Tag: poetry

I want to burn with passion, not regret

After All This
by Richard Jackson

After all this love, after the birds rip like scissors
through the morning sky, after we leave, when the empty
bed appears like a collapsed galaxy, or the wake of
disturbed air behind a plane, after that, as the wind turns
to stone, as the leaves shriek, you are still breathing
inside my own breath. The lighthouse on the far point
still sweeps away the darkness with the brush of an arm.
The tides inside your heart still pull me towards you.
After all this, what are these words but mollusk shells
a child plays with? What could say more than the eloquence
of last night’s constellations? or the storm anchored by
its own flashes behind the far mountains? I remember
the way your body wavers under my touch like the northern
lights. After all this, I want the certainty of hidden roots
spreading in all directions from their tree. I want to hear
again the sky tangled in your voice. Some nights I can
hear the footsteps of the stars. How can these words
ever reveal the secret that waits in their sleeping light?
The words that walk through my mind say only what has
already passed. Beyond, the swallows are still knitting
the wind. After a while, the smokebush will turn to fire.
After a while, the thin moon will grow like a tear in a curtain.
Under it, a small boy kicks a ball against the wall of
a burned out house. He is too young to remember the war.
He hardly knows the emptiness that kindles around him.
He can speak the language of early birds outside our window.
Someday he will know this kind of love that changes
the color of the sky, and frees the earth from its moorings.
Sometimes I kiss your eyes to see beyond what I can imagine.
Sometimes I think I can speak the language of unborn stars.
I think the whole earth breathes with you. After all this,
these words are all I have to say what is impossible to think,
what shy dreams hide in the rafters of my heart, because
these words are only a form of touch, only tell you I have no life
that isn’t yours, and no death you couldn’t turn into a life.

the locked tiger they can’t lock up

For What Binds Us
By Jane Hirshfield

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There’s a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

failing social darwinism


via themythicalman

Today is the first day of the year 5772. I wish I felt more hopeful.

Returning from Seattle, I looked out at the crescent of water visible from the highway near the border to see the the skies over the southern, U.S. shore a bright, joyful blue, (flooded with the scent of flowers when we drove through it), but fading northward until over Canada was silver, all gray and bleak and rain. It felt too pat, too apt a metaphor to be real, yet there it was, undeniable, painted in uncanny symmetry.

There were no apples in honey for me this year. Instead I dropped some sweetness off at a doorway up the street and stayed home, cleaning my room, unpacking from my trip, putting more aside to sell. I may have returned to familiar surroundings, yet this doesn’t feel like home. Everything is drenched in stress. Unemployment, lack of rent, debts and bills I can do nothing about. One of the cats broke her tail in my absence, no idea how, but because we don’t have money enough for a vet, it has gone unexamined, except by my inexpert fingers. I hope she isn’t in much pain. Meanwhile, the first of the month looms, a darker shadow every day. David is unemployed now, too, as the bookstore chain he worked for is closing down their shops, and my welfare cheque is being held, as I am due for an audit, so our finances are in an even worse state than before. Even so, I am considering quitting welfare, as a way to alleviate some of the depression. Fighting the world without a net is harsh, but independence is worth more than security.

and so I step to night

Evening
by Rainer Maria Rilke

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.

a memoir

When You Are Old
by Spencer Gordon

Life is a long time grieving, especially the first time. The second time you try, and it’s all right, there’s less tears; it’s a reunion you never thought would happen. Then the call comes back: the hard line in the head that said

don’t kiss, don’t dance, don’t do that. And even drinking is easier, somehow, like each sip was watered down with berries and pills and ice. You never dreamed it would be so easy. But this is your second time around,

and you’re used to feeling used, and you want to see the people you thought were gone for good, and so you lean toward the fat neck beside you, and you say kiss me darling, I’m back for you, and you alone, and the trees

aren’t sad, are they? The air is a calm mourner, you say; it doesn’t need a wake to drink at. It doesn’t need friends or family. You’re like the wind, you think. You don’t need a friend. You don’t need another life. And so it ends.

I wish I remembered what it’s like to be happy

A Hand
by Jane Hirshfield

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.

Nor is it palm and knuckles,
not ligaments or the fat’s yellow pillow,
not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.

A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines
with their infinite dramas,
nor what it has written,
not on the page,
not on the ecstatic body.

Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping—
not sponge of rising yeast-bread,
not rotor pin’s smoothness,
not ink.

The maple’s green hands do not cup
the proliferant rain.
What empties itself falls into the place that is open.

A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.

Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.

yesterday I danced in the rain

The Mother Writes to the Murderer: A Letter
by Naomi Shihab Nye

To you whose brain is a blunt fist
pushed deep inside your skull
whose eyes are empty bullets
whose mouth is a stone more speechless
than lost stones at the bottoms of rivers
who lives in a shrunken world where nothing blooms
and no promise is ever kept

To you whose face I never saw but now see
everywhere the rest of my life

You don’t know where she hid her buttons

arranged in families by color or size
tissue-wrapped in an oatmeal box
how she told them goodnight sleep well
and never felt ashamed

You don’t know her favorite word
and I won’t tell you

You don’t have her drawings taped to your refrigerator
blue circuses, red farms
You don’t know she cried once in a field of cows
saying they were too beautiful to eat

I’m sure you never thought of that
I’m sure nothing is too beautiful for you to eat

You have no idea what our last words were to one another
how terribly casual
because I thought she was going a block away
with her brother to the store
They would be back in ten minutes

I was ironing her dress
while two houses away an impossible darkness
rose up around my little girl

What can I wish you in return?
I was thinking knives and pistols
high voltages searing off your nerves
I was wishing you could lose your own life
bit by bit finger by toe
and know what my house is like

how many doors I still will have to open

Maybe worse would be for you to love something
and have it snatched up sifted out of your sight
for what reason?
a flurry of angels recalled to heaven
and then see how you sit
and move and remember
how you sleep at night
how you feel about mail my letter to you
all the letters passing through all the hands
of the people on earth
when the only one that matters
is the one you can neither receive
nor send

do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again.

‘You don’t seem to understand, sir,’ the worthy Lyon, my teacher, used to often say to me, ‘that certain words are made to go with others; between them there exist certain relationships that must not be changed.’

‘I can’t help it, dear teacher, but for words too I am a firm believer in the virtue of bad company.’

André Gide, 1911

Under the surface of the conversation lives another set of words, ur-homonyms, post post modern, the secret referential dialect of poetry birds, blue and gray, alike in species, but not in feather, the language an echo of captured ghosts. We are eye contact, insinuation, the rhythm and flow of a secret river covered over. He fiddles with his phone, pulls up a memory, a beautiful mention of jewelry and bones, and unobtrusively places it on my side of the table, the better to keep it between ourselves, the better not to interrupt. It is the best sort of message – silent, apt, instantly understood – spun from the fearless perfection of falling stars. It was confirmation of an unlikely truth, a gesture clear and unmistakable, almost but not quite an apology. We had thought ourselves as solid as stone, but then we crumbled like plaster under rain, our gestures blurred, our voices unheard and stolen by a sudden, dangerous misunderstanding. It was terrible, ragged and abrupt. We became a fire guttering, giving off no warmth and even less light, but this, I thought, looking up to meet his meaning, and its depths, it justifies what came before, this is why I thought it was safe, and why I will again.

Canadian Olympics Poet Shane Koyczan adds his voice to ShitHarperDid.com

“Wasted Vote” by Shane Koyczan

Shane Koyczan and the Short Story Long have come out with a haunting new track just in time for the May 2nd polls,
reminding people that there’s no such thing as a wasted vote, only a wasted election.

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