Again, as always, when the shadows fall,
In that sweet space between the dark and day,
I leave the present and its fretful claims
And seek the dim past where my memories stay.
I dream an old, forgotten, far-off dream,
And think old thoughts and live old scenes anew,
Till suddenly I reach the heart of Spring—
The spring that brought me you!
I see again a little woody lane,
The moonlight rifting golden through the trees;
I hear the plaintive chirp of drowsy bird
Lulled dreamward by a tender, vagrant breeze;
I hold your hand, I look into your eyes,
I touch your lips,—oh, peerless, matchless dower!
Oh, Memory thwarting Time and Space and Death!
Oh, Little Perfect Hour!
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 13, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
When April's here and meadows wide Once more with spring's sweet growths are pied I close each book, drop each pursuit, And past the brook, no longer mute, I joyous roam the countryside. Look, here the violets shy abide And there the mating robins hide— How keen my sense, how acute, When April's here! And list! down where the shimmering tide Hard by that farthest hill doth glide, Rise faint strains from shepherd's flute, Pan's pipes and Berecyntian lute. Each sight, each sound fresh joys provide When April's here.
This poem is in the public domain.
“I can remember when I was a little, young girl, how my old mammy would sit out of doors in the evenings and look up at the stars and groan, and I would say, ‘Mammy, what makes you groan so?’ And she would say, ‘I am groaning to think of my poor children; they do not know where I be and I don’t know where they be. I look up at the stars and they look up at the stars!’”
—Sojourner Truth.
I think I see her sitting bowed and black,
Stricken and seared with slavery’s mortal scars,
Reft of her children, lonely, anguished, yet
Still looking at the stars.
Symbolic mother, we thy myriad sons,
Pounding our stubborn hearts on Freedom’s bars,
Clutching our birthright, fight with faces set,
Still visioning the stars!
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 24, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
From The Poetry of Robert Frost by Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1916, 1923, 1928, 1930, 1934, 1939, 1947, 1949, © 1969 by Holt Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright 1936, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1951, 1953, 1954, © 1956, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1962, 1967, 1970 by Leslie Frost Ballantine.
Come, “Will,” let’s be good friends again,
Our wrongs let’s be forgetting,
For words bring only useless pain,
So wherefore then be fretting.
Let’s lay aside imagined wrongs,
And ne’er give way to grieving,
Life should be filled with joyous songs,
No time left for deceiving.
I’ll try and not give way to wrath,
Nor be so often crying;
There must some thorns be in our path,
Let’s move them now by trying.
How, like a foolish pair were we,
To fume about a letter;
Time is so precious, you and me;
Must spend ours doing better.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 6, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.
This poem is in the public domain.
But this poem’s got no parents
snapped to life, ditched its
Bildung and flooded backwards
over the border to Canada it has no appetite,
health or grudges no sour feelings keep it up at night
no autobiography left to compose of glances,
tresses, snap decisions, remarkable
and unremarkable men water slouching
through a bathroom ceiling in a singular home
Candy a class act when a landscape
painter at pop punk court
I’ll outlast both, and dexedrine, and I'm not sorry
more like you discover melodrama
in the windows of the technically not that rich
Copyright © 2020 by Kay Gabriel. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 24, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
Ask me about the time
my brother ran towards the sun
arms outstretched. His shadow chased him
from corner store to church
where he offered himself in pieces.
Ask me about the time
my brother disappeared. At 16,
tossed his heartstrings over telephone wire,
dangling for all the rez dogs to feed on.
Bit by bit. The world took chunks of
my brother’s flesh.
Ask me about the first time
we drowned in history. 8 years old
during communion we ate the body of Christ
with palms wide open, not expecting wine to be
poured into our mouths. The bitterness
buried itself in my tongue and my brother
never quite lost his thirst for blood or vanishing
for more days than a shadow could hold.
Ask me if I’ve ever had to use
bottle caps as breadcrumbs to help
my brother find his way back home.
He never could tell the taste between
a scar and its wounding, an angel or demon.
Ask me if I can still hear his
exhaled prayers: I am still waiting to be found.
