Poetry for Pleasure

Home , Love After Love (poem), Philip Levine (poet), William Jay Smith

CLL Winter 2021 [8 sessions starting January 5, 2021]

Poetry for Pleasure

Let everything happen to you Beauty and Terror Just keep going No feeling is final – Rainer Maria Rilke

“Time (as is well known) sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a worm; but man feels especially happy when he does not even notice whether it is passing rapidly or quietly” Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“If a thief kisses you, count your teeth.” Anon

I had a chorus of ‘Body and Soul’ that I carried in my head, and as long as I had that I thought I was rich. – Anita O’Day

…writing well was almost the same as thinking well, and thinking well was he next thing to acting well. All moral discipline, all moral perfection derived from the soul of literature, from the soul of human dignity, which was the moving spirit of both humanity and politics. – The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann

Poetry is an art of imitation... that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth--to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture... –Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesie

And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass. – Ezra Pound

Undying Memories by Arthur Santos Causa by Ezra Pound from “A Stormy Night” by Rilke ……………………………………………….4 A Song of a Navajo Weaver by Bertrand N. O. Walker ………………………..5 Two by William Blake ………………………………………………………..6-7 Three by Walt Whitman …………………………………………………...……8 America, I Sing Back by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke ………………………….10 On The Ning Nang Nong by Spike Milligan………...………………………….12 As I Grew Older by Langston Hughes ………………………………………… 13 Does It Matter? by Siegfried Sassoon ………………………………………….14 Three by Louise Glück ………………………………………………………….15 Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey by Hayden Carruth ……………………………..18 American Primitive by William Jay Smith ……………………………………..19 The Groundhog by Richard Eberhart …………………………………………...20 The Ballad of the Skeletons by Allen Ginsberg ………………………………..22 Two by Randal Jarrell …………………………………………………………..26 Three by W.C. Williams ………………………………………………………..29 Rape by Adrienne Rich …………………………………………………………32 Musée des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden ………………………………………...33 Hap by Thomas Hardy ………………………………………………………….34 Psalm by Paul Celan ……………………………………………………………35 The Man with the Hoe by Edwin Markham ……………………………………36 Harry Wilmans by Edgar Lee Masters …………………………………………38 St. Roach by Muriel Rukeyser ………………………………………………….39 The Eagle by Alfred, Lord Tennyson …………………………………………..41 Counting the Mad by Donald Justice …………………………………………..42 How Will it Feel… by Mary Jo Bang ………………………………………….43 Wynken, Blynken, and Nod by Eugene Field ………………………………….44 Hearing by John Hodgen ……………………………………………………….46 Lost by David Wagoner ……………………………………………………...... 47 The Mountain by Elizabeth Bishop ……………………………………………48 Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson ………………………………….50 Adventures of Isabel by Ogden Nash ………………………………………….51 Two by D. H. Lawrence ……………………………………………………….53 Snake by Langston Hughes ……………………………………………………56 The Unknowable by Philip Levine ……………………………………………57 Won’t You Celebrate with Me by Lucille Clifton …………………………….58 A Dog was Crying Tonight in Wicklow by Seamus Heaney …………………59 After the Winter by Claude McKay …………………………………………..60

In My Craft or Sullen Art by Dylan Thomas ……………….………61 Elegy for Fats Waller by Michael Longley ………………………...62 Love After Love by Derek Walcott ………………………………...63 Oysters by Seamus Heaney ………………………………….……...64 Three by James A. Emanuel ……………………………….………..65 Touch Me by Stanley Kunitz ……………………………………….67 Veteran's Day by Marie Howe ……………………………….……..68 In the Context by George Held …………………………….………..71 Malcom X Park by Yvonne ……………………………….………...72 Two by Wislawa Szymborska ………………………………………74 Three by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright ………………………….………..78 Two by Erich Fried ……………………………………….…………80 Two by Philip Fried …………………………………………………82 Two by Neil Shepard ………………………………………………..84 Love Song by Dorothy Parker ………………………………………86 Two by Bob Burr ……………………………………………………87 Table by Richard Tillinghast ………………………………………..88 Perhaps the World Ends Here by Joy Harjo ………………………...89 Mingus at the Showplace by William Matthews ……………………90 The Wind That Blows Through Me by Alicia Ostriker …………….91

Undying Memories by Arthur Santos (age 5)

Thank God for sheep. Thank sheep for wool. Thank wool for blankets. Thank blankets for warmth. Thank warmth for us. #

from “A Stormy Night” section viii by Rilke:

On nights like this my little sister grows, who was born and died before me, very small. There have been many such nights, gone long ago: she must be lovely now. Soon the suitors will call. #

Causa by Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972)

I join these words for four people, Some others may overhear them, O world, I am sorry for you, You do not know these four people.

4 A Song of a Navajo Weaver by Bertrand N. O. Walker - 1869-1926

For ages long, my people have been Dwellers in this land; For ages viewed these mountains, Loved these mesas and these sands, That stretch afar and glisten, Glimmering in the sun As it lights the mighty canons Ere the weary day is done. Shall I, a patient dweller in this Land of fair blue skies, Tell something of their story while My shuttle swiftly flies? As I weave I’ll trace their journey, Devious, rough and wandering, Ere they reached the silent region Where the night stars seem to sing. When the myriads of them glitter Over peak and desert waste, Crossing which the silent runner and The gaunt of co-yo-tees haste. Shall I weave the zig-zag pathway Whence the sacred fire was born; And interweave the symbol of the God Who brought the corn— Of the Rain-god whose fierce anger Was appeased by sacred meal, And the trust that my brave people In him evermore shall feel? All this perhaps I might weave As the woof goes to and fro, Wafting as my shuttle passes, Humble hopes, and joys and care, Weaving closely, weaving slowly, While I watch the pattern grow; Showing something of my life: To the Spirit God a prayer. Grateful that he brought my people To the land of silence vast

5 Taught them arts of peace and ended All their wanderings of the past. Deftly now I trace the figures, This of joy and that of woe; And I leave an open gate-way For the Dau to come and go. #

Ah! Sun-flower by William Blake

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time, Who countest the steps of the Sun: Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the travellers journey is done.

Where the Youth pined away with desire, And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow: Arise from their graves and aspire, Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

The Chimney Sweeper: by William Blake

When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!" So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved, so I said, "Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare, You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."

And so he was quiet, & that very night, As Tom was a-sleeping he had such a sight! That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack, Were all of them locked up in coffins of black;

And by came an Angel who had a bright key, And he opened the coffins & set them all free; Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing they run, And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.

Then naked & white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind. And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy, He'd have God for his father & never want joy.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark And got with our bags & our brushes to work. Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm; So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

7 I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing by Walt Whitman

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing, All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches, Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green, And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself, But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not, And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss, And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room, It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends, (For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,) Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love; For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space, Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near, I know very well I could not. #

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider, I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

8 I Hear America Singing by Walt Whitman

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong, The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work, The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck, The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands, The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown, The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

9 America, I Sing Back by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke - 1958-

for Phil Young, my father, Robert Hedge Coke, Whitman, and Hughes

America, I sing back. Sing back what sung you in. Sing back the moment you cherished breath. Sing you home into yourself and back to reason.

