska

a country you carry in your pocket
airport to airport, a country
that exists for you in a remembered
fragrance, an expired stamp, now the seal
of blood embossed upon someone's
sunstruck pavement.
- "Palestine" by Lorna Dee Cervantes

Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.
- "Persimmons" by Li-Young Lee

I must go down to the seas again,
to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship
and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song
and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face
and a grey dawn breaking.
- "Sea Fever" by John Masefield

Current Mood: tired

WHAT LIPS MY LIPS HAVE KISSED, AND WHERE, AND WHY (SONNET XLIII)

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

****

Well, that's the last poem for poetry month. I hope you all enjoyed the poetry. I know I had a lot of fun looking up poems. :)

Current Mood: accomplished

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Page Summary

"Naming The Stars" by Joyce Sutphen
"Small Kindnesses" by Danusha Laméris
"This Morning I Pray for My Enemies" by Joy Harjo
"Advice From Dionysus" by Shinji Moon
"Traveler" by Heather Sommer
"The Unquarried Blue of Those Depths Is All But Blinding" by Ashley Anna McHugh
"Even if I now saw you" by Izumi Shikibu
“Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)” by Muriel Rukeyser
"Song of Five Friends" by Yun Sŏndo
"We are hard on each other" by Margaret Atwood
"Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal" by Naomi Shihab Nye
"The City" by Constantine P. Cavafy
"The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" by Jack Gilbert
"Insomnia" by Dana Gioia
"Immigrant Blues" by Li-Young Lee
"Atlantis- A Lost Sonnet" by Eavan Boland
Quotations
Murmurings in a Field Hospital
Poetry excepts
“What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, And Where, And Why (Sonnet XLIII)” by Edna St. Vincent Millay

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Entries tagged with poetry

"Naming The Stars" by Joyce Sutphen

"Small Kindnesses" by Danusha Laméris

"This Morning I Pray for My Enemies" by Joy Harjo

"Advice From Dionysus" by Shinji Moon

"Traveler" by Heather Sommer

"The Unquarried Blue of Those Depths Is All But Blinding" by Ashley Anna McHugh

"Even if I now saw you" by Izumi Shikibu

“Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)” by Muriel Rukeyser

"Song of Five Friends" by Yun Sŏndo

"We are hard on each other" by Margaret Atwood

"Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal" by Naomi Shihab Nye

"The City" by Constantine P. Cavafy

"The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" by Jack Gilbert

"Insomnia" by Dana Gioia

"Immigrant Blues" by Li-Young Lee

"Atlantis- A Lost Sonnet" by Eavan Boland

Quotations

Murmurings in a Field Hospital

Poetry excepts

“What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, And Where, And Why (Sonnet XLIII)” by Edna St. Vincent Millay