To be found, tell me why there is nothing
more holy than becoming a ghost.
Copyright © 2020 by Tanaya Winder. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 17, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
My mother married a man who divorced her for money. Phyllis, he would say, If you don’t stop buying jewelry, I will have to divorce you to keep us out of the poorhouse. When he said this, she would stub out a cigarette, mutter something under her breath. Eventually, he was forced to divorce her. Then, he died. Then she did. The man was not my father. My father was buried down the road, in a box his other son selected, the ashes of his third wife in a brass urn that he will hold in the crook of his arm forever. At the reception, after his funeral, I got mean on four cups of Lime Sherbet Punch. When the man who was not my father divorced my mother, I stopped being related to him. These things are complicated, says the Talmud. When he died, I couldn’t prove it. I couldn’t get a death certificate. These things are complicated, says the Health Department. Their names remain on the deed to the house. It isn’t haunted, it’s owned by ghosts. When I die, I will come in fast and low. I will stick the landing. There will be no confusion. The dead will make room for me.
Copyright © 2020 by Richard Siken. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 4, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
Let me begin again as a quiet thought
in the shape of a shell slowly examined
by a brown child on a beach at dawn
straining to see their future. Let me begin
this time knowing the drumming in my dreams
is me inheriting the earth, is morning
lighting up the rivers. Let me burn
my vanities: old music in the pines, sifters
of scotch, a day moon like a signature
of night. This time, let me circle
the island of my fears only once then
live like a raging waterfall and grow
a magnificent mustache. Let me not ever be
the birdcage or the serrated blade or
the empty season. Dear Glacier, Dear Sea
of Stars, Dear Leopards disintegrating
at the outer limits of our greed; soon we will
encounter you only in motivational tweets.
Reader, I should have married you sooner.
This time, let me not sleep like the prophet who
believes he’s seen infinity. Let me run
at break-neck speeds toward sceneries
of doubt. I have no more dress rehearsals
to attend. Look closer: I am licking my lips.
Copyright © 2021 by Major Jackson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 26, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Two miles into
the sky, the snow
builds a mountain
unto itself.
Some drifts can be
thirty feet high.
Picture a house.
Then bury it.
Plows come from both
ends of the road,
foot by foot, month
by month. This year
they didn’t meet
in the middle
until mid-June.
Maybe I’m not
expressing this
well. Every year,
snow erases
the highest road.
We must start near
the bottom and
plow toward each
other again.
Copyright © 2021 by Camille T. Dungy. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 20, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
The wind was a care-free soul
That broke the chains of earth,
And strode for a moment across the land
With the wild halloo of his mirth.
He little cared that he ripped up trees,
That houses fell at his hand,
That his step broke calm on the breast of seas,
That his feet stirred clouds of sand.
But when he had had his little joke,
Had shouted and laughed and sung,
When the trees were scarred, their branches broke,
And their foliage aching hung,
He crept to his cave with a stealthy tread,
With rain-filled eyes and low-bowed head.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 14, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
definitions provided by the Navajo–English Dictionary by Leon Wall & William Morgan
dibé bighan: sheep corral
juniper beams caught charcoal in the late summer morning
night still pooled in hoof prints; deer panicked run from water
ooljéé’ biná’adinídíín: moonlight
perched above the town drowned in orange and streetlamp
the road back home dips with the earth
shines black in the sirens
bit’a’ : its sails or—its wing (s)
driving through the mountain pass
dólii, mountain bluebird, swings out—
from swollen branches
I never see those anymore, someone says
diyóół : wind (
wind (more of it) more wind as in (to come up)
plastic bags driftwood the fence line
nihootsoii
: evening—somewhere northward fire
twists around the shrublands;
sky dipped in smoke—twilight
—there is a word for this,
someone says
: deidííłid, they burned it
: kódeiilyaa, we did this
Copyright © 2021 by Jake Skeets. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 13, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Stay, season of calm love and soulful snows!
There is a subtle sweetness in the sun,
The ripples on the stream’s breast gaily run,
The wind more boisterously by me blows,
And each succeeding day now longer grows.