Oh, before America began to sing, I sung her to sleep, held her cradleboard, wept her into day. My song gave her creation, prepared her delivery, held her severed cord beautifully beaded.

My song helped her stand, held her hand for first steps, nourished her very being, fed her, placed her three sisters strong. My song comforted her as she battled my reason broke my long held footing sure, as any child might do.

Lo, as she pushed herself away, forced me to remove myself, as I cried this country, my song grew roses in each tear’s fall.

My blood veined rivers, painted pipestone quarries circled canyons, while she made herself maiden fine.

Oh, but here I am, here I am, here, I remain high on each and every peak, carefully rumbling her great underbelly, prepared to pour forth singing— and sing again I will, as I have always done.

Never silenced unless in the company of strangers, singing the stoic face, polite repose, polite, while dancing deep inside, polite Mother of her world. Sister of myself.

When my song sings aloud again. When I call her back to cradle. Call her to peer into waters, to behold herself in dark and light, day and night, call her to sing along, call her to mature, to envision—

Then, she will make herself over. My song will make it so

10 When she grows far past her self-considered purpose, I will sing her back, sing her back. I will sing. Oh, I will—I do.

America, I sing back. Sing back what sung you in.

On The Ning Nang Nong by Spike Milligan [1918-2002]

On the Ning Nang Nong Where the Cows go Bong! and the monkeys all say BOO! There's a Nong Nang Ning Where the trees go Ping! And the tea pots jibber jabber joo. On the Nong Ning Nang All the mice go Clang And you just can't catch 'em when they do! So its Ning Nang Nong Cows go Bong! Nong Nang Ning Trees go ping Nong Ning Nang The mice go Clang What a noisy place to belong is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!!

As I Grew Older by Langston Hughes

It was a long time ago. I have almost forgotten my dream. But it was there then, In front of me, Bright like a sun— My dream. And then the wall rose, Rose slowly, Slowly, Between me and my dream. Rose until it touched the sky— The wall. Shadow. I am black. I lie down in the shadow. No longer the light of my dream before me, Above me. Only the thick wall. Only the shadow. My hands! My dark hands! Break through the wall! Find my dream! Help me to shatter this darkness, To smash this night, To break this shadow Into a thousand lights of sun, Into a thousand whirling dreams Of sun!

13 Does It Matter? by Siegfried Sassoon 1918

Does it matter? -losing your legs? For people will always be kind, And you need not show that you mind When others come in after hunting To gobble their muffins and eggs.

Does it matter? -losing you sight? There’s such splendid work for the blind; And people will always be kind, As you sit on the terrace remembering And turning your face to the light.

Do they matter-those dreams in the pit? You can drink and forget and be glad, And people won't say that you’re mad; For they know that you've fought for your country, And no one will worry a bit.

The Red Poppy by Louise Gluck 1943 …

The great thing is not having a mind. Feelings: oh, I have those; they govern me. I have a lord in heaven called the sun, and open for him, showing him the fire of my own heart, fire like his presence. What could such glory be if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters, were you like me once, long ago, before you were human? Did you permit yourselves to open once, who would never open again? Because in truth I am speaking now the way you do. I speak because I am shattered.

Vespers by Louise Glück

In your extended absence, you permit me use of earth, anticipating some return on investment. I must report failure in my assignment, principally regarding the tomato plants. I think I should not be encouraged to grow tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold the heavy rains, the cold nights that come so often here, while other regions get twelve weeks of summer. All this belongs to you: on the other hand, I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly multiplying in the rows. I doubt you have a heart, in our understanding of that term. You who do not discriminate between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence, immune to foreshadowing, you may not know how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf, the red leaves of the maple falling even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible for these vines.

16 The Wild Iris by Louise Glück

At the end of my suffering there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. Then nothing. The weak sun flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being a soul and unable to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth bending a little. And what I took to be birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember passage from the other world I tell you I could speak again: whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice: from the center of my life came a great fountain, deep blue shadows on azure seawater.

17 Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey by Hayden Carruth

Scrambled eggs and whiskey in the false-dawn light. Chicago, a sweet town, bleak, God knows, but sweet. Sometimes. And weren't we fine tonight? When Hank set up that limping treble roll behind me my horn just growled and I thought my heart would burst. And Brad M. pressing with the soft stick and Joe-Anne singing low. Here we are now in the White Tower, leaning on one another, too tired to go home. But don't say a word, don't tell a soul, they wouldn't understand, they couldn't, never in a million years, how fine, how magnificent we were in that old club tonight.

From Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, Poems 1991-1995

American Primitive by William Jay Smith (1918 – 2015)

Look at him there in his stovepipe hat, His high-top shoes, and his handsome collar; Only my Daddy could look like that, And I love my Daddy like he loves his Dollar.

The screen door bangs, and it sounds so funny-- There he is in a shower of gold; His pockets are stuffed with folding money, His lips are blue, and his hands feel cold.

He hangs in the hall by his black cravat, The ladies faint, and the children holler: Only my Daddy could look like that, And I love my Daddy like he loves his Dollar.

19 The Groundhog by Richard Eberhart [1904 – June 9, 2005]

In June, amid the golden fields, I saw a groundhog lying dead. Dead lay he; my senses shook, And mind outshot our naked frailty. There lowly in the vigorous summer His form began its senseless change, And made my senses waver dim Seeing nature ferocious in him. Inspecting close his maggots’ might And seething cauldron of his being, Half with loathing, half with a strange love, I poked him with an angry stick. The fever arose, became a flame And Vigour circumscribed the skies, Immense energy in the sun, And through my frame a sunless trembling. My stick had done nor good nor harm. Then stood I silent in the day Watching the object, as before; And kept my reverence for knowledge Trying for control, to be still, To quell the passion of the blood; Until I had bent down on my knees Praying for joy in the sight of decay. And so I left; and I returned In Autumn strict of eye, to see The sap gone out of the groundhog, But the bony sodden hulk remained. But the year had lost its meaning, And in intellectual chains I lost both love and loathing, Mured up in the wall of wisdom. Another summer took the fields again Massive and burning, full of life, But when I chanced upon the spot There was only a little hair left, And bones bleaching in the sunlight Beautiful as architecture;

20 I watched them like a geometer, And cut a walking stick from a birch. It has been three years, now. There is no sign of the groundhog. I stood there in the whirling summer, My hand capped a withered heart, And thought of China and of Greece, Of Alexander in his tent; Of Montaigne in his tower, Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.

21 The Ballad of the Skeletons by Allen Ginsberg (1985)

Said the Presidential skeleton "I won't sign the bill" Said the Speaker skeleton "Yes you will" Said the Representative skeleton "I object" Said the Supreme Court skeleton "Whaddya expect?"

