What the mouth sings, the soul must learn to forgive.
A rat’s as moral as a monk in the eyes of the real world.
Still, the heart is a river
pouring from itself, a river that cannot be crossed.

It opens on a bay
and turns back upon itself as the tide come sin,
it carries the cry of the loon and the salts
of the unutterably human.

A distant eagle enters the mouth of a river
salmon no longer run and his wide wings glide
upstream until he disappears
into the nothing from which he came. Only the thought remains.

Lacking the eagle’s cunning or the wisdom of the sparrow,
where shall I turn, drowning in sorrow?
Who will know what the trees know, the spidery patience
of young maple or what the willows confess?

Let me be water. The heart pours out in waves.
Listen to what the water says.
Wind, be a friend.
There’s nothing I couldn’t forgive.

From Gratitude (American Poets Continuum, 1998). Copyright © 1998 by Sam Hamill. Used with the permission of Eron Hamill.

Full moon rising on the waters of my heart, 
Lakes and moon and fires, 
Cloine tires,
Holding her lips apart. 

Promises of slumber leaving shore to charm the moon, 
Miracle made vesper-keeps, 
Cloine sleeps, 
And I’ll be sleeping soon. 

Cloine, curled like the sleepy waters where the 
        moon-waves start, 
Radiant, resplendently she gleams, 
Cloine dreams, 
Lips pressed against my heart. 

This poem is in the public domain. 

for the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters

One of the women greeted me.
I love you, she said. She didn’t
Know me, but I believed her,
And a terrible new ache
Rolled over in my chest,
Like in a room where the drapes
Have been swept back. I love you,
I love you, as she continued
Down the hall past other strangers,
Each feeling pierced suddenly
By pillars of heavy light.
I love you, throughout
The performance, in every
Handclap, every stomp.
I love you in the rusted iron
Chains someone was made
To drag until love let them be
Unclasped and left empty
In the center of the ring.
I love you in the water
Where they pretended to wade,
Singing that old blood-deep song
That dragged us to those banks
And cast us in. I love you,
The angles of it scraping at
Each throat, shouldering past
The swirling dust motes
In those beams of light
That whatever we now knew
We could let ourselves feel, knew
To climb. O Woods—O Dogs—
O Tree—O Gun—O Girl, run
O Miraculous Many Gone—
O Lord—O Lord—O Lord—
Is this love the trouble you promised?

 

From Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. Used with the permission of Graywolf Press.

“The water” “of the river” “was mild-temperatured,” “the current
gentle” “I soon began” “to swim—” “in a moonless,” “starless darkness”
“The sky held no clouds—” “no luminous” “spheres existed here”
“Yet the sky was” “a sky;” “for the river air” “was fresh & sweet”

“Then,” “as I swam,” “the others I contained—” “my companions
from the subway—” “weightlessly” “emerged from me,” “looking
shadow-like,” “& quickly” “solid-bodied” “began to swim with me”
“I never really” “saw their faces” “We swam quietly,” “concentrating,”

“our motions almost synchronized” “In the distance sat” “small yellow
lights” “where presumably” “the other shore lay” “Partway across”
“the river,” “something else, a substance,” “a state of being,”
“a thick noxious" "distress” “in the form of” “a gray cloud,”

“welled up within me” “& left my body” “from a point along“ “my spine”
“The cloud” “hovered near us” “& so we turned onto” “our backs to
watch it” “It was full of" "ghoulish faces,” “phosphorescent” “death’s
heads;” “one skull grew large” “& open-mouthed” “It had long” “glowing

hair,” “screamed as if” “in terror,” “then spoke” “to me:”
“ ‘We are dying” “You are killing us” “killing us’” “The cloud exploded”
“into greenish flame” “which was soon consumed” “by darkness”
“We turned over” “& resumed” “our swimming”

From Book Three of The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley, copyright © 1992 by Alice Notley. Used by peromission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.

Lord,
          when you send the rain,
          think about it, please,
          a little?
  Do
          not get carried away
          by the sound of falling water,
          the marvelous light
          on the falling water.
    I
          am beneath that water.
          It falls with great force
          and the light
Blinds
          me to the light.

From Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems by James Baldwin (Beacon Press, 2014). Copyright © 2014 The James Baldwin Estate. Used by permission of Beacon Press.

The water is one thing, and one thing for miles.
The water is one thing, making this bridge
Built over the water another. Walk it
Early, walk it back when the day goes dim, everyone
Rising just to find a way toward rest again.
We work, start on one side of the day
Like a planet’s only sun, our eyes straight
Until the flame sinks. The flame sinks. Thank God
I’m different. I’ve figured and counted. I’m not crossing
To cross back. I’m set
On something vast. It reaches
Long as the sea. I’m more than a conqueror, bigger
Than bravery. I don’t march. I’m the one who leaps.

From The Tradition. Copyright © 2019 by Jericho Brown. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press. 

All the things we hide in water
hoping we won't see them go—
(forests growing under water
press against the ones we know)—

and they might have gone on growing
and they might now breathe above
everything I speak of sowing
(everything I try to love).

From Calendars by Annie Finch, published by Tupelo Press. Copyright © 2003 by Annie Finch. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Tupelo Press.

I
Among starving polar bears, 
The only moving thing 
Was the edge of a glacier.
 
II
We are of one ecology
Like a planet
In which there are 200,000 glaciers.
 
III
The glacier absorbed greenhouse gases. 
We are a large part of the biosphere.
 
IV
Humans and animals 
Are kin. 
Humans and animals and glaciers 
Are kin.
 
V
We do not know which to fear more,
The terror of change
Or the terror of uncertainty, 
The glacier calving
Or just after.
 
VI
Icebergs fill the vast Ocean
With titanic wrecks. 
The mass of the glacier 
Disappears, to and fro. 
The threat
Hidden in the crevasse
An unavoidable cause.
 
VII
O vulnerable humans,
Why do you engineer sea walls?
Do you not see how the glacier
Already floods the streets
Of the cities around you?
 
VIII
I know king tides, 
And lurid, inescapable storms; 
But I know, too, 
That the glacier is involved 
In what I know.
 
IX
When the glacial terminus broke, 
It marked the beginning 
Of one of many waves.
 
X
At the rumble of a glacier
Losing its equilibrium, 
Every tourist in the new Arctic
chased ice quickly.
 
XI
They explored the poles 
for offshore drilling. 
Once, we blocked them, 
In that we understood 
The risk of an oil spill
For a glacier.
 
XII
The sea is rising.
The glacier must be retreating.
 
XIII
It was summer all winter. 
It was melting 
And it was going to melt.
The glacier fits
In our warm-hands.
 

Copyright © 2016 by Craig Santos Perez. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier” originally appeared in Newsletter of the Comparative Literature Association of the Republic of China. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Then I came to an edge of very calm
But couldn’t stay there. It was the washed greenblue mapmakers use to indicate
Inlets and coves, softbroken contours where the land leaves off
And water lies plainly, as if lamped by its own justice. I hardly know how to say how it was
Though it spoke to me most kindly,
Unlike a hard afterwards or the motions of forestalling.

Now in evening light the far-off ridge carries marks of burning.
The hills turn thundercolored, and my thoughts move toward them, rough skins
Without their bodies. What is the part of us that feels it isn’t named, that doesn’t know
How to respond to any name? That scarcely or not at all can lift its head
Into the blue and so unfold there?

Excerpted from Capitivity by Laurie Sheck. Copyright © 2007 by Laurie Sheck. Used by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

We travel carrying our words.
We arrive at the ocean.
With our words we are able to speak
of the sounds of thunderous waves.
We speak of how majestic it is,
of the ocean power that gifts us songs.
We sing of our respect
and call it our relative.

 

Translated into English from O’odham by the poet.

 

’U’a g T-ñi’okı˘


T-ñi’okı˘ ’att ’an o ’u’akc o hihi
Am ka:ck wui dada.
S-ap ‘am o ’a: mo has ma:s g kiod.
mat ’am ’ed.a betank ’i-gei.
’Am o ’a: mo he’es ’i-ge’ej,
mo hascu wud.  i:da gewkdagaj
mac ’ab amjed.  behě g ñe’i.
Hemhoa s-ap ‘am o ’a: mac si has elid, mo d.  ’i:mig.

Used with the permission of the author.