The birds a gladder music have begun,
The squirrel, full of mischief and of fun,
From maple’s topmost branch the brown twig throws.
I read these pregnant signs, know what they mean:
I know that thou art making ready to go.
Oh stay! I fled a land where fields are green
Always, and palms wave gently to and fro,
And winds are balmy, blue brooks ever sheen,
To ease my heart of its impassioned woe.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 21, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Never, my heart, is there enough of living,
Since only in thee is loveliness so sweet pain;
Only for thee the willows will be giving
Their quiet fringes to the dreaming river;
Only for thee so the light grasses ever
Are hollowed by the print of windy feet,
And breathe hill weather on the misty plain;
And were no rapture of them in thy beat,
For every hour of sky
Stillborn in gladness would the waters wear
Colors of air translucently,
And the stars sleep there.
Gently, my heart, nor let one moment ever
Be spilled from the brief fullness of thine urn.
Plunge in its exultation star and star,
Sea and plumed sea in turn.
O still, my heart, nor spill this moment ever.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 2, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
I picked up shells with ruby lips
That spoke in whispers of the sea,
Upon a time, and watched the ships,
On white wings, sail away to sea.
The ships I saw go out that day
Live misty—dim in memory;
But still I hear, from far away,
The blue waves breaking ceaselessly.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 12, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
On a dusty rooftop in Giza, I tell Imam,
in another life, he and Hugh would have been
the best of friends. I picture Hugh, taking him
by the arm down the corniche
or the Cape, the cool night air refusing
silence. I hear their strings and tubes cutting through
beaming crowds in Imbaba and Soweto. Miriam
is serenading an open sea, clicking to the wind
by El Montaza. I see Biko
and Negm, side by side, in a crowded auditorium,
a whole generation huddled
around their voices. This is to say, in another
life revolution would be but
abstract. Biko would be a doctor,
perhaps in Durban. There would be no trains
for Hugh to sing of, save for those
that would bring him back to his loved
ones, safely. Negm would only be known
for love poems. What more
could one ask for? Let us not cheer
for those who would rather die
as soldiers when there is no
war. My whole life I have envied
the kind of thirst for music
that can be quenched by
Elvis and Sinatra. I have prayed
nightly for those I have idolized
to find a good night’s sleep
before deadly fame. What good is poetry
if it kills the poet? In another life, what must be said
here is but fairytale, ghost stories
for the rowdy children. Kanafani would live
in Acre, Baldwin would die
in Harlem, neither knowing the taste
of exile. I would write of bees
and clocks. I would not need men’s solemn
crooning to put me
to sleep. I would not mourn
the dead.
Copyright © 2021 by Hazem Fahmy. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 10, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
In the dark
Down a stairwell
Through the doorway
Gone west
With a new wish
In daylight
Down the sidewalk
In a wool coat
In a white dress
Without a name
Without asking
On your knees
On your stomach
Gone silent
In the backseat
In the courtroom
In a cage
In the desert
In the park
Gone swimming
On the shortest night
At the bottom of the lake
In pieces
In pictures
Without meaning
Without a face
Seeking refuge
In a new land
Gone still
In the heart
With your head bowed
In deference
In sickness
In surrender
With your hands up
On the sidewalk
In the daylight
In the dark
Copyright © 2021 by Camille Rankine. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 2, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
A sea of foliage girds our garden round,
But not a sea of dull unvaried green,
Sharp contrasts of all colours here are seen;
The light-green graceful tamarinds abound
Amid the mangoe clumps of green profound,
And palms arise, like pillars gray, between;
And o'er the quiet pools the seemuls lean,
Red,—red, and startling like a trumpet's sound.
But nothing can be lovelier than the ranges
Of bamboos to the eastward, when the moon
Looks through their gaps, and the white lotus changes
Into a cup of silver. One might swoon
Drunken with beauty then, or gaze and gaze
On a primeval Eden, in amaze.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on May 29, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Hawaiian creation chant
At the time that turned the heat of the earth,
At the time when the heavens turned and changed,
At the time when the light of the sun was subdued
To cause light to break forth,
At the time of the night of Makalii (winter)
Then began the slime which established the earth,
The source of deepest darkness.