Said the Military skeleton "Buy Star Bombs" Said the Upperclass skeleton "Starve unmarried moms" Said the Yahoo skeleton "Stop dirty art" Said the Right Wing skeleton "Forget about your heart"

Said the Gnostic skeleton "The Human Form's divine" Said the Christian Coalition skeleton "No, it's not, it's mine" Said the Buddha skeleton "Compassion is wealth" Said the Corporate skeleton "It's bad for your health"

Said the Old Christ skeleton "Care for the poor" Said the Son of God skeleton "AIDS needs cure" Said the Homophobe skeleton "Gay folk suck" Said the Heritage Policy skeleton "Blacks are outta luck"

Said the Macho skeleton "Women in their place" Said the Fundamentalist skeleton "Increase the human race" Said the Right-to-Life skeleton "Fetus has a soul" Said Pro Choice skeleton "Shove it up your hole"

Said the Downsized skeleton "Robots got my job" Said the Tough-on-Crime skeleton "Tear gas the mob" Said the Governor skeleton "Cut school lunch" Said the Mayor skeleton "Eat the budget crunch" Said the Neo Conservative skeleton "Homeless off the street!" Said the Free Market skeleton "Use 'em up for meat!"

Said the Think Tank skeleton "Free Market's the way!" Said the Savings & Loan skeleton "Make the State pay!" Said the Chrysler skeleton "Pay for you & me" Said the Nuke Power skeleton "& me & me & me" Said the Ecologic skeleton "Keep skies blue" Said the Multinational skeleton "What's it worth to you?"

Said the NAFTA skeleton "Get rich, Free Trade" Said the Maquiladora skeleton "Sweat shops, low paid"

23 Said the rich GATT skeleton "One world, high tech" Said the Underclass skeleton "Get it in the neck" Said the World Bank skeleton "Cut down your trees" Said the I.M.F. skeleton "Buy American cheese"

Said the Underdeveloped skeleton "We want rice" Said the Developed Nations' skeleton "Sell your bones for dice"

Said the Ayatollah skeleton "Die, writer, die!" Said Joe Stalin's skeleton "That's no lie" Said the Middle Kingdom skeleton "We swallowed Tibet" Said the Dalai Lama skeleton "Indigestion's whatcha get" Said the World Chorus skeleton "That's their fate" Said the U.S.A. skeleton "Gotta save Kuwait"

Said the Petrochemical skeleton "Roar, Bombers, roar!" Said the Psychedelic skeleton "Smoke a dinosaur" Said Nancy's skeleton "Just say 'No'" Said the Rasta skeleton "Blow, Nancy, blow!"

Said the Demagogue skeleton "Don't smoke Pot" Said the Alcoholic skeleton "Let your liver rot"

24 Said the Junkie skeleton "Can't we get a fix?" Said the Big Brother skeleton "Jail the dirty pricks!" Said the Mirror skeleton "Hey, good looking" Said the Electric Chair skeleton "Hey, what's cooking?"

Said the Talkshow skeleton "Fuck you in the face!" Said the Family Values skeleton "My family values mace" Said the NY Times skeleton "That's not fit to print" Said the CIA skeleton "Can't ya take a hint?"

Said the Network skeleton "Believe my lies" Said the Advertising skeleton "Don't get wise!" Said the Media skeleton "Believe you me" Said the Couch-potato skeleton "What, me worry?" Said the TV skeleton "Eat sound bites" Said the Newscast skeleton "That's all, Goodnight"

Next Day by Randal Jarrell

Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All, I take a box And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens. The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical Food-gathering flocks Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,

Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise If that is wisdom. Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves And the boy takes it to my station wagon, What I’ve become Troubles me even if I shut my eyes.

When I was young and miserable and pretty And poor, I’d wish What all girls wish: to have a husband, A house and children. Now that I’m old, my wish Is womanish: That the boy putting groceries in my car

See me. It bewilders me he doesn’t see me. For so many years I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me And its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me, The eyes of strangers! And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile

Imaginings within my imagining, I too have taken The chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog And we start home. Now I am good. The last mistaken, Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind

Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm Some soap and water—

26 It was so long ago, back in some Gay Twenties, Nineties, I don’t know . . . Today I miss My lovely daughter Away at school, my sons away at school,

My husband away at work—I wish for them. The dog, the maid, And I go through the sure unvarying days At home in them. As I look at my life, I am afraid Only that it will change, as I am changing:

I am afraid, this morning, of my face. It looks at me From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate, The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look Of gray discovery Repeats to me: “You’re old.” That’s all, I’m old.

And yet I’m afraid, as I was at the funeral I went to yesterday. My friend’s cold made-up face, granite among its flowers, Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body Were my face and body. As I think of her and I hear her telling me

How young I seem; I am exceptional; I think of all I have. But really no one is exceptional, No one has anything, I’m anybody, I stand beside my grave Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.

27 Bats by Randall Jarrell (1964)

A bat is born Naked and blind and pale. His mother makes a pocket of her tail And catches him. He clings to her long fur By his thumbs and toes and teeth. And then the mother dances through the night Doubling and looping, Soaring, somersaulting- Her baby hangs on underneath. All night, in happiness, She hunts and flies. Her high sharp cries Like shining needlepoints of sound Go out into the night and echoing back, Tell her what they have touched. She hears how far it is, how big it is, Which way it’s going: She lives by hearing. The mother eats the moths and gnats she catches In full flight, In full flight. The mother drinks the water of the pond, She skims across, Her baby hangs on tight. Her baby drinks the milk she makes him. In moonlight or starlight, In midair Their single shadow, printed on the moon Or fluttering across the stars, Whirls on all night; at daybreak, The tired mother flaps home to her rafter. The others are all there. They hang themselves up by their toes, They wrap themselves in their brown wings. Bunched upside down, they sleep in air. Their sharp ears, their sharp teeth, their quick sharp faces Are dull and slow and mild. All the bright day, as the mother sleeps, She folds her wings about her sleeping child.

Proletarian Portrait by William Carlos Williams

A big young bareheaded woman in an apron

Her hair slicked back standing on the street

One stockinged foot toeing the sidewalk

Her shoe in her hand. Looking intently into it

She pulls out the paper insole to find the nail

That has been hurting her

29 THE RAPER FROM PASSENACK

William Carlos Williams

The Raper from Passenack was very kind. When she regained her wits, he said, It's all right, Kid, I took care of you.

What a mess she was in. Then he added, you'll never forget me now. And drove her home.

Only a man who is sick, she said would do a thing like that. It must be so.

No one who is not diseased could be so insanely cruel. He wants to give it to someone else-- to justify himself. But if I get a venereal infection out of this I won't be treated.

I refuse. You'll find me dead in bed first. Why not? That's the way she spoke,

I wish I could shoot him. How would you like to know a murderer? I may do it.

I'll know by the end of this week. I wouldn't scream. I bit him several times but he was too strong for me. I can't yet understand it. I don't faint so easily.

When I came to myself and realized what had happened all I could do was to curse

and call him every vile name I could think of. I was so glad to be taken home.

