a variant of Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet XVII
I don’t love you as if you were penicillin,
insulin, or chemotherapy drugs that treat cancer,
I love you as one loves the sickest patient:
terminally, between the diagnosis and the death.
I love you as one loves new vaccines frozen
within the lab, poised to stimulate our antibodies,
and thanks to your love, the immunity that protects
me from disease will respond strongly in my cells.
I love you without knowing how or when this pandemic
will end. I love you carefully, with double masking.
I love you like this because we can’t quarantine
forever in the shelter of social distancing,
so close that your viral load is mine,
so close that your curve rises with my cough.
Copyright © 2022 by Craig Santos Perez. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 4, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
What is this nameless something that I want,
Forever groping blindly, without light,—
A ghost of pain that does forever haunt
My days, and make my heart eternal night?
I think it is your face I so long for,
Your eyes that read my soul at one warm glance;
Your lips that I may touch with mine no more
Have left me in their stead a thrusting lance
Of fire that burns my lips and sears my heart
As all the dreary wanton years wear through
Their hopeless dragging days. No lover’s art
Can lift full, heavy sorrow from my view
Or still my restless longing, purge my hate,
Because I learned I loved you, dear, too late.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 28, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
When he appears, he looks into my eyes
With the gaze of a child missing a perfected
Will. Then, like a child, he moves suddenly—
Insisting on his own space, summoning up that
Odd power that makes us seem real to ourselves.
His life failed him. Fame, which he had in hand,
Failed him. He believed it was because he chose me.
When I catch or remember his ripped-from-pure-terror
Characters onscreen and off (murderer, father, diplomat)—
I get that he was always a version of the liability of “us.”
He comes to me alone in dreams, spinning into a glimpse
Of such blue-eyed hate it might have been love—O
I was never sure of that living kid on the lit stage,
Floating now into the twentieth year of his death.
Copyright © 2021 by Carol Muske-Dukes. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 12, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
I have a rendezvous with Life,
In days I hope will come,
Ere youth has sped, and strength of mind,
Ere voices sweet grow dumb.
I have a rendezvous with Life,
When Spring's first heralds hum.
Sure some would cry it's better far
To crown their days with sleep
Than face the road, the wind and rain,
To heed the calling deep.
Though wet nor blow nor space I fear,
Yet fear I deeply, too,
Lest Death should meet and claim me ere
I keep Life's rendezvous.
This poem is in the public domain.
Machine
guns
between their brows—
blood flowers bloom.
Child of summer
dawn—
tracing
horses in the mud.
Midnight
Skylarks
under storm, ferrying
bodies one
by one.
Rage
Volcanic
ash
covered highlands:
jittery dance
of
the jewel beetle.
Sunflower
petals,
falling on a
black mass
of
ants.
Copyright © 2019 Ryan C. K. Choi. This poem originally appeared in Kenyon Review, May/June 2019. Reprinted with permission of the author.
(Haiku Erasure of Lord Byron's "Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull")
Start spirit; behold
the skull. A living head loved
earth. My bones resign
the worm, lips to hold
sparkling grape's slimy circle,
shape of reptile's food.
Where wit shone of shine,
when our brains are substitute,
like me, with the dead,
life's little, our heads
sad. Redeemed and wasting clay
this chance. Be of use.
Copyright © 2012 by Ravi Shankar. Used with permission of the author.