Of the depth of darkness, of the depth of darkness,
Of the darkness of the sun, in the depth of night,
It is night,
So was night born
O ke au i kahuli wela ka honua
O ke au i kahuli lole ka lani
O ke au i kukaiaka ka la.
E hoomalamalama i ka malama
O ke au o Makali’i ka po
O ka walewale hookumu honua ia
O ke kumu o ka lipo, i lipo ai
O ke kumu o ka Po, i po ai
O ka lipolipo, o ka lipolipo
O ka lipo o ka la, o ka lipo o ka po
Po wale hoi
Hanau ka po
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on May 22, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Each of them described the brother's death in different terms, though the fact of his absence interrupted them indiscriminately. Do they know how he found his life, if from inside it looked like a cage shaped exactly like his body, except two sizes too big, growing as he grew, condensing when he made himself small, and no matter what he did, he couldn't dissolve its borders, not even while he slept. I don't think it let him sleep. At night, fighting sleep, I stay up as if hoping I'll catch wind of something. Tonight, or years ago, a wolf chased a deer past the cabin's front door and out onto lake ice where fate met each discriminately. Borders dissolved, but which one, between predator and prey, or stage and props? Anywhere there is a hole there are traces of arrival and departure. The wind becomes a palimpsest of the creature no longer here, and a song, or is it a cry, emerging from nowhere, on its way to nowhere, passes through until the textures of the earth absorb it entirely. Sound: a body's way of making itself known. Silence: a way of knowing.
Copyright © 2021 by Diana Khoi Nguyen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 13, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
There are too many ancestors, so we are gathering their bones.
The poor ones, their graves broken by the roots of trees. The ones whose headstones have been weathered as blank as snow-drifts.
We have bought the wide plot. We have built the mausoleum. And now we fill it with the bones.
The ones killed in the monsoon floods. The one buried in her wedding dress. The one buried with his medals.
Because there will be a time when we cannot keep track of them, scattered in the cemetery like prodigals, we collect the bones.
The ones whose faces I can still recall. The ones who have been dead for a hundred years. We collect their bones.
At each opened grave, we think about the body taking its shape as father, sister, cousin, uncle. We hunger for the story of each figure.
We hold the bones, though we know memory is mostly forgetting. Or memory is the sweeper who clears the sidewalk each morning. Or memory is the broom.
The mausoleum is marble, white as certain roses, and shaped like a house. There is room for everyone we will put there.
The rich ones, their gravestones glowing with gold paint. The infants with sweet names.
We open their graves. We move their bones.
Look back far enough and your family becomes unfamiliar, a circle of people with a fading circumference.
When I think of it long enough, home becomes a confusion of birthplace, hometown, country, and nation.
We walk through the cemetery, we point to our own, and we gather their bones.
Maybe memory is the desperate pharaoh who commands that the things of this life go with him into the next.
I would take with me the books I loved best. A jar of the ocean spanning my two countries. A slip of my lover’s sunny hair.
I would take with me a sack of rice. My mother’s orange shawl. The robe my father wears in the kitchen at night, drinking a glass of water.
That we might go to just one place to worship them, to wonder at who they were, we are moving the bones.
Our tribe of eros and vinegar. Our black hair, our ordinary minds.
Holding the bones, we say the names of the dead, the music of the syllables, conjuring the hearts they answered to. We hold the bones.
Each stern skull. Each proud sternum. Each elegant rib, curved like a horizon.
Copyright © 2021 by Rick Barot. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 10, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Many ways to spell good night.
Fireworks at a pier on the Fourth of July
spell it with red wheels and yellow spokes.
They fizz in the air, touch the water and quit.
Rockets make a trajectory of gold-and-blue
and then go out.
Railroad trains at night spell with a smokestack
mushrooming a white pillar.
Steamboats turn a curve in the Mississippi crying
in a baritone that crosses lowland cottonfields
to a razorback hill.
