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.