I suppose it's my mind--the fear of infection. I'd rather a million times have been got pregnant.

But it's the foulness of it can't be cured. And hatred, hatred of all men --and disgust.

YOUNG WOMAN AT A WINDOW (2)

William Carlos Williams

While she sits there

with tears on her cheek

her cheek on her hand

this little child who robs her

knows nothing of his theft

but rubs his nose

31 Rape by Adrienne Rich (1973)

There is a cop who is both prowler and father: he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers, had certain ideals. You hardly know him in his boots and silver badge, on horseback, one hand touching his gun. You hardly know him but you have to get to know him: he has access to machinery that could kill you. He and his stallion clop like warlords among the trash, his ideals stand in the air, a frozen cloud from between his unsmiling lips. And so, when the time comes, you have to turn to him, the maniac’s sperm still greasing your thighs, your mind whirling like crazy. You have to confess to him, you are guilty of the crime of having been forced. And you see his blue eyes, the blue eyes of all the family whom you used to know, grow narrow and glisten, his hand types out the details and he wants them all but the hysteria in your voice pleases him best. You hardly know him but now he thinks he knows you: he has taken down your worst moment on a machine and filed it in a file. He knows, or thinks he knows, how much you imagined; he knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted. He has access to machinery that could get you put away; and if, in the sickening light of the precinct, and if, in the sickening light of the precinct, your details sound like a portrait of your confessor, will you swallow, will you deny them, will you lie your way home?

32 Musée des Beaux Arts 1940 by W.H. Auden (1907 – 1973)

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

33 Hap by Tomas Hardy (1840 – 1928)

If but some vengeful god would call to me From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing, Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!”

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die, Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited; Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain, And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? —Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . . These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

34 Psalm by Paul Celan (1920-1970) Translated by John Felstiner

No one kneads us again out of earth and clay, no one incants our dust. No one.

Blessèd art thou, No One. In thy sight would we bloom. In thy spite.

A Nothing we were, are now, and ever shall be, blooming: the Nothing-, the No-One's-Rose.

With our pistil soul-bright, our stamen heaven-waste, our corona red from the purpleword we sang over, O over the thorn.

The Man with the Hoe by Edwin Markham - 1852-1940

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, The emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back the burden of the world. Who made him dead to rapture and despair, A thing that grieves not and that never hopes. Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave To have dominion over sea and land; To trace the stars and search the heavens for power; To feel the passion of Eternity? Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns And marked their ways upon the ancient deep? Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf There is no shape more terrible than this — More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed — More filled with signs and portents for the soul — More fraught with menace to the universe. What gulfs between him and the seraphim! Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? What the long reaches of the peaks of song, The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; Time's tragedy is in the aching stoop; Through this dread shape humanity betrayed, Plundered, profaned, and disinherited, Cries protest to the Powers that made the world. A protest that is also a prophecy. O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, Is this the handiwork you give to God, This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched? How will you ever straighten up this shape; Touch it again with immortality;

36 Give back the upward looking and the light; Rebuild in it the music and the dream, Make right the immemorial infamies, Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes? O masters, lords and rulers in all lands How will the Future reckon with this Man? How answer his brute question in that hour When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores? How will it be with kingdoms and with kings — With those who shaped him to the thing he is — When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world. After the silence of the centuries?

Inspired by the painting L'homme à la houe by Jean-François Millet.

194. Harry Wilmans by Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950) 1916

I was just turned twenty-one, And Henry Phipps, the Sunday-school superintendent, Made a speech in Bindle’s Opera House. “The honor of the flag must be upheld,” he said, “Whether it be assailed by a barbarous tribe of Tagalogs Or the greatest power in Europe.” And we cheered and cheered the speech and the flag he waved As he spoke. And I went to the war in spite of my father, And followed the flag till I saw it raised By our camp in a rice field near Manila, And all of us cheered and cheered it. But there were flies and poisonous things; And there was the deadly water, And the cruel heat, And the sickening, putrid food; And the smell of the trench just back of the tents Where the soldiers went to empty themselves; And there were the whores who followed us, full of syphilis; And beastly acts between ourselves or alone, With bullying, hatred, degradation among us, And days of loathing and nights of fear To the hour of the charge through the steaming swamp, Following the flag, Till I fell with a scream, shot through the guts. Now there’s a flag over me in Spoon River! A flag! A flag!

38 St. Roach by Muriel Rukeyser 1976

For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you, for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth, they showed me by every action to despise your kind; for that I saw my people making war on you, I could not tell you apart, one from another, for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you, for that all the people I knew met you by crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling water on you, they flushed you down, for that I could not tell one from another only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender. Not like me. For that I did not know your poems And that I do not know any of your sayings And that I cannot speak or read your language And that I do not sing your songs And that I do not teach our children to eat your food or know your poems or sing your songs But that we say you are filthing our food But that we know you not at all.

Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time. You were lighter than the others in color, that was neither good nor bad.

I was really looking for the first time. You seemed troubled and witty.

Today I touched one of you for the first time. You were startled, you ran, you fled away Fast as a dancer, light, strange and lovely to the touch. I reach, I touch, I begin to know you.

39 Roach by Muriel Rukeyser

For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you, For that I never touched you. They told me you are only filth. They showed me by every action to despise your kind. Today I touched one of you for the first time. Yepa were startled, you ran you fled away. First as a dancer, light, strange and lovely to the touch. I reach I touch, I begin to know you.

(revised for children’s workshop)

40 The Eagle by Alfred, Lord Tennyson 1809-1892

He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

41 Counting the Mad by Donald Justice (1925 -

This one was put in a jacket, This one was sent home, This one was given bread and meat But would eat none, And this one cried No No No No All day long.

This one looked at the window As though it were a wall, This one saw things that were not there, This one things that were, And this one cried No No No No All day long.

This one thought himself a bird, This one a dog, And this one thought himself a man, An ordinary man, And cried and cried No No No No All day long.

How will it feel months from now by Mary Jo Bang

when the pink sliver of sky swims in through the window and you hear the high notes from the opera singer one story below. Angel of wishing, angel of fortune, the cart overturned, the small animals from the back of the truck flooding the highway. The keys keep making the piano be.

I have only ever wanted the red sky to turn blue. It’s so beautiful when it sinks in. Hold me, closeness says. As long as I have sight, I’ll see.

The walls of time dissolve whenever the lights are turned off. The lights that made the day so easy to be with. I fold myself away. No mirage of sirens hammering the glass front of the hospital down the block. Stars guide the eye across the sky. It will be like that. Again, and again.

43 Wynken, Blynken, and Nod by Eugene Field

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night Sailed off in a wooden shoe,— Sailed on a river of crystal light Into a sea of dew. "Where are you going, and what do you wish?" The old moon asked the three. "We have come to fish for the herring-fish That live in this beautiful sea; Nets of silver and gold have we," Said Wynken, Blynken, And Nod.

