This is my give-away—
not because I don’t want
it anymore,
not because it’s out of
style or
broken or
useless since it lost
its lid or one of its buttons,
not because I don’t understand
the “value” of things.
This is my give-away—
because I have enough
to share with you
because I have been given
so much
health love happiness
pain sorrow fear
to share from the heart
in a world where words can be
meaningless when they come
only from the head.
This is my give-way—
to touch what is good in you
with words your heart can hear
like ripples from a pebble
dropped in water
moving outward growing
wider touching others.
You are strong.
You are kind.
You are beautiful.
This is my give-away.
Wopida ye.
Wopida ye.
Wopida ye.
Copyright © 2021 by Gwen Westerman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 26, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
for Willem
My love,
you are water upon water
upon water until it turns
azure, mountainous.
The horizon fills like sand
between glass marbles. So much
has passed between us—
last night you told me
to press your hand
harder and harder as I pained.
The sunset was at its last
embers. The dark was stealing
the blue light from our room.
I was falling into you.
~ ~
Compress water and it turns to ice— compress beauty
and it loses breath. Gaze at it too long, and even the wide
mirror of the ocean will shatter.
~ ~
My Willem,
between us, God has descended in all His atoms.
We have not yet learned to hold Him.
Copyright © 2021 by Adeeba Shahid Talukder. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 20, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
for my favorite auntie, Jeanette
Sometimes I think I’m never going to write a poem again
and then there’s a full moon.
I miss being in love but I miss
myself most when I’m gone.
In the salty wet air of my ancestry
my auntie peels a mango with her teeth
and I’m no longer
writing political poems; because there are
mangoes and my favorite memory is still alive.
I’m digging for meaning but haunted by purpose
and it’s an insufficient approach.
What’s the margin of loss on words not spent today?
I’m getting older. I’m buying smaller images to travel light.
I wake up, I light up, I tidy, and it’s all over now.
Copyright © 2021 by Camonghne Felix. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 7, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Auntie lies in the rest home with a feeding tube and a bedpan, she weighs nothing, she fidgets and shakes, and all I can see are her knotted hands and the carbon facets of her eyes, she was famous for her pies and her kindness to neighbors, but if it is true that every hat exhibits a drama the psyche wishes it could perform, what was my aunt saying all the years of my childhood when she squeezed into cars with those too tall hats, those pineapples and colored cockades, my aunt who told me I should travel slowly or I would see too much before I died, wore spires and steeples, tulled toques. The velvet inkpots of Schiaparelli, the mousseline de soie of Lilly Daché have disappeared into the world, leaving behind one flesh-colored box, Worth stenciled on the top, a coral velvet cloche inside with matching veil and drawstring bag, and what am I to make of these Dolores del Rio size 4 black satin wedgies with constellations of spangles on the bridge. Before she climbed into the white boat of the nursing home and sailed away--talking every day to family in heaven, calling them through the sprinkling system--my aunt said she was pushing her cart through the grocery when she saw young girls at the end of an aisle pointing at her, her dowager's hump, her familial tremors. Auntie, who claimed that ninety pounds was her fighting weight, carried her head high, hooded, turbaned, jeweled, her neck straight under pounds of roots and vegetables that shimmied when she walked. Surely this is not the place of women in our world, that when we are old and curled like crustaceans, young girls will laugh at us, point their fingers, run as fast as they can in the opposite direction.
From Except By Nature published by Graywolf Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Sandra Alcosser. All rights reserved. Used with permission.