I do think of them
from time to time—
just now sucking the pulp
of a tangerine
the taste of which
is mostly texture,
in this spin-drunk season
that seems to forget
—us. —itself.
At the job I lost,
their husk carcasses
with the locust bean’s
cracked brown pods
rustled on the brick steps
leading into the white-walled
hours of computer screen;
their compressed toil
missing from the hives
they left agape in the backyard
of the next-door neighbor
who, recently divorced,
had brought us the jars
of honey I spooned into teas
I sipped in the break room
and watched at the window
as he continued to tend
the needle palm and hydrangea.
In the age of loss there is
the dream of loss
in which, of course, I
am alive at the center—
immobile but no one’s queen—
enveloped (beloved) in bees,
swathed in their wings’
wistful enterprise. They pry
the evolved thin eyelids
behind which I replay
the landscape as last I knew it
(crow feathers netting redder suns),
their empire’s droning edge
mindless in the spirals of
my obsolescing ears.
Beneath my feet
what kind of earth
I’m terrified to break
into sprint across to free
myself, to free them
from the myth they make
of me and then bury
below their dance
of manufactory;
what kind of future
they could die for if
punching into me their stings—
what future without risking
the same; and while, in either body
the buzzards of hunger conspire,
what kind of new
dread animal,
this shape we take?
Copyright © 2018 by Justin Phillip Reed. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 1, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Which cannot be written tries anyway—
From one room to another, each time startled
And does not want to hear of the already
Passed through, the country of before.
Poem that at each door believes itself
In the room closest to the end
Where finally everything will be gone over,
Dismantled, held up, carefully laid back down
While talked into the beauty which can turn
In a minute. To hear of every other
Poem written is to begin
Revision and what cannot be left enough
Alone and so the lovers look at each other
Until none else can come near. Poem
Which never wanted anything but this
Tries anyway, so brave, unable to know where
She heads; unwrapping until only a gift
Which cannot be given as it cannot be let go.
Sophie Cabot Black, "Love Poem" from The Exchange (Graywolf Press, 2013). Copyright © 2013 by Sophie Cabot Black. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
In the invitation, I tell them for the seventeenth time
(the fourth in writing), that I am gay.
In the invitation, I include a picture of my boyfriend
& write, You’ve met him two times. But this time,
you will ask him things other than can you pass the
whatever. You will ask him
about him. You will enjoy dinner. You will be
enjoyable. Please RSVP.
They RSVP. They come.
They sit at the table & ask my boyfriend
the first of the conversation starters I slip them
upon arrival: How is work going?
I’m like the kid in Home Alone, orchestrating
every movement of a proper family, as if a pair
of scary yet deeply incompetent burglars
is watching from the outside.
My boyfriend responds in his chipper way.
I pass my father a bowl of fish ball soup—So comforting,
isn’t it? My mother smiles her best
Sitting with Her Son’s Boyfriend
Who Is a Boy Smile. I smile my Hurray for Doing
a Little Better Smile.
Everyone eats soup.
Then, my mother turns
to me, whispers in Mandarin, Is he coming with you
for Thanksgiving? My good friend is & she wouldn’t like
this. I’m like the kid in Home Alone, pulling
on the string that makes my cardboard mother
more motherly, except she is
not cardboard, she is
already, exceedingly my mother. Waiting
for my answer.
While my father opens up
a Boston Globe, when the invitation
clearly stated: No security
blankets. I’m like the kid
in Home Alone, except the home
is my apartment, & I’m much older, & not alone,
& not the one who needs
to learn, has to—Remind me
what’s in that recipe again, my boyfriend says
to my mother, as though they have always, easily
talked. As though no one has told him
many times, what a nonlinear slapstick meets
slasher flick meets psychological
pit he is now co-starring in.
Remind me, he says
to our family.
Copyright © 2018 by Chen Chen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 19, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
It's so quiet now the children have decided to stop
being born. We raise our cups in an empty room.