The old moon laughed and sang a song, As they rocked in the wooden shoe; And the wind that sped them all night long Ruffled the waves of dew; The little stars were the herring-fish That lived in the beautiful sea. "Now cast your nets wherever you wish,— Never afraid are we!" So cried the stars to the fishermen three, Wynken, Blynken, And Nod.

All night long their nets they threw To the stars in the twinkling foam,— Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe, Bringing the fishermen home: 'Twas all so pretty a sail, it seemed As if it could not be; And some folk thought 'twas a dream they'd dreamed Of sailing that beautiful sea; But I shall name you the fishermen three: Wynken, Blynken, And Nod.

44 Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes, And Nod is a little head, And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies Is a wee one's trundle-bed; So shut your eyes while Mother sings Of wonderful sights that be, And you shall see the beautiful things As you rock in the misty sea Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three:— Wynken, Blynken, And Nod.

Hearing by John Hodgen

We divorced during the impeachment proceedings, each of us calling for points of order, grudgingly ceding ground when we had to, glad to strike the last word, or enter into the record some conspiracy theory we’d heard, calling it all a sham, a scam, denying witnesses, crying no to every allegation of tit for tat, or quid pro quo, proposing subsidiary motions to postpone to a certain time, or indefinitely, to amend, commit, or refer to a crime, to raise a previous question, lay on the table, cite or attest, to object to further consideration, make a final request to extend the limits of debate, to uphold a vow, an oath, to second that emotion, raise a question of privilege, both of us appealing for a recess, a suspension of the rules, both of us out of order, both of us fools.

John Hodgen: “With pundits and commentators describing this impeachment vote as a signature day in our collective history, I think of that history as both macrocosm and microcosm, that for every weighty political moment for our leaders and representatives, there are millions of people going through their own history, living through their own landmark days, including those spent in civic halls testifying to oaths and vows.”

Lost by David Wagoner

(Based on native American tradition: response given by an elder to a child who asks, “What should I do if I am lost in the forest?”)

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here. No two trees are the same to Raven. No two branches are the same to Wren. If what a tree or bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows Where you are. You must let it find you.

The Mountain by Elizabeth Bishop

At evening, something behind me. I start for a second, I blench, or staggeringly halt and burn. I do not know my age.

In the morning it is different. An open book confronts me, too close to read in comfort. Tell me how old I am.

And then the valleys stuff impenetrable mists like cotton in my ears. I do not know my age.

I do not mean to complain. They say it is my fault. Nobody tells me anything. Tell me how old I am.

The deepest demarcation can slowly spread and sink like any blurred tattoo. I do not know my age.

Shadows fall down; lights climb. Clambering lights, oh children! you never stay long enough. Tell me how old I am.

Stone wings have sifted here with feathers hardening feathers. The claws are lost somewhere. I do not know my age. I am growing deaf. Bird-calls dribble and the waterfalls go unwiped. What is my age? Tell me how old I am.

Let the moon go hang, the stars go fly their kites. I want to know my age. Tell me how old I am. Spread the literary love

Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said, "Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king— And admirably schooled in every grace: In fine, we thought that he was everything To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light, And went without the meat, and cursed the bread; And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head.

50 Adventures of Isabel by Ogden Nash

Isabel met an enormous bear, Isabel, Isabel, didn't care; The bear was hungry, the bear was ravenous, The bear's big mouth was cruel and cavernous. The bear said, Isabel, glad to meet you, How do, Isabel, now I'll eat you! Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry. Isabel didn't scream or scurry. She washed her hands and she straightened her hair up, Then Isabel quietly ate the bear up. Once in a night as black as pitch Isabel met a wicked old witch. the witch's face was cross and wrinkled, The witch's gums with teeth were sprinkled. Ho, ho, Isabel! the old witch crowed, I'll turn you into an ugly toad! Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry, Isabel didn't scream or scurry, She showed no rage and she showed no rancor, But she turned the witch into milk and drank her. Isabel met a hideous giant, Isabel continued self reliant. The giant was hairy, the giant was horrid, He had one eye in the middle of his forhead. Good morning, Isabel, the giant said, I'll grind your bones to make my bread. Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry, Isabel didn't scream or scurry. She nibled the zwieback that she always fed off, And when it was gone, she cut the giant's head off. Isabel met a troublesome doctor, He punched and he poked till he really shocked her. The doctor's talk was of coughs and chills And the doctor's satchel bulged with pills.

The doctor said unto Isabel, Swallow this, it will make you well. Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry, Isabel didn't scream or scurry. She took those pills from the pill concocter, And Isabel calmly cured the doctor.

52 Piano by D. H. Lawrence

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past. #

Snake by D. H. Lawrence

On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat, A snake came to my water-trough To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree I came down the steps with my pitcher And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough And rested his throat upon the stone bottom, And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness, He sipped with his straight mouth, Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body, Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough, And I, like a second-comer, waiting.

53 He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do, And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do, And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment, And stooped and drank a little more, Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me He must be killed, For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him, How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless, Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured? I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices: If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more That he should seek my hospitality From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken, And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black, Seeming to lick his lips,

54 And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air, And slowly turned his head, And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream, Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole, And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther, A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole, Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after, Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher, I picked up a clumsy log And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him, But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in an undignified haste, Writhed like lightning, and was gone Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front, At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination. And immediately I regretted it. I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act! I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross, And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king, Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords Of life. And I have something to expiate: A pettiness.

Snake by Langston Hughes

He glides so swiftly Back into the grass- Gives me the courtesy of road To let me pass, That I am half ashamed To seek a stone To kill him.

The Unknowable by Philip Levine

Practicing his horn on the Williamsburg Bridge hour after hour, "woodshedding" the musicians called it, but his woodshed was the world.

The enormous tone he borrowed from Hawkins that could fill a club to overflowing blown into tatters by the sea winds teaching him humility, which he carries with him at all times, not as an amulet against the powers of animals and men that mean harm or the lure of the marketplace. No, a quality of gaze downward on the streets of Brooklyn or Manhattan.

Hold his hand and you’ll see it, hold his eyes in yours and you’ll hear the wind singing through the cables of the bridge that was home, singing through his breath -- no rarer than yours, though his became the music of the world thirty years ago. Today I ask myself how he knew the time had come to inhabit the voice of the air and how later he decided the time had come for silence, for the world to speak any way it could? He wouldn’t answer because he’d find the question pompous. He plays for money.

The years pass, and like the rest of us he ages, his hair and beard whiten, the great shoulders narrow. He is merely a man---

After all---a man who stared for years into the breathy unknowable voice of silence and captured the music. #

Won’t You Celebrate with Me by Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.

