I have oared and grieved, grieved and oared, treading a religion of fear. A frayed nerve. A train wreck tied to the train of an old idea. Now, Lord, reeling in violent times, I drag these tidal griefs to this gate. I am tired. Deliver me, whatever you are. Help me, you who are never near, hold what I love and grieve, reveal this green evening, myself, rain, drone, evil, greed, as temporary. Granted then gone. Let me rail, revolt, edge out, glove to the grate. I am done waiting like some invalid begging in the nave. Help me divine myself, beside me no Virgil urging me to shift gear, change lane, sing my dirge for the rent, torn world, and love your silence without veering into rage.
Copyright © 2018 by Donna Masini. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 5, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
I sing the will to love: the will that carves the will to live, the will that saps the will to hurt, the will that kills the will to die; the will that made and keeps you warm, the will that points your eyes ahead, the will that makes you give, not get, a give and get that tell us what you are: how much a god, how much a human. I call on you to live the will to love.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on May 6, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Poem for Aretha Franklin when she opens her mouth our world swells like dawn on the pond when the sun licks the water & the jay garbles, the whole quiet thing coming into tune, the gnats, frogs, the dandelion pollen, the pebbles & leaves & the whole world of us sitting at the throat of the jay dancing in the throat of the jay all of us on the lip of the jay singing doowop, doowop, do.
Copyright © 2018 by Crystal Williams. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 8, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Three days into his wake my father has not risen. He remains encased in pine, hollowed- out, his body unsealed, organs harvested, then zippered shut like a purse. How strange to see one’s face inside a coffin. The son at my most peaceful. The father at his most peaceful. Not even the loud chorus of wailing family members can rid us of our sleep. My mother sits front center. Regal in black, her eyes sharpened as Cleopatra’s. Her children, grown and groaning, quietly moan beside a white copse of trumpeting flowers. The church is forested with immigrants, spent after their long journey to another country to die. Before the casket is to be closed, we all rise to bid our final farewells. My mother lowers herself, kisses the trinity of the forehead and cheeks, then motions her obedient children to follow. One by one my siblings hover, perch, and peck. I stand over my father as I had done on occasions of safe approach: in his sleep, or splayed like a crushed toad on the floor, drunk. I study him, planetary, distant presence both bodily and otherworldly, a deceptive kind of knowledge. His beauty has waned but not faded, face surface of a moon, not ours, I turn pale, shivering, I place my hand on his, amphibious. While my mother places her hand warm on the cradle of my back, where I bend to fit into my body. Her burning eyes speak, Do it for me, they urge, Kiss your father goodbye. I refuse.
Copyright © 2018 by Joseph O. Legaspi. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 17, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
I have taken scales from off The cheeks of the moon. I have made fins from bluejays’ wings, I have made eyes from damsons in the shadow. I have taken flushes from the peachlips in the sun. From all these I have made a fish of heaven for you, Set it swimming on a young October sky. I sit on the bank of the stream and watch The grasses in amazement As they turn to ashy gold. Are the fishes from the rainbow Still beautiful to you, For whom they are made, For whom I have set them, Swimming?
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 3, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
turns out there are more planets than stars more places to land than to be burned I have always been in love with last chances especially now that they really do seem like last chances the trill of it all upending what’s left of my head after we explode are you ready to ascend in the morning I will take you on the wing
Copyright © 2019 by D. A. Powell. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 28, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
When I rose into the cradle
of my mother’s mind, she was but
a girl, fighting her sisters
over a flimsy doll. It’s easy
to forget how noiseless I could be
spying from behind my mother’s eyes
as her mother, bulging with a baby,
a real-life Tiny Tears, eclipsed
the doorway with a moon. We all
fell silent. My mother soothed the torn
rag against her chest and caressed
its stringy hair. Even before the divergence
of girl from woman, woman from mother,
I was there: quiet as a vein, quick
as hot, brimming tears. In the decades
before my birthday, years before
my mother’s first blood, I was already
prized. Hers was a hunger
that mattered, though sometimes
she forgot and I dreamed the dream
of orange trees then startled awake
days or hours later. I could’ve been
almost anyone. Before I was a daughter,
I was a son, honeycomb clenching
the O of my mouth. I was a mother—
my own—nursing a beginning.