In this light, the curtains are transparent as gauze.
Through the open window we hear nothing—
no airplane, lawn mower, no siren
speeding its white pain through the city's traffic.
There is no traffic. What remains is all that remains.
The brick school at the five points crosswalk
is drenched in morning glory.
Its white flowers are trumpets
festooning this coastal town.
Will the eventual forest rise up
and remember our footsteps? Already
seedlings erupt through cement,
crabgrass heaves through cracked marble,
already wolves come down from the hills
to forage among us. We are like them now,
just another species looking to the stars
and howling extinction.
They say the body accepts any kind of sorrow,
that our ancestors lay down on their stomachs
in school hallways, as children they lay down
like matches waiting for a nuclear fire.
It wasn't supposed to end like this:
all ruin and beauty, vines waterfalling down
a century's architecture; it wasn't supposed to end
so quietly, without fanfare or fuss,
a man and woman collecting rain
in old coffee tins. Darling,
the wars have been forgotten.
These days our quarrels are only with ourselves.
Tonight you sit on the edge of the bed loosening your shoes.
The act is soundless, without future
weight. Should we name this failure?
Should we wake to the regret at the end of time
doing what people have always done
and say it was not enough?
From Ruin and Beauty by Patricia Young. Copyright © 2000 by Patricia Young. Reprinted by permission of House of Anansi Press. All rights reserved.
we drank in the remains of ruined buildings and we sat in a cave or wrecked houses on farms given back to the bank listening to men who'd been raised in ways that were lost and we strained to make out the use of their news they were crazy or passed out speed notched with a cross they drank from the flask and the mouth they came in and shook off the rain inflamed and dismayed calm and arcane the least one seethed chanting whitman for hours then wept at the dregs of the fire foam formed at the edge of their lips we drank and waited for something to drop you and I looking and sifting for signs written in wax we were young we knew how to die but not how to last a small man who claimed he was blake raged all night and probably he was he had god in his sights white crosses shone in our eyes or acid mandalic in the ruins the men talked: seraphic and broken glowing with gnosis and rubbish we sorted their mad sacred words these dog-headed guides to the life after and the life after that
Copyright © 2011 by Mark Conway. Used with permission of the author.
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I
walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-
conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the
neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping
at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in
the tomatoes!—and you, García Lorca, what were you doing
down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork
chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following
you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary
fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and
never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add
shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue
automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what
America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you
got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear
on the black waters of Lethe?
—Berkeley, 1955
From Collected Poems 1947–1980 by Allen Ginsberg, published by Harper & Row. Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg. Used with permission.
This is like a life. This is lifelike.
I climb inside a mistake
and remake myself in the shape
of a better mistake—
a nice pair of glasses
without any lenses,
shoes that don’t quite fit,
a chest that always hurts.
There is a checklist of things
you need to do to be a person.
I don’t want to be a person
but there isn’t a choice,
so I work my way down and
kiss the feet.
I work my way up and lick
the knee.
I give you my skull
to do with whatever you please.
You grow flowers from my head
and trim them too short.
I paint my nails nice and pretty
and who cares. Who gives a shit.
I’m trying not to give a shit
but it doesn’t fit well on me.
I wear my clothes. I wear my body.
I walk out in the grass and turn red
at the sight of everything.
Copyright © 2015 by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. Used with the permission of the author.
I
Admitted to the hospital again.
The second bout of pneumocystis back
In January almost killed him; then,
He'd sworn to us he'd die at home. He baked
Us cookies, which the student wouldn't eat,
Before he left--the kitchen on 5A
Is small, but serviceable and neat.
He told me stories: Richard Gere was gay
And sleeping with a friend if his, and AIDS
Was an elaborate conspiracy
Effected by the government. He stayed
Four months. He lost his sight to CMV.
