This poem is in the public domain.
white-throat sparrows/full of note/netted in the eventide/voices sawing the trees/fragile little bodies/tracing frantic circles not understanding/what we must all come to accept/not one day will last/we must end ourselves/as gently as we can take our swords/our facts/oddments of feather turn them into the dark/she takes us as we are windswept/awake with shattering & nothing is as loud as her arms pulling us close/not even these wings landing/forever in the nests of my ears
Copyright © 2017 by Mariama J. Lockington. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 13, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
A man can’t die where there is no earth because there will be no place to bury him. His body is the sky and understands the language of birds. His body says the earth is made of everything that has fallen from Heaven while no one was looking. He promises to defy gravity and then return home. A man can’t reach for the sky and not feel he is falling. It goes on forever and the birds talk about the awesomeness of flight while the oxen labor in the fields, while the cows eat grass and dream of slaughter. A man can’t talk about flight because one day, there will be no sky, just the body covered in earth. And now the sky is empty of birds. And now the earth is covered in flowers.
Copyright © 2017 by W. Todd Kaneko. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 14, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
—for a sixty-seven-pound nugget of Lake Superior copper
found in an Iowa cornfield
Before the earliest flute
was carved from a vulture’s wing,
before we—what few we were—
bowed to the moon,
the balmy, secular night,
you were coming.
Snug in the great throat of a glacier.
Still as a wish, until its sighing end.
I like to think you waited years
for us, one shoulder greening in the damp,
the other burnished by long leaves
of wheat, before we called it wheat.
Or was it loess, the wind’s fine veil,
polished you so bright we would know you at first sight?
What have you seen in the ice and the earth?
Is hell cold, or hot?
Do you pray, too? And to what god?
Or whale, or bigger rock?
Copyright © 2017 by Megan Levad. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 15, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
My river was once unseparated. Was Colorado. Red-
fast flood. Able to take
anything it could wet—in a wild rush—
all the way to Mexico.
Now it is shattered by fifteen dams
over one-thousand four-hundred and fifty miles,
pipes and pumps filling
swimming pools and sprinklers
in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
To save our fish, we lifted them from our skeletoned river beds,
loosed them in our heavens, set them aster —
‘Achii ‘ahan, Mojave salmon,
Colorado pikeminnow—
Up there they glide, gilled with stars.
You see them now—
god-large, gold-green sides,
moon-white belly and breast—
making their great speeded way across the darkest hours,
rippling the sapphired sky-water into a galaxy road.
The blurred wake they drag as they make their path
through the night sky is called
‘Achii ‘ahan nyuunye—
our words for Milky Way.
Coyote too is up there, crouched in the moon,
after his failed attempt to leap it, fishing net wet
and empty, slung over his back—
a prisoner blue and dreaming
of unzipping the salmon’s silked skins with his teeth.
O, the weakness of any mouth
as it gives itself away to the universe
of a sweet-milk body.
Just as my own mouth is dreamed to thirst
the long desire-ways, the hundred-thousand light year roads
of your throat and thighs.
Copyright © 2015 by Natalie Diaz. Used with permission of the author.