Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.
Copyright © 1962 by William Carlos Williams. Used with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved. No part of this poem may be reproduced in any form without the written consent of the publisher.
Great Oracle, why are you staring at me, do I baffle you, do I make you despair? I, Americus, the American, wrought from the dark in my mother long ago, from the dark of ancient Europa— Why are you staring at me now in the dusk of our civilization— Why are you staring at me as if I were America itself the new Empire vaster than any in ancient days with its electronic highways carrying its corporate monoculture around the world And English the Latin of our days— Great Oracle, sleeping through the centuries, Awaken now at last And tell us how to save us from ourselves and how to survive our own rulers who would make a plutocracy of our democracy in the Great Divide between the rich and the poor in whom Walt Whitman heard America singing O long-silent Sybil, you of the winged dreams, Speak out from your temple of light as the serious constellations with Greek names still stare down on us as a lighthouse moves its megaphone over the sea Speak out and shine upon us the sea-light of Greece the diamond light of Greece Far-seeing Sybil, forever hidden, Come out of your cave at last And speak to us in the poet's voice the voice of the fourth person singular the voice of the inscrutable future the voice of the people mixed with a wild soft laughter— And give us new dreams to dream, Give us new myths to live by!
Read at Delphi, Greece, on March 21, 2001 at the UNESCO World Poetry Day
Reprinted from San Francisco Poems by permission of City Lights Foundation. Copyright © 2001 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. All rights reserved.
I. To summarize the past by theft and allusion With a parasong a palimpsest A manuscreed writ over A graph of consciousness at best A consciousness of felt life A rushing together Of the raisins of wrath Of living and dying The laughter and forgetting The maze and amaze of life.
From Americus, Book I by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Copyright © 2004 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted by permission of New Directions. All rights reserved.
I am signaling you through the flames.
The North Pole is not where it used to be.
Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.
Civilization self-destructs.
Nemesis is knocking at the door.
What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?
The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.
If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.
You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words....
From Poetry as Insurgent Art by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Copyright © 2007 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Used by permission of New Directions. All rights reserved.
A long time passes—long even in the understanding of stone—and at last Bone feels entitled to speak to Silence. There are prerequisites: proper depth, aridity, desiccation, ph balance, density, and a kind of confidence. No loam: say salt, say dust, say southwest Utah. And when the conversation occurs it is understood on Bone's part what to expect from Silence, so one could say that expectations were low, but such is a pattern of our thinking, and in this case the entire dry dialectic is different, and in fact expectations were high. There is a moon shining, unknown to Bone, intimate with Silence. There are mammals overhead, the noise of whose small feet are perceived or unperceived.
And after all this discursive talk, what at last does Bone say to Silence? What would you have Bone say to Silence? We could try Is there anywhere we can go for a beer? and that might get a little laugh, might qualify as ineffably human, almost religious. But we know better about Bone & Silence—need only look inside us, have the bravery to cease this chatter, this scrape of pencil on paper, to leave the rest of the book blank, get out of the way, let the conversation begin.
Copyright © 2011 by Gerald Fleming. Reprinted from Night of Pure Breathing with the permission of Hanging Loose Press.
You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.
Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:
head south on Mississippi 49, one—
by—one mile markers ticking off
another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion—dead end
at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches
in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand
dumped on a mangrove swamp—buried
terrain of the past. Bring only
what you must carry—tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock
where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:
the photograph—who you were—
will be waiting when you return
"Theories of Time and Space" from Native Guard: Poems by Natasha Trethewey. Copyright © 2006 by Natasha Trethewey. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.