II
One day, I drew his blood, and while I did
He laughed, and said I was his girlfriend now,
His blood-brother. "Vampire-slut," he cried,
"You'll make me live forever!" Wrinkled brows
Were all I managed in reply. I know
I'm drowning in his blood, his purple blood.
I filled my seven tubes; the warmth was slow
To leave them, pressed inside my palm. I'm sad
Because he doesn't see my face. Because
I can't identify with him. I hate
The fact that he's my age, and that across
My skin he's there, my blood-brother, my mate.
III
He said I was too nice, and after all
If Jodie Foster was a lesbian,
Then doctors could be queer. Residual
Guilts tingled down my spine. "OK, I'm done,"
I said as I withdrew the needle from
His back, and pressed. The CSF was clear;
I never answered him. That spot was framed
In sterile, paper drapes. He was so near
Death, telling him seemed pointless. Then, he died.
Unrecognizable to anyone
But me, he left my needles deep inside
His joking heart. An autopsy was done.
IV
I'd read to him at night. His horoscope,
The New York Times, The Advocate;
Some lines by Richard Howard gave us hope.
A quiet hospital is infinite,
The polished, ice-white floors, the darkened halls
That lead to almost anywhere, to death
Or ghostly, lighted Coke machines. I call
To him one night, at home, asleep. His breath,
I dreamed, had filled my lungs--his lips, my lips
Had touched. I felt as though I'd touched a shrine.
Not disrespectfully, but in some lapse
Of concentration. In a mirror shines
The distant moon.
From The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World by Rafael Campo, published by Arte Público Press. Copyright © 1994 Rafael Campo. Used with permission.
I’m thinking of the boiling sea
and the dream in which
all the fish were singing.
I want to wake up with my heart
not aching like death,
but I am always falling
in to terror. I’m a good person.
I grieve to appropriate degrees.
I mourn this season. This moment.
I mourn for the polar bear
drifting out of history
on a wedge of melting ice.
For the doughnut shop
which reached an end
yesterday, after decades and decades.
I’m thinking of the light
at dawn. Of the woman
in Alabama who ordered
six songbirds from a catalog because
she was lonely. Or
heartbroken. I’m thinking
of the four that came
dead in the box, mangled.
Of the two that are
missing. I want to tell you
that they were spotted
in the humid air
winging above a mall.
I want to tell you a story
about the time leaves fell from
the trees all at once. I am
thinking of cataclysm.
More than anything, I want to tell you
this. I want to disappear
in the night. I want
the night to vanish from memory.
I want to tell you
how this happened.
Copyright © 2017 by Paul Guest. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 30, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
Some did not want to alter the design
when the failure message
said massive problem with oxygen.
Some wanted to live full tilt with risk.
By then we were too weak for daily chores:
feeding chickens, hoeing yams,
calibrating pH this and N2 that . . .
felt like halfway summiting Everest.
We didn’t expect the honeybees
to die. Glass blocked the long-wave
light that guides them.
Farm soil too rich in microbes
concrete too fresh ate the oxygen.
We had pressure problems,
recalibrating the sniffer. Bone tired
I reread Aristotle by waning light.
Being is either actual or potential.
The actual is prior to substance.
Man prior to boy, human prior to seed,
Hermes prior to chisel hitting wood.
I leafed through Turner’s England,
left the book open at Stonehenge.
A shepherd struck by lightning lies dead,
dog howling, several sheep down too.
The painter gave gigantic proportion
to sulphurous god rimmed clouds
lightning slashing indigo sky
while close at hand lie fallen stones
dead religion, pages dusty
brown leaf shards gathering
in the gutter yet I cannot turn the page
wondering what I am and when
in the story of life my life is taking place.
Now what. No shepherd. No cathedral.
How is it then that I read love
in pages that lie open before me?
Copyright © 2015 by Alison Hawthorne Deming. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 23, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
Watching Picnic again for the
umpteenth time. We need
more trains. The tin-roofed stations in
red brick or the grand multi-track
white terminals. Someone left
me by train once, tearily, and
I never should have let his
jive ass back in to collect his things
that were stashed in Patty’s room.
