Poem for 3/8/23 - [Dog Is a Way of Thinking] by Magdalena Zurawski

 

[Dog Is a Way of Thinking] (from the NY Times Magazine)

By Magdalena Zurawski

My language, which likes
to prove I am not

alone, wants
to talk to me again
today. It’s

telling me, Don’t
forget: you want
to be less like Homer and
not at all like Milton, but
more like your dog. Your
dog, my language
says, knows things are
there, doesn’t want
blindness to see
a world, only a nose
to know what’s
knocking now, who’s on
her way home. There’s
no yesterday.

Your dog, if he could
talk, my language tells
me, would, every
day, like a radio,
catch an air wave and
say, “Today. ... ”

Poem for 3/7/23 - Bears by Adrienne Cecile Rich

Bears

by Adrienne Cecile Rich

Wonderful bears that walked my room all night,
Where have you gone, your sleek and fairy fur,
Your eyes' veiled and imperious light?

Brown bears as rich as mocha or as musk,
White opalescent bears whose fur stood out
Electric in the deepening dusk,

And great black bears that seemed more blue than black,
More violet than blue against the dark­ ­—
Where are you now? Upon what track

Mutter your muffled paws that used to tread
So softly, surely, up the creakless stair
While I lay listening in bed?

When did I lose you? Whose have you become?
Why do I wait and wait and never hear
Your thick nocturnal pacing in my room?
My bears, who keeps you now, in pride and fear?

Poem for 3/2/23 - They tear down my family home by Iman Mersal

Thank you to Michal Goldman for turning me on to Iman Mersal's poetry. I was able to attend a reading at Brookline Booksmith last week, at which Iman read this poem in Arabic, followed by a friend who read the translation by Robin Creswell.

They tear down my family home

by Iman Mersal, translated by Robin Creswell

As if sledgehammers weren't enough
the demolition men use their hands

to tear down the window jinn used to flit through 

and with a kick the back door is gone. Its memory is gone.

Underfoot I feel the remains of the sugarloaves, oranges, and mangoes

our furtive visitors hid under their black shawls.

They would come after evening prayer, the hems of their long gallabiyas

brushing across the threshold of the back door, 

a door of gifts and sorceresses, now a door to nowhere.

The roof that never protected my childhood from the delta rains 

has reverted to its old self--a few trees you can count on one hand.

Now they're tearing down her old bedroom, casting into the air 

strands of her still-wet hair, hair that flies up from the cracks 

of earthen walls about to become clods of dirt, 

as if no one had ever rested their back there.

Did my mother bathe before bed or at dawn?

Did she pull her hair from the comb's teeth to ward off 

the evil eye, or fire, or the stratagems of neighbors?

My mother's hair slips away like a gift, or retribution.

What ties me to her now?

I donated her dresses to charity because they didn't fit me.

If we met, I'd be her older sister.

What ties me to her now?

Her womb is with her in the ground--there 

under the camphor tree, where early death is close enough to touch with your hand.

Poem for 3/1/23 - [love is more thicker than forget] by e. e. cummings

[love is more thicker than forget]

by e. e. cummings

love is more thicker than forget

more thinner than recall

more seldom than a wave is wet

more frequent than to fail

it is most mad and moonly

and less it shall unbe

than all the sea which only

is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win

less never than alive

less bigger than the least begin

less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly

and more it cannot die

than all the sky which only

is higher than the sky

E.E. Cummings, “[love is more thicker than forget]” from Complete Poems 1904-1962, edited by George J

Two Poems for 2/28/23 - A Certain Slant of Sunlight by Ted Berrigan and There's a Certain Slant of Light by Emily Dickinson

A Certain Slant of Sunlight

Ted Berrigan - 1934-1983

In Africa the wine is cheap, and it is
on St. Mark’s Place too, beneath a white moon.
I’ll go there tomorrow, dark bulk hooded
against what is hurled down at me in my no hat
which is weather: the tall pretty girl in the print dress
under the fur collar of her cloth coat will be standing
by the wire fence where the wild flowers grow not too tall
her eyes will be deep brown and her hair styled 1941 American
      will be too; but
I’ll be shattered by then
But now I’m not and can also picture white clouds
impossibly high in blue sky over small boy heartbroken
to be dressed in black knickers, black coat, white shirt,
      buster-brown collar, flowing black bow-tie
her hand lightly fallen on his shoulder, faded sunlight falling
across the picture, mother & son, 33 & 7, First Communion Day, 1941—
I’ll go out for a drink with one of my demons tonight
they are dry in Colorado 1980 spring snow. 

There's a certain Slant of light, (320)
BY EMILY DICKINSON
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –
'Tis the seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –

Poem for 2/27/23 - FREDERICK DOUGLASS by Robert Hayden

From Betsy Aron, who recommended this poem: 

Robert Hayden (1913-1980) - born in Detroit, taught at Fisk, his 1963 collection A Ballad of Remembrance received the Grand Prize at the World Festival of Negro Arts. He called his work “a form of prayer—prayer of illumination, perfection.”

FREDERICK DOUGLASS (listen to Robert Hayden discuss and read this poem here)

Robert Hayden

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,   

usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,   

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,   

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more   

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:   

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro   

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world   

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,   

this man, superb in love and logic, this man   

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,   

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives   

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

Poem for 2/23/23 - Two Poems by Marge Piercy

Two Poems by Marge Piercy
 

Erasure

Falling out of love

is a rusty chain going quickly through a winch.

It hurts more than you will remember.

It costs a pint of blood turned grey 

and burning out a few high paths 

among the glittering synapses of the brain, 

a few stars fading out at once in the galaxy, 

a configuration gone

imagination called a lion or a dragon or a sunburst 

that would photograph more like a blurry mouse.

When falling out of love is correcting vision 

light grates on the eyes

light files the optic nerve hot and raw.

To find you have loved a coward and a fool 

is to give up the lion, the dragon, the sunburst 

and take away your hands covered with small festering bites 

and let the mouse go in a grey blur 

into the baseboard.

The Morning Half-Life Blues

Girls buck the wind in the grooves toward work
in fuzzy coats promised to be warm as fur.
The shop windows snicker
flashing them hurrying over dresses they cannot afford:
you are not pretty enough, not pretty enough.

Blown with yesterday’s papers through the boiled coffee morning
we dream of the stop on the subway without a name,
the door in the heart of the grove of skyscrapers,
that garden where we nestle to the teats of a furry world,
lie in mounds of peony eating grapes,
and need barter ourselves for nothing.
not by the hour, not by the pound, not by the skinful,
that party to which no one will give or sell us the key
though we have all thought briefly we found it
drunk or in bed.

Black girls with thin legs and high necks stalking like herons,
plump girls with blue legs and green eyelids and
strawberry breasts,
swept off to be frozen in fluorescent cubes,
the vacuum of your jobs sucks your brains dry
and fills you with the ooze of melted comics.
Living is later. This is your rented death.
You grasp at hard commodities and vague lusts
to make up, to pay for each day
which opens like a can and is empty, and then another,
afternoons like dinosaur eggs stuffed with glue.

Girls of the dirty morning, ticketed and spent,
you will be less at forty than at twenty.
Your living is a waste product of somebody’s mill.
I would fix you like buds to a city where people work
to make and do things necessary and good,
where work is real as bread and babies and trees in parks
where we would all blossom slowly and ripen to sound fruit.