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.

I want you and you are not here. I pause

in this garden, breathing the colour thought is

before language into still air. Even your name

is a pale ghost and, though I exhale it again

and again, it will not stay with me. Tonight

I make you up, imagine you, your movements clearer

than the words I have you say you said before.

Wherever you are now, inside my head you fix me

with a look, standing here whilst cool late light

dissolves into the earth. I have got your mouth wrong,

but still it smiles. I hold you closer, miles away,

inventing love, until the calls of nightjars

interrupt and turn what was to come, was certain,

into memory. The stars are filming us for no one.

For Robert Philen

You are like me, you will die too, but not today:

you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:

if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been

set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost

radio, may never be an oil painting or

Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are

a concordance of person, number, voice,

and place, strawberries spread through your name

as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me

of some spring, the waters as cool and clear

(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),

which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:

and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium

or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star

in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving

from its earthwards journeys, here where there is

no snow (I dreamed the snow was you,

when there was snow), you are my right,

have come to be my night (your body takes on

the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep

becomes you): and you fall from the sky

with several flowers, words spill from your mouth

in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees

and seas have flown away, I call it

loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,

a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,

and free of any eden we can name

"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.”

Guess what month it is? National Poetry month! Which means if I have time, I'll be posting a poem each day this month.

**
**
**

"Photograph"
Andrea Gibson

I wish I was a photograph
tucked into the corners of your wallet
I wish I was a photograph
you carried like a future in your back pocket
I wish I was that face you show to strangers
when they ask you where you come from
I wish I was that someone that you come from
every time you get there
and when you get there
I wish I was that someone who got phone calls
and postcards saying
wish you were here
I wish you were here
autumn is the hardest season
the leaves are all falling
and they're falling like they're falling in love with the ground
and the trees are naked and lonely
I keep trying to tell them
new leaves will come around in the spring
but you can't tell trees those things
they're like me they just stand there
and don't listen
I wish you were here
I've been missing you like crazy
I've been hazy eyed
staring at the bottom of my glass again
thinking of that time when it was so full
it was like we were tapping the moon for moonshine
or sticking straws into the center of the sun
and sipping like icarus would forever kiss
the bullets from our guns
I never meant to fire you know
I know you never meant to fire lover
I know we never meant to hurt each other
now the sky clicks from black to blue
and dusk looks like a bruise
I've been wrapping one night stands
around my body like wedding bands
but none of them fit in the morning
they just slip off my fingers and slip out the door
and all that lingers is the scent of you
I once swore if I threw that scent into a wishing well
all the wishes in the world would come true
do you remember
do you remember the night I told you
I've never seen anything more perfect than
than snow falling in the glow of a street light
electricity bowing to nature
mind bowing to heartbeat
this is gonna hurt bowing to I love you
I still love you like moons love the planets they circle around
like children love recess bells
I still hear the sound of you
and think of playgrounds
where outcasts who stutter
beneath braces and bruises and acne
are finally learning that their rich handsome bullies
are never gonna grow up to be happy
I think of happy when I think of you
so wherever you are I hope you're happy
I really do
I hope the stars are kissing your cheeks tonight
I hope you finally found a way to quit smoking
I hope your lungs are open and breathing your life
I hope there's a kite in your hand
that's flying all the way up to orion
and you still got a thousand yards of string to let out
I hope you're smiling
like god is pulling at the corners of your mouth
cause I might be naked and lonely
shaking branches for bones
but I'm still time zones away
from who I was the day before we met
you were the first mile
where my heart broke a sweat
and I wish you were here
I wish you'd never left
but mostly I wish you well
I wish you my very very best

LETTER FROM THE LAND OF SINNERS

I write you this out of another province
That you may never see:
Country of rivers, its topography
Mutable in detail, yet always one,
Blasted in certain places, here by glaciers,
There by the work of man.

The fishers by the water have no boast
Save of their freedom; here
A man may cast a dozen kinds of lure
And think his days rewarded if he sight
Now and again the prize, unfettered, flicking
Its prism-gleams of light.

The old lord lived secluded in his park
Until the hall was burned
Years ago, by his tenants; both have learned
Better since then, and now our children run
To greet him. Council and hunter have forgotten
The echo of the gun.

I said there are blasted places: we have kept
Their nakedness intact--
No marble to commemorate an act
Superhuman or merely rash; we know
Why they are there and why the seed that falls there
Is certain not to grow.

We keep these places as we keep the time
Scarred on our recollection
When some we love broke from us in defection,
Or we ourselves harried to death too soon
What we could least forgo. Our memories
Recur like the old moon.

But we have made another kind of peace,
And walk where boughs are green,
Forgiven by the selves that we have been,
And learning to forgive. Our apples taste
Sweeter this year; our gates are falling down,
And need not be replaced.

FOR THE SAKE OF STRANGERS

No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waiting patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another—a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a retarded child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them—
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.

FAIRY TALES

for Gu Cheng

You believed in your own story,
then climbed inside it—
a turquoise flower.
You gazed past ailing trees,
past crumbling walls and rusty railings.
Your least gesture beckoned a constellation
of wild vetch, grasshoppers, and stars
to sweep you into immaculate distances.

The heart may be tiny
but the world's enormous.

And the people in turn believe—
in pine trees after rain,
ten thousand tiny suns, a mulberry branch
bent over water like a fishing-rod,
a cloud tangled in the tail of a kite.
Shaking off dust, in silver voices
ten thousand memories sing from your dream.

The world may be tiny
but the heart's enormous.

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Syndicate

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
"Miles Away" by Carol Ann Duffy
"You, Therefore" by Reginald Shepherd
"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
"Photograph" by Andrea Gibson
"Letter From the Land of Sinners" by Adrienne Rich
"For the Sake of Strangers" by Dorianne Laux
"Fairy Tales" by Shu Ting, trans. by Donald Finkel

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Entries tagged with poetry month

"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

"Miles Away" by Carol Ann Duffy

"You, Therefore" by Reginald Shepherd

"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

"Photograph" by Andrea Gibson

"Letter From the Land of Sinners" by Adrienne Rich

"For the Sake of Strangers" by Dorianne Laux

"Fairy Tales" by Shu Ting, trans. by Donald Finkel