A Dog was Crying Tonight in Wicklow by Seamus Heaney

When human beings found out about death They sent the dog to Chukwu with a message: They wanted to be let back into the house of life. They didn't want to end up lost forever Like burnt wood disappearing into smoke And ashes that get blown away to nothing. Instead, they saw their souls in a flock at twilight Cawing and headed back for the same old roosts And the same bright airs and wing-stretchings each morning. Death would be like a night spent in the wood: At first light they’d been back in the house of life. (The dog was meant to tell all this to Chukwu). But death and human beings took second place When he trotted off the path and started barking At another dog in broad daylight just barking Back at him from the far bank of a river. And that was how the toad reached Chukwu first, The toad who'd overheard in the beginning What the dog was meant to tell. 'Human beings' he said, (And here the toad was trusted absolutely), 'Human beings want death to last forever.' Then Chukwu saw the people's souls in birds Coming towards him like black spots off the sunset To where there were no roosts or nests or trees And his mind reddened and darkened all at once And nothing that the dog would tell him later Could change that vision. Great chiefs and great loves Obliterating light, the toad in mud, The dog crying out all night behind the corpse house.

After the Winter by Claude McKay

Some day, when trees have shed their leaves And against the morning’s white The shivering birds beneath the eaves Have sheltered for the night, We’ll turn our faces southward, love, Toward the summer isle Where bamboos spire the shafted grove And wide-mouthed orchids smile.

And we will seek the quiet hill Where towers the cotton tree, And leaps the laughing crystal rill, And works the droning bee. And we will build a cottage there Beside an open glade, With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near, And ferns that never fade.

60 In My Craft or Sullen Art by Dylan Thomas

In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages But for the common wages Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart From the raging moon I write On these spindrift pages Nor for the towering dead With their nightingales and psalms But for the lovers, their arms Round the griefs of the ages, Who pay no praise or wages Nor heed my craft or art

Elegy for Fats Waller by Michael Longley (1939 -) Belfast

Lighting up, lest all our hearts should break, His fiftieth cigarette of the day, Happy with so many notes at his beck And call, he sits there taking it away, The maker of immaculate slapstick. With music and with such precise rampage Across the deserts of the blues a trail He blazes, towards the one true mirage, Enormous on a nimble-footed camel And almost refusing to be his age. He plays for hours on end and though there be Oases one part water, two parts gin, He tumbles past to reign, wise and thirsty, At the still centre of his loud dominion - THE SHOOK, THE SHAKE, THE SHEIK OF ARABY.

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

Oysters by Seamus Heaney

Our shells clacked on the plates. My tongue was a filling estuary, My palate hung with starlight: As I tasted the salty Pleiades Orion dipped his foot into the water.

Alive and violated, They lay on their bed of ice: Bivalves: the split bulb And philandering sigh of ocean Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

We had driven to that coast Through flowers and limestone And there we were, toasting friendship, Laying down a perfect memory In the cool of thatch and crockery.

Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow, The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome: I saw damp panniers disgorge The frond-lipped, brine-stung Glut of privilege

And was angry that my trust could not repose In the clear light, like poetry or freedom Leaning in from sea. I ate the day Deliberately, that its tang Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

The Treehouse by James A. Emanuel

To every man His treehouse, A green splice in the humping years, Spartan with narrow cot And prickly door.

To every man His twilight flash Of luminous recall of tiptoe years in leaf-stung flight; of days of squirm and bite that waved antennas through the grass; of nights when every moving thing was girlshaped, expectantly turning.

To every man His house below And his house above— With perilous stairs Between.

“I'm A Jazz Singer,” She Replied by James A. Emanuel

He dug what she said: bright jellies, smooth marmalade spread on warm brown bread.

"Jazz" from drowsy lips orchids lift to honeybees floating on long sips.

"Jazz": quick fingerpops pancake on a griddle-top of memories. Stop.

"Jazz": mysterious as nutmeg, missing fingers, gold, Less serious.

"Jazz": cool bannister. Don't need no stair. Ways to climb when the sax is there. #

The Young Ones, Flip Side

In tight pants, tight skirts, Stretched or squeezed, Youth hurts, Crammed in, bursting out, Flesh will sing And hide its doubt In nervous hips, hopping glance, Usurping rouge, Provoking stance.

Put off, or put on, Youth hurts. And then It's gone.

Touch Me by Stanley Kunitz

“Summer is late, my heart.” Words plucked out of the air some forty years ago when I was wild with love and torn almost in two scatter like leaves this night of whistling wind and rain. It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown. Outdoors all afternoon under a gunmetal sky staking my garden down, I kneeled to the crickets trilling underfoot as if about to burst from their crusty shells; and like a child again marveled to hear so clear and brave a music pour from such a small machine. What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire. The longing for the dance stirs in the buried life. One season only, and it's done. So let the battered old willow thrash against the windowpanes and the house timbers creak. Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.

Veteran's Day by Marie Howe

The boys of summer are climbing the building, splayed dark against the stone, they are using ropes. Climbing together, three of them, in T-shirts and corduroys, hauling each other up, story by story, stopping to speak carefully, deciding direction: who will go first, who will belay, who will wait on the ledge they are leaving, climbing slowly this way, watching each other's sneakers. Years planning, a few missteps admittedly, several mix-ups at bus stations, a few times, the phone ringing, no one there, but now the boy are climbing and together, deliberate as flies. Below them, the doors open. Grownups stumble out, dazed from inside the dark, to watch the boys climbing in the sun, some whistling between their teeth, some grumbling a little. As women, settling on the grass, spread their skirts, the boys test their holds, put, each of them, one foot on the ledge and bounce on their heels to feel the rope pull taut and safe, and they don't look down. Some of the grownups are thinking of calling the police.

The boys of summer climb, stopping now only to rest, pressing their faces flat against the stone to watch each other and wink, wondering how they'll hook up to the fourth floor, where they know there are suddenly windows. The day wanes. It is, after all, November. The dark comes early.

Windows, as the expected, open. Hands grab

68 for their long American legs. The boys, laughing, pull up their feet and stand, watching the fingers crawl on the sill. Some of these hands they almost recognize. Finally, there are sirens, a kind of music. Night falls and the boys climb in the searchlights, practicing for the final ascent. The men directing the beams caressing them with the incredulity boys feel when a fly is caught finally in the fist after a thousand times trying. The grownups bundled into lawn chairs, drink coffee.

The boys hang like spiders and sleep, and all night the lights caress them as the grownups watch. At dawn, the boys of summer rise and climb again.

They are not hungry. They go slower now. There is, between them, something invisible. Forgetting the ropes, they stare at each story with the calculated glances of serious climbers and they believe everything they see. They love each other now, climbing easily, some might say like monkeys, they have forgotten the feel of the earth flat underfoot, climbing like this, into autumn, their working shoulders impossibly beautiful as they squint, shading their eyes with sunburned fists, the crowd, catching on, muttering story after story, as the boys climb, by now, almost a fiction, too high to be seen clearly. But how they glow in their boy's strength and their beauty and their love. What else would we have them do? They were born for this.

They know it. The crowd thickening below them as they scramble finally to the gravelly roof and stand, stretching they still, for one moment before they leap, each of them, or fly, in almost perfect swan dives, and fall like stones, or like boys with the thud of sure premonition to the eventual pavement, buckling, and man-made, that has been waiting all this time, for them, with a deep and perfect gravity.

