From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
Li-Young Lee, “From Blossoms” from Rose. Copyright © 1986 by Li-Young Lee. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., boaeditions.org.
The translucent claws of newborn mice
this pearl cast of color,
the barely perceptible
like a ghosted threshold of being:
here not here.
The single breath we hold
on the thinnest verge of sight:
not there there.
A curve nearly naked
an arc of almost,
a wisp of becoming
a wand—
tiny enough to change me.
Copyright © 2020 by Kimberly Blaeser. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 8, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
My friends without shields walk on the target It is late the windows are breaking My friends without shoes leave What they love Grief moves among them as a fire among Its bells My friends without clocks turn On the dial they turn They part My friends with names like gloves set out Bare handed as they have lived And nobody knows them It is they that lay the wreaths at the milestones it is their Cups that are found at the wells And are then chained up My friends without feet sit by the wall Nodding to the lame orchestra Brotherhood it says on the decorations My friend without eyes sits in the rain smiling With a nest of salt in his hand My friends without fathers or houses hear Doors opening in the darkness Whose halls announce Behold the smoke has come home My friends and I have in common The present a wax bell in a wax belfry This message telling of Metals this Hunger for the sake of hunger this owl in the heart And these hands one For asking one for applause My friends with nothing leave it behind In a box My friends without keys go out from the jails it is night They take the same road they miss Each other they invent the same banner in the dark They ask their way only of sentries too proud to breathe At dawn the stars on their flag will vanish The water will turn up their footprints and the day will rise Like a monument to my Friends the forgotten
From The Moving Target, by W. S. Merwin, published by Atheneum. Copyright © 1963 by W. S. Merwin. Used with permission.
The slow crawling light wilts
into the dark flat of asphalt.
The moon rings the dim-lit room.
The scraping. The fire.
Dust
in the deep flesh of ear.
Strike a match, watch the flame—
the scraping, the fire, ring
in unison,
the brain’s bent
fugue.
Yoked mica, deafened glint—
scrape and fire, the moon ringing
the dim-lit room.
A louse in the crevice
of brain—
wrinkle-scape
in knuckles flexed
lashed, etched,
around the steel—
the affliction
of squalor—a pummeling
—skull
and brain
smelted in a starless dark.
Copyright © 2020 by Santee Frazier. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 22, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
I have carried in my coat, black wet
with rain. I stand. I clear my throat.
My coat drips. The carved door closes
on its slow brass hinge. City noises—
car horns, bicycle bells, the respiration
truck engines, the whimpering
steel in midtown taxi brakes—bend
in through the doorjamb with the wind
then drop away. The door shuts plumb: it seals
the world out like a coffin lid. A chill,
dampened and dense with the spent breath
of old Hail Marys, lifts from the smoothed
stone of the nave. I am here to pay
my own respects, but I will wait:
my eyes must grow accustomed
to church light, watery and dim.
I step in. Dark forms hunch forward
in the pews. Whispering, their heads
are bowed, their mouths pressed
to the hollows of clasped hands.
High overhead, a gathering of shades
glows in stained glass: the resurrected
mingle with the dead and martyred
in panes of blue, green, yellow, red.
Beneath them lies the golden holy
altar, holding its silence like a bell,
and there, brightly skeletal beside it,
the organ pipes: cold, chrome, quiet
but alive with a vibration tolling
out from the incarnate
source of holy sound. I turn, shivering
back into my coat. The vaulted ceiling
bends above me like an ear. It waits:
I hold my tongue. My body is my prayer.
Copyright © 2020 by Malachi Black. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 3, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
He predicted froth, and geese
took to the sky like a hurricane.
I trust my captain. He told me
when I turn over on my stomach in sleep
to think of loneliness. I draw a circle
and put an X through it for here, meaning ship.
All I packed was an empty pillowcase and aspirin
and rain I collected. The geese turn their bodies
into clouds for me to pour the rain.
Nights I tuck my fingers into feathers
and repeat a song I was sung as a baby.
Copyright © 2018 Joanna I. Kaminsky. Reprinted with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in The Southern Review, Autumn 2018.