Patty’s room is the closet. He was
a closet case. He was a cliché.
He left by train but the train
was a bus. Mysteries unfold
on trains. Strangers disembark
often enough to disrupt your day.
My chief fear on trains is not
murder nor stumbling into the wrong
berth. There is no wrong berth.
My fear is that I’ll have to ride
backward into memory. I hate memory.
My first train memory is the circus
puffing by on its way to winter
in Florida. Ever after I stood at
the porch and watched the L &N,
hoping for giraffes. There are no
giraffes in most circuses, so I was
obviously a forlorn child. Lonesome
whistle. Did Hank Williams wake
to the crossing guard blinking its red
light across his face at night
through a window he hoped someday
to climb out. Trains are sad as
elephants. Lumbering along. Or
pulling down tents.
Can’t blame Kim Novak for wanting
to run off with William Holden,
especially after seeing him with his
shirt off, dancing under the pink
and green Chinese lanterns,
him moving in—I too would hold on.
Even though I’m sure it’s wrong for Kim.
It’s wrong for him. Where do people
who are wrong for each other meet
but in the movies or on trains.
Best to meet a man who’s moving.
Passing through. Let him ruin
your weekend but not your life.
That’s what weekends are for.
Copyright © 2014 by D. A. Powell. Used with permission of the author.
Lie to yourself about this and you will
forever lie about everything.
Everybody already knows everything
so you can
lie to them. That's what they want.
But lie to yourself, what you will
lose is yourself. Then you
turn into them.
*
For each gay kid whose adolescence
was America in the forties or fifties
the primary, the crucial
scenario
forever is coming out—
or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not.
*
Involuted velleities of self-erasure.
*
Quickly after my parents
died, I came out. Foundational narrative
designed to confer existence.
If I had managed to come out to my
mother, she would have blamed not
me, but herself.
The door through which you were shoved out
into the light
was self-loathing and terror.
*
Thank you, terror!
You learned early that adults' genteel
fantasies about human life
were not, for you, life. You think sex
is a knife
driven into you to teach you that.
Copyright © 2012 by Frank Bidart. Used with permission of the author.
Ignoring the doctor’s red call
I swam in the molasses-thick swamp
of my indulgence, allowed the sugar to ruin
the picnic. The lawn beneath me humming
with little invaders.
There are conditions if one insists
on knowing the secrets of my blood.
I know it’s hard to gaze at the night sky
speckled white & not wish upon
the dead light, but I ask only for your laughter.
I ask for all the ways I can remain
whole & not a vision with missing limbs.
Look at the trees blistering with sap. Goddamnit
look at me! Look at me in the old way
in this new light.
Once I loved a boy, who feared, so much
his own sickness
I never confessed to him my own.
Afraid he would turn, with his worry, my smile
into a knife—into a scythe
covered in ants.
From Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Hieu Minh Nguyen. Used with the permission of Coffee House Press.
Twilight—and you
Quiet—the stars;
Snare of the shine of your teeth,
Your provocative laughter,
The gloom of your hair;
Lure of you, eye and lip;
Yearning, yearning,
Languor, surrender;
Your mouth,
And madness, madness,
Tremulous, breathless, flaming,
The space of a sigh;
Then awakening—remembrance,
Pain, regret—your sobbing;
And again, quiet—the stars,
Twilight—and you.
This poem is in the public domain.
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Dirge Without Music" from The Buck in the Snow and Other Poems. Copyright © 1928 Edna St. Vincent Millay. Used with permission of The Millay Society.