Marie Howe, "Veteran’s Day" from The Good Thief. 1988

In the Context by George Held

When long waves roll in at Napeague and roil the tidal pools, I feel nature’s force and nature’s balm soothing my wounded body and my troubled mind,

All in the context of Covid-19, the plague upon all houses...

Ah, “coronavirus,” that beautiful poetical word, amphibrach + trochee, a perfect word for free verse, a word that can break any meter the way the virus can break down any human organ—

“Coronavirus” - caress its divine sonic details on the tongue, in the pharynx, the miraculous voice box,

As you murmur the all-consuming word— coronavirus, coronavirus, coronavirus

Malcom X Park by Yvonne

After the urban turmoil of the ’60s summers, Black Oak Park on the western edge of University City in Philadelphia was renamed Malcolm X Park with a bandstand for music, drama, and preachers. In 2019 it became the new focal point for the city’s annual Juneteenth celebrations.

Curbed, a dark bronze matron of the hunt Held in check a wound-up, spike-haired runt In her left fist and in her right—two Docile (one colossal) breeds. A motley crew. “You babysit dogs?” I winked and presumed While rush hour wheels of all sorts zoomed By us, five commoners on foot. “No. All mine.” How multicultural, I thought. Then twelve paws sprang—two clogs in tight pursuit— For the park. Encounters like this uproot Old superstitions: Black folks do this. White Folks do that. No household pooch had we. The bright Heart Mother mourned in her youth’s moody land Died from chicken bones. Some strange evil hand. Grown and wed, she had no scraps to spare. No loss fed. Besides, landlords hated pets. Sometimes, a kid. Once, a park-bound teen, I babysat Sis, terrified. Doberman teeth lunged! I spat, “Is he untied?” Nope. A benched slack rope. His porcelain mistress, Greener grass on her mind, sighed, oblivious. Nevertheless, the park turned with the world. Gone with the wind, bright tiny flowers swirled,

72 Jazz, gospel, hip-hop planted in their place. Supplanted? Well … even the Bard now has space. from Historic Preservation

—from Poets Respond June 21, 2020

______

Yvonne: “I grew up and still live across the street from Malcolm X Park; the incidents in the poem are true and one of many in a verse memoir-in-progress that deals with the micro-aggressions ordinary Black folks experience every day.”

73 Dinosaur Skeleton by Wislawa Szymborska

Beloved Brethren, we have before us an example of incorrect proportions. Behold! the dinosaur's skeleton looms above--

Dear Friends, on the left we see the tail trailing into one infinity, on the right, the neck juts into another--

Esteemed Comrades, in between, four legs that finally mired in the slime beneath this hillock of a trunk--

Gentle Citizens, nature does not err, but it loves its little joke: please note the laughably small head--

Ladies, Gentlemen, a head this size does not have room for foresight, and that is why its owner is extinct--

Honored Dignitaries, a mind too small, an appetite too large, more senseless sleep than prudent apprehension--

Distinguished Guests, we're in far better shape in this regard, life is beautiful and the world is ours--

Venerated Delegation, the starry sky above the thinking reed and moral law within it--

Most Reverend Deputation, such success does not come twice and perhaps beneath this single sun alone--

Inestimable Council, how deft the hands,

74 how eloquent the lips, what a head on these shoulders--

Supremest of Courts, so much responsibility in place of a vanished tail--

75 People on a Bridge by Wislawa Szymborska

A strange planet with its strange people. The yield to time but don’t recognize it. They have ways of expressing their protest. They make pictures, like this one for instance:

At first glance, nothing special. You see water. You see a shore. You see a boat sailing laboriously upstream. You see a bridge over the water and people on the bridge. The people are visibly quickening their step, because a downpour has just started lashing sharply from a dark cloud.

The point is that nothing happens next. The cloud doesn’t change its colour or shape. The rain neither intensifies nor stops. The boat sails on motionless. The people on the bridge run just where they were a moment ago. It’s difficult to avoid remarking here: this isn’t by any means an innocent picture. Here time has been stopped. Its laws have been ignored. It’s been denied influence on developing events. It’s been insulted and spurned.

Thanks to a rebel, a certain Hiroshige Utagawa (a being which as it happens has long since and quite properly passed away) time stumbled and fell.

Maybe this was just a whim of no significance, a freak covering just a pair of galaxies, but we should perhaps add the following:

76 Here it’s considered proper to regard this little picture highly, admire it and thrill to it from age to age.

For some this isn’t enough. They even hear the pouring rain, they feel the cool drops on necks and shoulders, they look at the bridge and the people as if they saw themselves there in the self-same never-finished run along an endless road eternally to be travelled and believe in their impudence that things are really thus.

[trans. Adam Czerniawski]

Ali Baba’s Last Alibi by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

The ducks are sitting pretty today. The sun plays peekaboo. It’s April. I love you like an iron sinking into an iceberg. Hiss.

We know how to pump bliss. How to praise our circumstance. You bring me tea and hyacinths. A fallen angel bakes us a cake.

I must arise and go now to meet the Voidoids in the past where a routine became a route and a ghost became a guest.

Flip your turn signal on, babe. Make a right to find what is left. #

Nonsense Hotline by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

Languishing in the Department of Anguish Tuesday spins, tipsy on its tilted axis Trump Stumps in Battleground States Blessed are the hungry, for they feed truth Black beans with epazote and beet greens Dream I cut into the buffet line Free Leonard Peltier Day Squatters’ Rights Day Spoiler Alert vs Trigger Warming Shelf life of a burning heart Alphabet soup on afternoon’s mustache Trap your inner sun, earth links Fog wraps silver rags around time’s neck The rest of us surging to bumrush the clock

78 Ali Baba’s Last Alibi by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

The ducks are sitting pretty today. The sun plays peekaboo. It’s April. I love you like an iron sinking into an iceberg. Hiss.

We know how to pump bliss. How to praise our circumstance. You bring me tea and hyacinths. A fallen angel bakes us a cake.

I must arise and go now to meet the Voidoids in the past where a routine became a route and a ghost became a guest.

Flip your turn signal on, babe. Make a right to find what is left.

Homecoming by Erich Fried (1921-1988)

What have you seen? A king on a heath in a storm

What have you seen? A child in the well, its mother at a dance

What else have you seen? Bodies fattened with hunger

What else have you seen? A cloud on a town

Who was powerful? The king was powerful with impotence The child was mighty in its mother The dance was mighty in the tavern beside the well The hunger was mighty in its fattened bodies The storm was mighty, the cloud and its town

Which of them do you love? The king, the storm and the heath the child and the mother the bodies fattened by hunger the well, the tavern, the dance the cloud and its town

Good: you can die.