It is easy to spell good night.
Many ways to spell good night.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 4, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
for my favorite auntie, Jeanette
Sometimes I think I’m never going to write a poem again
and then there’s a full moon.
I miss being in love but I miss
myself most when I’m gone.
In the salty wet air of my ancestry
my auntie peels a mango with her teeth
and I’m no longer
writing political poems; because there are
mangoes and my favorite memory is still alive.
I’m digging for meaning but haunted by purpose
and it’s an insufficient approach.
What’s the margin of loss on words not spent today?
I’m getting older. I’m buying smaller images to travel light.
I wake up, I light up, I tidy, and it’s all over now.
Copyright © 2021 by Camonghne Felix. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 7, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Qawem ya sha’abi, qawemhum. Resist my people, resist them.
—Dareen Tatour
Hawaiians are still here. We are still creating, still resisting.
—Haunani-Kay Trask
Stand in rage as wind and current clash
rile lightning and thunder
fire surge and boulder crash
Let the ocean eat and scrape away these walls
Let the sand swallow their fences whole
Let the air between us split the atmosphere
We have no land No country
But we have these bodies these stories
this language of rage left
This resistance is bitter
and tastes like medicine Our lands
replanted in the dark and warm there
We unfurl our tangled roots stretch
to blow salt across
blurred borders of memory
They made themselves
fences and bullets checkpoints
gates and guardposts martial law
They made themselves
hotels and mansions adverse
possession eminent domain and deeds
They made themselves
shine
through the plunder
They say we can never— They say
we will never—because
because they—
and the hills and mountains have been
mined for rock walls the reefs
pillaged for coral floors
They say we can never—
and the deserts and dunes have been
shoveled and taken for their houses and highways—
because we can never— because
the forests have been raided razed
and scorched and we we the wards
refugees houseless present-
absentees recognition refusers exiled
uncivilized disposable natives
protester-activist-terrorist-resisters—
our springs and streams have been
dammed—so they say we can never return
let it go accept this
progress stop living
in the past—
but we make ourselves
strong enough to carry all of our dead
engrave their names in the clouds
We gather to sing whole villages awake
We crouch down to eat rocks like fruit
to hold the dirt the sand in our hands
to fling words
the way fat drops of rain
splatter off tarp or corrugated roofs
We remember the sweetness We rise from the plunder
They say there is no return
they never could really make us leave
Copyright © 2021 by Brandy Nālani McDougall. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 23, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
When I say Black, what I mean is the curl of my hair is tight enough to snag the teeth of a wide-tooth comb. So, I don’t comb my hair when I’m in the comfort of my home. This comfort is the standard by which I determine who, what, where is home. I rarely feel home in my father’s home.
▪
When I was 21, my father kissed my forehead and this was the first time he ever kissed me. My father’s lips recall a different story. But this is my tale of a boy whose hard head grew tender from his father’s kiss. The words I love you, boy seeped into my newly-softened skull. For just a moment, my father returned my boyhood so he could feel the gratification of kissing his son goodnight. It had to be that way.
▪
The only way to rake my hair into a neat brush of manageable coils is to first wet it thoroughly. Before I leave my home, I sometimes—most times—tame my hair with water to allow it to floss the teeth of the comb, to bear the brunt of its bite. I sometimes long for watered-down brown tresses that know to bow to the comb’s might. I sometimes wish my hair would grow into an impenetrable forest, endless and black as starless nights.
▪
When I say Black, I mean my father’s hardened bosom has left me disheartened—desensitized to all but the snatch of a fine-tooth comb. I’ve been taught a man must be made a boy before he can receive a kiss from another man, and such ancient magic must be sparingly used. Sometimes—most times—I sleep with one eye open and hope to reunite with the strange magician who makes boys of men with forehead kisses. On these nights, I lie in bed and wait for him to cast his spell. As I sleep, my father combs his fingers through my hair and plants his lips on my eager forehead. On these nights, I wake floating above my bed in boyish bliss. On these nights, I feel home.