Occasionally a god speaks to you,
rutted tollway a flint knife breaching
gutted fields hung on event
horizon, clear cut contradiction
through soybeans and sheared corn: blue
pickup an orange blaze, white letters
blistered, boiling down to tarmac,
asphalt, sulfur fume cured by a methane
gas burn-off pipe, blue flame chipped
with white raising a buttress of weather
-burnt bricks, flaking wind
totem. We stopped to take some cargo
on, weighted October with a freight
of waiting snow traveling east, panic of
starlings startled from stubble husks
by a harvest moon dangled directly
ahead: drove into the pitted sphere, bloody
pearl punched in a sky just out of reach
(vanishing point retreating, peeling),
one of the yellowed streetlights
by now, dimming, diminishing. The road
says to perspective, wait.
"Syntax," from Otherhood: Poems by Reginald Shepherd. Copyright © 2003 by Reginald Shepherd. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved.
What was unforeseen is now a bird orbiting this field.
What wasn’t a possibility is present in our arms.
It shall be and it begins with you.
Our often-misunderstood kind of love deems dangerous.
How it frightens and confounds and enrages.
How strange, unfamiliar.
Our love carries all those and the contrary.
It is most incandescent.
So, I vow to be brave.
Clear a path through jungles of shame and doubt and fear.
I’m done with silence. I proclaim.
It shall be and it sings from within.
Truly we are enraptured
With Whitmanesque urge and urgency.
I vow to love in all seasons.
When you’re summer, I’m watermelon balled up in a sky-blue bowl.
When I’m autumn, you’re foliage ablaze in New England.
When in winter, I am the tender scarf of warm mercies.
When in spring, you are the bourgeoning buds.
I vow to love you in all places.
High plains, prairies, hills and lowlands.
In our dream-laden bed,
Cradled in the nest
Of your neck.
Deep in the plum.
It shall be and it flows with you.
We’ll leap over the waters and barbaric rooftops.
You embrace my resilient metropolis.
I adore your nourishing wilderness.
I vow to love you in primal ways.
I vow to love you in infinite forms.
In our separateness and composites.
To dust and stars and the ever after.
Intrepid travelers, lovers, and family
We have arrived.
Look. The bird has come home to roost.
From Threshold (CavanKerry Press, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Joseph O. Legaspi. Used with the permission of the author.
How I loved
each bare floor, each
naked wall, the shadows on
newly empty halls.
By day, my head humming
to itself of dreams, I cleaned and
scrubbed
to make life
new; dislodging from the corner,
the old
moths and cicadas
pinned to the screen, the carcasses
of grasshoppers
dangling from beams,
and each windowsill’s clutter of
dried beetles
and dead bees. But,
through each opening, each closing door,
the old life
returns on six legs, or
spins a musty web as it roosts over
a poison pot, or
descends from above
to drink blood in. This is how it
happens: the
settling in—the press
of wilderness returns to carved-out space, to skin.
Copyright @ 2014 by Jenny Factor. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on August 11, 2014.
It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who'd showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.
I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.
From Selected Poems by Thom Gunn. Copyright © 2009 by Thom Gunn. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, www.fsgbooks.com. All rights reserved.
A bag of thank-you notes fell
on me and that was enough
art for one day. Culturally speaking,
it was more like a year
in the floral trenches, kicked off
with a single boneless kiss.
Poor sad demon in his poor dead tree—
or is it he who pities me, cockshy
quasihero with a latex lasso,
taking forever to measure
the dimensions of his confinement.
Some other demons have smeared a flock
of sparrows on a blanket, the full filthy
price of a sky under which they smoked
their names. My prize is a set
of teeth, striptease at the nude beach,
audio files of decomposing stars
telling me, if they’re telling me
anything, that theory’s just another word
for nothing left to like.
Copyright © 2013 by Mark Bibbins. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on September 26, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
by HAUNTIE
Body
A meeting place between the many times that came before it
These times, the trajectories that brought me to be here now
Body
A passing form
like a flower
the slowest moment of rupture in a single time
in time—body as memory
through time—body as home
with time—body as matter
i am body, yet i do not claim body
i never meant to sever with ink
What is the act of mark making, if not to define?
