Poem for 4/29/22 - Yiddishland by Erika Meitner

 Yiddishland

BY ERIKA MEITNER

The people who sang to their children in Yiddish and worked in Yiddish

and made love in Yiddish are nearly all gone. Phantasmic. Heym.

Der may kumt shoyn on. The month of May has arrived. At the cemetery

my aunt has already draped my grandmother's half of the tombstone

with a white sheet. The fabric is tacked to the polished granite

by gray and brown rocks lifted from my grandfather's side of the plot.

He's been gone over twenty-five years. We are in Beth Israel Cemetery,

Block 50, Woodbridge, New Jersey for the unveiling and the sky is like lead.

We are in my grandmother's shtetl in Poland, but everyone is dead.

The Fraternal Order of Bendin-Sosnowicer Sick & Benevolent Society

has kept these plots faithfully next to their Holocaust memorial—

gray stone archway topped with a menorah and a curse: Pour out Thy wrath

upon the Nazis and the wicked Germans for they have destroyed the seed of Jacob.

May the almighty avenge their blood. Great is our sorrow, and no consolation is to be found!

My sister, in her cardboard kippah, opens her prayer book—a special edition

she borrowed from rabbinical school—and begins to read in Aramaic.

Not one of us can bring ourselves to add anything to the fixed liturgy.

My son is squatting at the next grave over, collecting decorative stones

from the Glickstein's double plot. We eat yellow sponge cake and drink

small cups of brandy to celebrate my grandmother's life. We are no longer mourners,

says Jewish law. Can we tell this story in Yiddish? Put the words in the right places?

My son cracks a plastic cup until it's shredded to strips, looks like a clear spider,

sounds like an error. When my sister finally pulls back the sheet, all the things

my grandmother was barely fit on the face of the marker. A year ago at the funeral,

her friend Goldie told me she was strong like steel, soft like butter—women like that

they don't make any more. My mother tries to show my grandmother—now this gray marker—

my son, how he's grown, but he squirms from her arms. Ihr gvure iz nit tzu beshraiben.

Her strength was beyond description. The people who sang to their children in Yiddish

and admonished them in Yiddish are nearly all gone, whole vanished towns that exist now

only in books, their maps drawn entirely by heart: this unknown continent, this language

of nowhere, these stones from a land that never was. Der may kumt shoyn on.

The month of May has arrived. Der vind voyet. The wind howls,

says I'm not a stranger anywhere. On the stones we write all we remember,

but we are poor guardians of memory. Can you say it in Yiddish? Can you bless us?

 

Erika Meitner, "Yiddishland" from Copia. Copyright © 2014 by Erika Meitner.  Reprinted by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.

Poem for 4/28/22 - A Noiseless Patient Spider by Walt Whitman

 A Noiseless Patient Spider

BY WALT WHITMAN

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.

Poem for 4/26/22 - Romantics BY LISEL MUELLER

Romantics

BY LISEL MUELLER

Johannes Brahms and                                 
        Clara Schumann

The modern biographers worry

“how far it went,” their tender friendship.

They wonder just what it means

when he writes he thinks of her constantly,

his guardian angel, beloved friend.

The modern biographers ask

the rude, irrelevant question

of our age, as if the event

of two bodies meshing together

establishes the degree of love,

forgetting how softly Eros walked

in the nineteenth-century, how a hand

held overlong or a gaze anchored

in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,

and nuances of address not known

in our egalitarian language

could make the redolent air

tremble and shimmer with the heat

of possibility. Each time I hear

the Intermezzi, sad

and lavish in their tenderness,

I imagine the two of them

sitting in a garden

among late-blooming roses

and dark cascades of leaves,

letting the landscape speak for them,

leaving us nothing to overhear.

Lisel Mueller, “Romantics” from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller. 

Poem for 4/25/22 - Fund Drive BY TERRI KIRBY ERICKSON

 Fund Drive

BY TERRI KIRBY ERICKSON

She could be a Norman Rockwell painting,

the small girl on my front porch with her eager

face, her wind-burned cheeks red as cherries.

Her father waits by the curb, ready to rescue

his child should danger threaten, his shadow

reaching halfway across the yard. I take the

booklet from the girl's outstretched hand,

peruse the color photos of candy bars and

caramel-coated popcorn, pretend to read it.

I have no use for what she's selling, but I

can count the freckles on her nose, the scars

like fat worms on knobby knees that ought

to be covered on a cold day like this, when

the wind is blowing and the trees are losing

their grip on the last of their leaves. I'll take

two of these and one of those, I say, pointing,

thinking I won't eat them, but I probably will.

It's worth the coming calories to see her joy,

how hard she works to spell my name right,

taking down my information. Then she turns

and gives a thumbs-up sign to her father, who

grins like an outfielder to whom the ball has

finally come—his heart like a glove, opening.

Poem copyright ©2017 by Terri Kirby Erickson from Becoming the Blue Heron, (Press 53, 2017).

Poem for 4/21/22 - homage to my hips by Lucille Clifton

 Lucille Clifton

homage to my hips (1987)

these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,   
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!

Poem for 4/20/22 - Love is not all (Sonnet XXX) by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all (Sonnet XXX)

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would. 

                                                                    - 1931

Poem for 4/19/22 - [since feeling is first] by e. e. cummings

 

[since feeling is first]

e.e. cummings

since feeling is first who pays any attention  to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you; wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate  than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry —the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids’ flutter which says we are for each other: then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life’s not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on April 16, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poem for 4/18/22 - Relax - by Ellen Bass

 

Relax

Ellen Bass

Bad things are going to happen.

Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
Your husband will sleep
with a girl your daughter’s age, her breasts spilling
out of her blouse. Or your wife
will remember she’s a lesbian
and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat—
the one you never really liked—will contract a disease
that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth
every four hours. Your parents will die.
No matter how many vitamins you take,
how much Pilates, you’ll lose your keys,
your hair and your memory. If your daughter
doesn’t plug her heart
into every live socket she passes,
you’ll come home to find your son has emptied
the refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,
and called the used appliance store for a pick up—drug money.
There’s a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.
When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
and climbs half way down. But there’s also a tiger below.
And two mice—one white, one black—scurry out
and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point
she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.
So here’s the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you’ll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You’ll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.

"Relax" from Like a Beggar. Copyright © 2014 by Ellen Bass. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Poem for 4/14/22 - In Praise of Self-Deprecation by Wislawa Szymborska

 In Praise of Self-Deprecation

by Wislawa Szymborska

The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.
Scruples are alien to the black panther.
Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.
The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.

The self-critical jackal does not exist.
The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly
live as they live and are glad of it.

The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilos
but in other respects it is light.

There is nothing more animal-like
than a clear conscience
on the third planet of the Sun.

Poem for 4/13/22 - Mr. Chairman Takes His Leave by Rosemary Catacalos

Mr. Chairman Takes His Leave

Rosemary Catacalos

As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles. —Walt Whitman   en memoria William Rashall Sinkin, 1913–2014    Whitman, you once told me, is democracy on the page, messy  and imperfect as we are in real life, which gave you hope  that we would one day make real life true democracy, ripe blossom, pollen dusting every moment and person, each scampering mote of light.  This is why as you lay dying, I read “I Hear America Singing” and knew you heard every word and could feel my hand on yours  though you were already moving toward other miracles than this life. A sunflower followed your motion and a yellow dog stood guard.  You, who lived the notion that the sun belongs to each and every one, beggars, dreamers, kings, all. You who believed banks could have hearts,  for god’s sake! You have left it to us, messy and imperfect as we are and will be, to keep to the work side by side  and as long as it takes, all the while singing of miracles just as Whitman and you taught us to do. Meanwhile, you  were last seen wearing blue-plaid pajamas, a contrasting blue-plaid bow tie, and surrounded by hummingbirds.  Hummingbirds leave Texas in early February, migrating north to make new lives. The angle of the sun tells them precisely when  to take their leave. They arrive thousands of miles away in mid-May, about the time of your birthday. A sunflower  follows your motion. The yellow dog stands guard.

Copyright © 2022 by Rosemary Catacalos. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 13, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poem for 4/12/22 - Late Fermata by Jenny Browne

 

Late Fermata

Jenny Browne

On what would turn out to be Katie’s last good day she asked to be wheeled outside & helped into the Lazyboy her brother dragged out back no one even bothering to remove the tag from Costco that flapped, wild as a trapped bird  before the wind surrendered to a thin cardigan of mid-December sun as all afternoon we watched her sleeping while the sky hemorrhaged quietly down & the small hills of dogshit arranged along the graying cedar fence did not blaze into anything like golden stones, but her hair had grown back a half inch or so & so glowed in the last of that tinny glare & if I thought briefly then of medieval manuscripts where everyone important grows a halo it wasn't quite like that either although the bones of her face did appear as if at low tide to surface smooth as driftwood where the injured bird might light in the moonlight, holding on for some measures longer than expected.

Poem for 4/7/22 - from "Sand and Foam" by Kahlil Gibran

 

from “Sand and Foam”

Kahlil Gibran

Once I filled my hand with mist. Then I opened it and lo, the mist was a worm. And I closed and opened my hand again, and behold there was a bird. And again I closed and opened my hand, and in its hollow stood a man with a          sad face, turned upward. And again I closed my hand, and when I opened it there was naught but mist. But I heard a song of exceeding sweetness.

Poem for 4/6/22 - Ruth, What is Happiness? - by Yehuda Amichai

 Ruth, What Is Happiness?

by Yehuda Amichai

Ruth, what is happiness? We should have

talked about it, but we didn't.

The efforts we make to look happy

drain our strength, as from tired soil.

Let's go home. To different homes.

"And in case we don't see each other anymore."

Your bag slung over your shoulder

made you an efficient wanderer,

unbalanced but with bright eyes.

When the wind, lifting clouds,

will lift my heart as well and

bring it to another place--

that's true happiness.

"And in case we don't see each other anymore."

Poem for 4/5/22 - Ars Poetica #100: I Believe by Elizabeth Alexander

 Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

BY ELIZABETH ALEXANDER

Poetry, I tell my students,

is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves

(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”),

digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,

emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find

in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God

in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.

Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,

and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)

is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

Elizabeth Alexander, “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe” from American Sublime. Copyright © 2005 by Elizabeth Alexander. 

Poem for 4/4/22 - Two Poems on Biblical Themes by Lucille Clifton

 

Lucille Clifton

sarah's promise 

who understands better than i
the hunger in old bones
for a son? so here we are
abraham with his faith
and i my fury. jehovah,
i march into the thicket
of your need and promise you
the children of young women,
yours fora  thousand years.
their faith will send them to you,
docile as abraham. now,
speak to my husband.
spare me my one good boy.

naomi watches as ruth sleeps

she clings to me

like a shadow

when all that i wish

is to sit alone

longing for my husband,

my sons.

she has promised

to follow me,

to become me

if i allow it.

i am leading her

to boaz country.

he will find her beautiful

and place her among

his concubines.

jehovah willing

i can grieve in peace.

The Book of Lights, Copper Canyon Press, 1992