Copyright © 2019 by Ama Codjoe. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 2, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
One river gives
Its journey to the next.
We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.
We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.
We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—
Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.
Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:
Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.
You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me
What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made
Something greater from the difference.
Copyright © 2014 by Alberto Ríos. Used with permission of the author.
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is
From Migration: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright © 1988 by W. S. Merwin. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
There is a faith that weakly dies
When overcast by clouds of doubt,
That like a blazing wisp of straw
A vagrant breeze will flicker out.
Be mine the faith whose living flame
Shall pierce the clouds and banish night,
Whose glow the hurricanes increase
To match the gleams of heaven’s night.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 30, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
By which a strip of land became a hole in time
—Durs Grünbein
Grandfather I cannot find,
flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone,
what country do you belong to:
where is your body buried,
where did your soul go
when the road led nowhere?
Grandfather I’ll never know,
the moment father last saw you
rips open a wormhole
that has no end: the hours
became years, the years
forever: and on the other side
lies a memory of a memory
or a dream of a dream of a dream
of another life, where what happened
never happened, what cannot come true
comes true: and neither erases
the other, or the other others,
world after world, to infinity—
If only I could cross the border
and find you there,
find you anywhere,
as if you could tell me who he is, or was,
or might have become:
no bloodshot eyes, or broken
bottles, or praying with cracked lips
because the past is past and was is not is—
Grandfather, stranger,
give me back my father—
or not back, not back, give me the father
I might have had:
there, in the country that no longer exists,
on the other side of the war—
Copyright © 2019 by Suji Kwock Kim. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 6, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
What happens when God sits down for dinner?
Do you set the table for two, three or four?
What happens if you only have a loaf of bread
and a one-pound block of butter,
do you ask him to perform a miracle?
What do you do when God puts his hands on the table,
fingers flay, bull and lamb belly up, pink-red palms
asking for forgiveness?
What happens to forgiveness when God is your father
and you discover he’s just a man with two hands—
can a bull and a lamb be still on the tines of a fork?
Or are they votive candles burning on the altar of your plate?
Those paraffin hands, waxwing feathers in prayer.
How else can hope look
if not like a spoon to your lips, a sparrow
with new wings
beating air from the comfort of its perch?
This is how we move forward,
you unclasp your hands and surrender flight
before you pick up the butter knife.
Copyright © 2014 b: william bearheart. This poem originally appeared in Tupelo Quarterly. Reprinted with the permission of Carrie Bearheart.
i am witness to the threshing of the grain the man of corn hanging from a dry oak bough bade us to be silent in our flailing he bade us the understanding that pervades the silence that is veiled his whisper is no louder than the locust bade us no louder whrr chk chk whrr whrr chk chk flailed man threshed and scythed hung man of the harvest wheat bearded one unfleshed none the mistletoe on our smoky plain thus man sheared by the sun sterile fruit of the dry oak bough hanging turned gently to caress a wing of crows and turned and saw and bade us to be silent
From Journey to the End by John Hoffman. Copyright © 2008 by John Hoffman. Used by permission of City Lights Publishers. All rights reserved.
The last thin acre of stalks that stood
Was never the end of the wheat.
Always something fled to the wood,
As if the field had feet.
In front of the sickle something rose—
Mouse, or weasel, or hare;
We struck and struck, but our worst blows
Dangled in the air.
Nothing could touch the little soul
Of the grain. It ran to cover,
And nobody knew in what warm hole
It slept till the winter was over,
And early seeds lay cold in the ground.
Then—but nobody saw—
It burrowed back with never a sound,
And awoke the thaw.
This poem is in the public domain.
1
Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.
O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead?
Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.
2
Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.
What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will
none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.
This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on April 13, 2013. Browse the Poem-a-Day archive. This poem is in the public domain.