And what is definition, if not without exclusion?
What is exclusion, if not the cutting of matter?
The abstraction of cartography occurs
when the difference of parts is blurred
and lines are no longer visible
and place is not but visceral.
From To Whitey & the Cracker Jack (Anhinga Press, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by May Yang. Reprinted by permission of Anhinga Press.
Where an ash bush grows in the lake
a ring of stones has broken cover
in this summer's drought.
Not high enough to be an island,
it holds a disc of stiller water
in the riffled lake.
Trees have reclaimed the railway line behind us;
behind that, the road goes east—
as two lines parallel in space and time run away from us
this discovered circle draws us in.
In drowned towns
bells toll only for sailors and for the credulous
but this necklace of wet stones,
remnant of a wattle Atlantis,
catches us all by the throat.
We don't know what beads or blades
are held in the bog lake's wet amber
but much of us longs to live in water
and we recognise this surfacing
of old homes of love and hurt.
A troubled bit of us is kin
to people who drew a circle in water,
loaded boats with stone,
and raised a dry island and a fort
with a whole lake for a moat.
From The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry, Volume Two, edited by Jefferson Holdridge. Copyright © 2010 by Moya Cannon. Used by permission of Wake Forest University Press. All rights reserved.
when i show you the illicit
behind a fiberoptic veil—
obstruction is a kind of foreplay.
yes—this is an intentional seduction.
this behind is a fiberoptic veil
i build an economy on anything i can.
yes—this intentional seduction
is suppose to be a delight.
build this economy on anything i can’t.
my taste is acquired, so take your time.
suppose, this is a delight—
the mystery, yours to solve.
you take & taste my acquired time.
take what wilts from my lips—
you—the only mystery unsolved.
i can never stop questioning my mouth.
take all that wilts, my lips.
where every fantasy i try leaves me dead—
i can never stop talking about my mouth.
here, my tongue is bile & tomorrow.
they leave me dead in every fantasy i try—
the overgrown prophecy i am to witness.
bile becomes swallow here & tomorrow—
some end time we have already faced.
the prophecy lives to overgrow the witness.
no future belongs to my body.
these end-times we already face.
my testimony is the absolute of what i know.
i belong to the future in my body—
will truth survive the transmission?
i testify in absolutes of what i can not know.
what do we make of the delay?
what will survive the transmission?
reveal the half-life of the illicit,
unmake myself as a means of delay
watch for the obstructive foreplay.
Originally published in Hyperallergic. Copyright © 2017 jayy dodd. Used with permission of the author.
The yellow bittern that never broke out In a drinking bout, might as well have drunk; His bones are thrown on a naked stone Where he lived alone like a hermit monk. 0 yellow bittern! I pity your lot, Though they say that a sot like myself is curst I was sober a while, but I'll drink and be wise For I fear I should die in the end of thirst. It's not for the common birds that I'd mourn, The blackbird, the corn-crake, or the crane, But for the bittern that's shy and apart Where he drinks in the marsh from the lone bog-drain. Oh! if I had known you were near your death While my breath held out I'd have run to you, Till a splash from the Lake of the Son of the Bird Your soul would have stirred and waked anew. My darling told me to drink no more Or my life would be o'er in a little short while; But I told her 'tis drink gives me health and strength And will lengthen my road by many a mile. You see how the bird of the long smooth neck Could get his death from the thirst at last Come, son of my soul, and drain your cup, You'll get no sup when your life is past. In a wintering island by Constantine's halls A bittern calls from a wineless place, And tells me that hither he cannot come Till the summer is here and the sunny days. When he crosses the stream there and wings o'er the sea Then a fear comes to me he may fail in his flight— Well, the milk and the ale are drunk every drop, And a dram won't stop our thirst this night.
Translated by Thomas MacDonagh.
In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking—they were both walking—north.
She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.