80 The Execution by E. Fried

Three trees were found guilty by court of law of providing shelter with their leaves to the strangers

The verdict was executed in front of the gathered people the children at the front with their teachers according to school

The trees were first robbed of their leaves then hung by their branches so they swung when the wind came

The children sang the song about sylvan solitude and pressed leaves in textbooks as a warning

Hurrying to Mount Rushmore by Philip Fried

The President will be hurrying to Mount Rushmore for Independence Day to pose with chin uplifted nobly as he gazes, squinting and far-seeing, so he can be carved in fine- grained granite (quick cooling, part of a great mass of molten rock that rose like an age-old grievance from deep within earth's crust) that abuts in the memorial other metamorphic rocks to form geologic unconformities apparent today on the surface. In the Precambrian before the advent of life, what is now western South Dakota was then close to the edge of the sea, and because there was no vegetation to check erosion, erosive forces acted more quickly, washing sand and clay down into that shallow sea where these metamorphic rocks began formation as sediments, and here in this instant of time, we imagine the soon-to-be immortalized one already in stone, chin lofted and gazing above our heads of skin and bone at some distant future when the seas might rise again.

To Know Thyself ... by Philip Fried

The unquantified life is not worth living. My pedometer tallies the 10K daily steps I take as I strive to keep fit in my apartment, and tracks calories burned and food intake, leveraging my cell phone's power. Meanwhile my heart rate checker app built into my fitness wearables captures the ebb and flow of my blood, optimizing my cardio workout. I am known, safe, and accounted for, and 24/7 reports on TV update me on the virus's progress, with morbidity and mortality by state, and on the varying curve whether surging up or flattening. I circumscribe the outbreak with numbers (though sometimes the blur of a victim's face, suffering disease and cure, appears atop a crumpled sheet). Per the statistics, I'm well-briefed.

83 Leaving Vermont, Late Fall by Neil Shepard

Nervous breakdown. Left the hoe-down. Left the hay bales, kale and Brussel Sprouts. Left the apples’

Frozen spoils, corvids coring them With smart, sharp beaks, scattering Apple-pulp to the brook-trout.

Drove through the scarped Greens, Body deep in the stuff of home, dry As bone, granite. Drove away.

Spun roulette wheels beneath a chassis, Swerved with city-smarts, on the verge Of migraine, pain of

What’s shed, what’s housed, what’s had. Arrived with the verve of someone Auditioning Broadway

For a bit part in anonymity, And dowsing for the downside of fortune Found a walk along the Hudson

Bracing. Found the stiff admixture Of freshwater undercut by brackishness, Brash Atlantic overwriting

Every tributary with a local name, Erasing any trace of home, replacing It with one vast abrasive.

Big Winds by Neil Shepard

Big winds in the back pasture this morning. Must have blown in from that dark bluster in Ohio where the orange-haired dystopian shouted himself red: a nation broken, and only himself with enough narcissistic moxie to fix it. What would he fix? Short, as always, on specifics. But the fix, so far, fixates on anyone who crosses him. In short, big winds blow from the small mind of a bully who charges every flagging patch of red. And half the nation’s ready to blow in his blowhard direction. They’re small children who want a power-daddy to fix what’s broke. And the big winds in the back pasture presage afternoon thunderstorms and a dome of hot air crushing down on us that feels like the beginning of intolerable conditions. A whole summer and autumn of unbearable heat, which will roast the air to record highs. If there’s a weather god today, he’s a strongman. All those grass-heads below are dried-out, hollow, blown in one direction: his. The one turkey wading through them is the steadiest creature in the field, flattening the unthinking reeds, feeding as it needs, and popping out onto lawn, finally, like a reality TV star to shake off its crown of fluff and seed, and now I see he’s no turkey, he’s a red-faced turkey vulture, perfect for the clean-up work to come.

July 2016. Johnson, Vermont

Love Song by Dorothy Parker

My own dear love, he is strong and bold And he cares not what comes after. His words ring sweet as a chime of gold, And his eyes are lit with laughter. He is jubilant as a flag unfurled— Oh, a girl, she’d not forget him. My own dear love, he is all my world,— And I wish I’d never met him.

My love, he’s mad, and my love, he’s fleet, And a wild young wood-thing bore him! The ways are fair to his roaming feet, And the skies are sunlit for him. As sharply sweet to my heart he seems As the fragrance of acacia. My own dear love, he is all my dreams,— And I wish he were in Asia.

My love runs by like a day in June, And he makes no friends of sorrows. He’ll tread his galloping rigadoon In the pathway of the morrows. He’ll live his days where the sunbeams start, Nor could storm or wind uproot him. My own dear love, he is all my heart,— And I wish somebody’d shoot him.

86 Query by Robert Burr

The light came in upon you while I read a page or two and wrote enough to fill a sheet torn off the hotel notepad. Still, the way it crossed your leg, your hip, your head, then continued with a gentle pulse to spread itself, as though its source above the sill, below the blind, a bright square hole, might spill forever, got me up from my own bed. Like a voyeur from some peep-holed realm, I thought but felt quite differently, in fact. What rocks or sways the mind to find such fiction where there’s no intent to startle or to scare? That morning early, while you slept, I taught myself merely to be a camera box. #

"Delta Makes Landfall" by Robert Burr

The Big Scare – lost in prayer. The grounded sea birds have folded their wings and huddle to watch. Nothing over this wind sings (they seem to be thinking) or holds back a wave from its rock. Abruptly, the observer turns and rolls off, slushing through a watery path.

87 Table by Richard Tillinghast from the Turkish of Edip Cansever

A man filled with the gladness of living Put his keys on the table, Put flowers in a copper bowl there. He put his eggs and milk on the table. He put there the light that came in through the window, Sounds of a bicycle, sound of a spinning wheel. The softness of bread and weather he put there. On the table the man put Things that happened in his mind. What he wanted to do in life, He put that there. Those he loved, those he didn't love, The man put them on the table too. Three times three make nine: The man put nine on the table. He was next to the window next to the sky; He reached out and placed on the table endlessness. So many days he had wanted to drink a beer! He put on the table the pouring of that beer. He placed there his sleep and his wakefulness; His hunger and his fullness he placed there. Now that's what I call a table! It didn't complain at all about the load. It wobbled once or twice, then stood firm. The man kept piling things on.

88 Perhaps the World Ends Here by Joy Harjo (1951 -)

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

89 Mingus at the Showplace by William Matthews

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that was how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar, casting beer money from a thin reel of ones, the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy.

And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two other things, but they were wrong, as it happened.

So I made him look at the poem. “There’s a lot of that going around,” he said, and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He laughed amiably. He didn’t look as if he thought bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do. If they were baseball executives they’d plot to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game could be saved from children. Of course later that night he fired his pianist in mid-number and flurried him from the stand.

“We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,” he explained, and the band played on.

The Wind That Blows Through Me by Alicia Ostriker

I feel the hand of God inside my hand when I write said the old woman I am blown away like a hat I swear God's needy hand is inside every atom waving at us hoping we'll wave back

Sometimes I feel the presence of the goddess inside me said the dark red tulip and sometimes I see her waltzing in the world around me skirts flying though everything looks still

It doesn't matter whether you call the thing God or goddess those are only words said the dog panting after a run through the park and a sprint after a squirrel theology is bunk but the springtime wind is real