Copyright © 2021 by Dāshaun Washington. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 11, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Healed by a microscope, the angel burns my missing son's hair
in the mirror's
invisible stomach.
I am in the blue school of that first shooting.
Ohio radio treats fatigue as an error from sleep's past.
Art is a moon rock in a gun shop
And death
God's refusal
to age.
Copyright © 2021 by Barton Smock. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 23, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
I believe in my mother, the mother almighty,
mover of heaven and earth,
creator of daughters and dinner,
all that is always unseen,
I believe in my mother, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Pulmano,
who dreamed an American dream,
who suffered barely making ends meet,
who suffered giving everything unto everyone,
who suffered, died, and was buried;
she descended into this American earth,
while wailing women recited novena,
she ascended into heaven,
and is seated somewhere comfortable now,
she’s watching the Niners game now,
she’s wearing her Jerry Rice jersey,
she’s got a Diet Pepsi and a plate of Panda Express,
she’s watching reruns of Murder She Wrote and Matlock
if the game isn’t going the way she’d like,
I believe in my mother, in the most sacred of sisterhoods,
in kapwa with the kumares, the forgiveness of fear,
her transcendence from a tumorous body,
her pink jasmines and rose bushes in bloom. Amen.
Copyright © 2021 by Barbara Jane Reyes. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 27, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
No servile little fear shall daunt my will
This morning, I have courage steeled to say
I will be lazy, conqueringly still,
I will not lose the hours in toil this day.
The roaring world without, careless of souls,
Shall leave me to my placid dream of rest,
My four walls shield me from its shouting ghouls,
And all its hates have fled my quiet breast.
And I will loll here resting, wide awake,
Dead to the world of work, the world of love,
I laze contented just for dreaming’s sake,
With not the slightest urge to think or move.
How tired unto death, how tired I was!
Now for a day I put my burdens by,
And like a child amidst the meadow grass
Under the southern sun, I languid lie,
And feel the bed about me kindly deep,
My strength ooze gently from my hollow bones,
My worried brain drift aimlessly to sleep,
Life soften to a song of tuneful tones.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 5, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
I’m on an errand to find my grandpa. I’m ten
and finding freedom in a sanctioned outing
on my bike through the streets of Clovis, CA.
I roll past Silver’s house and peek into the backyard
of broke drunks holding paper bags around
a barrel fire. One who just came back
from taking a leak is seasoning some carne
they bought with the tallboys across the street
at Numero Uno market. The door chimes when
I walk in and see Artemio’s white mane. His mustache
stretches from his nostrils to his sideburns
and up into his waxed pomp of hair.
My grandma says I’m not supposed to talk to him,
but he always asks how she’s doing.
I don’t see my grandpa anyplace. Art says
he’s around somewhere. I go to Ruby’s
next door. I’m not allowed, but I look in.
I’m hit with a gust of cigarettes and Bud Light.
Half a dozen heads turn my direction. No dice.
I ride down Pollasky with feet out each way.
I swerve left and right, free, for once. I am this
far from the shouting distance of my grandma.
I take to the alley just for kicks and pop a wheelie
behind the appliance shop. I pull up behind Henry’s,
knowing grandpa’s in there. A few other grandpas too.
I don’t knock. I stay on my bike. I realize
I’m not ready to go home and like most men
in this town, grandpa doesn’t want to be found.
I keep riding. I go North toward what’s left
of the railroad tracks. There’s a grey cloud
moving across the sky and I imagine I’m
chasing it, I’m right behind it. I keep riding
until it’s all oleanders and stacked railroad ties.
I never thought I could go this far. I get off
the seat and stand. I glide next to a forgotten
caboose. I imagine I’m the howling train now.
My tires kick dust as they crunch over the dry dry dirt.
Copyright © 2021 by Joseph Rios. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 9, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
From The Poems of Dylan Thomas, published by New Directions. Copyright © 1952, 1953 Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1937, 1945, 1955, 1962, 1966, 1967 the Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1938, 1939, 1943, 1946, 1971 New Directions Publishing Corp. Used with permission.