In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:
Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.
From New Collected Poems by Eavan Boland. Copyright © 2008 by Eavan Boland. Reprinted by permission of W.W. Norton. All rights reserved.
Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses
Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.
Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.
“Anything Can Happen” from District and Circle by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 2006 by Seamus Heaney. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on September 5, 2013. Browse the Poem-a-Day archive.
im chaonaí uaigneach nach mór go bhfeicim an lá
I lie and imagine a first light gleam in the bay After one more night of erosion and nearer the grave, Then stand and gaze from the window at break of day As a shearwater skims the ridge of an incoming wave; And I think of my son a dolphin in the Aegean, A sprite among sails knife-bright in a seasonal wind, And wish he were here where currachs walk on the ocean To ease with his talk the solitude locked in my mind. I sit on a stone after lunch and consider the glow Of the sun through mist, a pearl bulb containèdly fierce; A rain-shower darkens the schist for a minute or so Then it drifts away and the sloe-black patches disperse. Croagh Patrick towers like Naxos over the water And I think of my daughter at work on her difficult art And wish she were with me now between thrush and plover, Wild thyme and sea-thrift, to lift the weight from my heart. The young sit smoking and laughing on the bridge at evening Like birds on a telephone pole or notes on a score. A tin whistle squeals in the parlour, once more it is raining, Turf-smoke inclines and a wind whines under the door; And I lie and imagine the lights going on in the harbor Of white-housed Náousa, your clear definition at night, And wish you were here to upstage my disconsolate labour As I glance through a few thin pages and switch off the light.
From Selected Poems, published by Viking/Gallery, 1991. Copyright © 1991 by Derek Mahon. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
someone is dressing up for death today, a change of skirt or tie eating a final feast of buttered sliced pan, tea scarcely having noticed the erection that was his last shaving his face to marble for the icy laying out spraying with deodorant her coarse armpit grass someone today is leaving home on business saluting, terminally, the neighbours who will join in the cortege someone is paring his nails for the last time, a precious moment someone’s waist will not be marked with elastic in the future someone is putting out milkbottles for a day that will not come someone’s fresh breath is about to be taken clean away someone is writing a cheque that will be rejected as ‘drawer deceased’ someone is circling posthumous dates on a calendar someone is listening to an irrelevant weather forecast someone is making rash promises to friends someone’s coffin is being sanded, laminated, shined who feels this morning quite as well as ever someone if asked would find nothing remarkable in today’s date perfume and goodbyes her final will and testament someone today is seeing the world for the last time as innocently as he had seen it first
Copyright © 2005 by Dennis O'Driscoll. From The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry, I. Used with permission of Wake Forest University Press.
The tide comes in; the tide goes out again washing the beach clear of what the storm dumped. Where there were rocks, today there is sand; where sand yesterday, now uncovered rocks. So I think on where her mortal remains might reach landfall in their transmuted forms, a year now since I cast them from my hand —wanting to stop the inexorable clock. She who died by her own hand cannot know the simple love I have for what she left behind. I could not save her. I could not even try. I watch the way the wind blows life into slack sail: the stress of warp against weft lifts the stalling craft, pushes it on out.
From The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women's Poetry by Peggy O'Brien. Copyright © 2012 by Paula Meehan. Reprinted with permission of Wake Forest University Press. All rights reserved.
The human brain wants to complete—
The poem too easy? Bored. The poem too hard?
Angry. What’s this one about? Around the block
the easy summer weather, the picture-puff clouds
adrift in the blue sky that’s no paint-by-numbers.
In the corner garden, the cabbage butterfly
bothers the big leafy heads, trying to complete
its life cycle by hatching a horned monster to
chew holes in the green cloth manufactured so
laboriously by seed germ from air, water,
light, dirt. There’s no end to this, yes, no end.
Even when we want to stop, stop, stop! Even
when someone else calls us monster. Even when
we fear and hope that we will not have the final
word.
Copyright © 2018 by Minnie Bruce Pratt. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 26, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
No matter how old you are,
it helps to be young
when you’re coming to life,
to be unfinished, a mysterious statement,
a journey from star to star.
So break out a box of Crayolas
and draw your family
looking uncomfortably away
from the you you’ve exchanged
for the mannequin
they named. You should
help clean up, but you’re so busy being afraid
to love or not
you're missing the fun of clothing yourself
in the embarrassment of life.
Frost your lids with midnight;
lid your heart with frost;
rub them all over, the hormones that regulate
the production of love
from karmic garbage dumps.
Turn yourself into
the real you
you can only discover
by being other.
Voila! You’re free.
Learn to love the awkward silence
you are going to be.
From The Future Is Trying to Tell Us Something: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Joy Ladin. Used with the permission of the author.
Within the restless, hurried, modern world
We took our hearts’ full pleasure—You and I,
And now the white sails of our ships are furled,
And spent the lading of our argosy.
Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,
For very weeping is my gladness fled,
Sorrow hath paled my lip’s vermilion
And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.
But all this crowded life has been to thee
No more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spell
Of viols, or the music of the sea
That sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.
This poem is in the public domain.
I started out in the Virginia mountains
with my grandma’s pansy bed
and my Aunt Maud’s dandelion wine.
We lived on greens and back-fat and biscuits.
My Aunt Maud scrubbed right through the linoleum.
My daddy was a Northerner who played drums
and chewed tobacco and gambled.
He married my mama on the rebound.
Who would want an ignorant hill girl with red hair?
They took a Pullman up to Indianapolis
and someone stole my daddy’s wallet.
My whole life has been stained with pokeberries.
No man seemed right for me. I was awkward
until I found a good wood-burning stove.
There is no use asking what it means.
With my first piece of ready cash I bought my own
place in Vermont; kerosene lamps, dirt road.
I’m sticking here like a porcupine up a tree.
Like the one our neighbor shot. Its bones and skin
hung there for three years in the orchard.
No amount of knowledge can shake my grandma out of me;
or my Aunt Maud; or my mama, who didn’t just bite an apple
with her big white teeth. She split it in two.
From What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). Copyright © 2010 by Ruth Stone. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press.
I am taken with the hot animal
of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs
and have them move as I intend, though
my knee, though my shoulder, though something
is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead
on the harbor beach: one mostly buried,
one with skin empty as a shell and hollow
feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,
I do not touch them. I imagine they
were startled to find themselves in the sun.
I imagine the tide simply went out
without them. I imagine they cannot
feel the black flies charting the raised hills
of their eyes. I write my name in the sand:
Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls
skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky.
I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg.
To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white
petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am
in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.
Copyright © 2017 by Donika Kelly. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 20, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
A golden age of love songs and we still
can't get it right. Does your kiss really taste
like butter cream? To me, the moon's bright face
was neither like a pizza pie nor full;
the Beguine began, but my eyelid twitched.
"No more I love you's," someone else assured
us, pouring out her heart, in love (of course)—
what bothers me the most is that high-pitched,
undone whine of "Why am I so alone?"
Such rueful misery is closer to
the truth, but once you turn the lamp down low,
you must admit that he is still the one,
and baby, baby he makes you so dumb
you sing in the shower at the top of your lungs.
Copyright © 2012 by Rafael Campo. Used with permission of the author.
I divested myself of despair and fear when I came here. Now there is no more catching one's own eye in the mirror, there are no bad books, no plastic, no insurance premiums, and of course no illness. Contrition does not exist, nor gnashing of teeth. No one howls as the first clod of earth hits the casket. The poor we no longer have with us. Our calm hearts strike only the hour, and God, as promised, proves to be mercy clothed in light.
From Constance by Jane Kenyon, published by Graywolf Press. © 1993 by Jane Kenyon. Used with permission. All rights reserved.