wretched thou art
wherever thou art
I sit and work on a line and lean into the pain my mind
continues
trying to think and all I come up with is a texture without
ideas
and to whatever
thou turnest —
the body I have is the body I once had but they could not
differ more
the teacher Agnes says abstract form holds meaning
beyond words
I turn the pages
of the old book
the way certain feelings come to us with no discernible
worldly cause
the teacher Buddha says the practitioner agitated by
thoughts
I have not held
since childhood
makes stronger their bondage to suffering and the sting
of becoming
during the time illness makes me feel most tied to the
material world
its binding broken
its brittle paper
I sit in meditation and sunlight from the window calms
my nausea
since the emergency I feel such sharp tenderness toward
common objects
its dog-eared corners
torn at the folds —
sort of attached to the white wall white door white dust
on the wood floor
mostly pain is an endless present tense without depth or
discernible shape
miserable are all
who have not
an image or memory lends it a passing contour or a sort of
border
the white door open against the white wall snuffs
headache’s first flare
a sense of present
life’s corruption
I remember a man patiently crying as doctors drained his
infected wound
lying on the gurney in my hospital gown we suffered
from having been being
but much more
miserable are those
adjacent and precarious the way a practitioner sits alone
on a cushion
resting alone unwearied alone taming himself yet I was
no longer alone
in love with it —
Copyright © 2015 by Brian Teare. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 16, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
I would have liked then for someone to touch me
So I could know the purpose of this hardship.
Black-eyed and impassive as a canyon,
From the hive of my mind, I looked at their faces
As I moved between rows of espaliered pears.
I only intended for someone to show
Me, once, an affection like the sun
Shows even the simplest bulb, entering what’s hidden.
Let me show them instead the picture
In a knife’s reflection, take down my hair
Where the gravedigger kneels among new potatoes.
Behind my teeth are headstones, and behind those
Skeletons of cavemen, of dinosaurs,
And under my skin: alphabets, alphabets
In black ink, a legacy of histories tiny and alive
As an ant army marching toward forever.
Understand, please—I, too, have a splendid use,
This world could not get rid of me if it wanted to.
Copyright © 2016 by Monica Ferrell. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 7, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
It’s love you left, we’ll say
when you never come back
for bells for the dead, for the grave
stone heads: the only ones
that don’t keep count. Don’t
we know it’s love that keeps you
away, that marks every mile
devotion? You would’ve went
to the end with each one,
made Orpheus turn back.
Would’ve fell / would’ve leapt /
would’ve left. The living is easy
/ the leaving is easy / living
with ghosts, it was easy
to give up your home
to your father, struck
with the same grief
of living, demanding
what are you gonna do
with my mama’s house?
Shorn grass & damp dirt:
they’ll put me in the middle.
I kick the ground like tires,
feeling dumb without flowers /
tokens / grief / anything
in my hands. You’ll bring me
back home, won’t you? Stamp
it down, as if the flat earth
could answer sometimes this,
too, is love. You left.
Copyright © 2016 Gary Jackson. Used with permission of the author.
Mice drink the rainwater before dying by
the poison we set in the cupboard for them.
They come for the birdseed, and winter
is so grey here the sight of a single cardinal
can keep us warm for days. We’ll justify
anything—and by we, I mean I, and by
I, I mean we, with our man-is-the-only-
animal-who and our manifest destiny, killers
each of us by greater or lesser degrees.
Instead of a gun or knife in my pocket
there are two notes. Unwhich the//
dandelion, reads one. I don’t know what
it means but cannot throw it away;
it is soft as cashmere. The other says:
coffee, chocolate, birdseed. I should be
extinct by now, except I can’t make it
on to that list either. Like toothpicks
made of plain wood, some things are
increasingly hard to find. Even when he was
a young drunk going deaf from target practice,
my father preferred picking his teeth
to brushing them. My mother preferred
crying. They bought or rented places
on streets named Castle, Ring, Greystone—
as if we were heroes in a Celtic epic.
Our romanticism was earned, and leaned
toward the gothic, but lichen aimed
for names on gravestones far
lovelier than our own. It seemed to last
a long time, that long time ago, finches
pixelating the hurricane fences,
cars idling exhaust, dandelions bolting
from flower to weed to delicacy,
like me. Egyptians prepared their dead
for a difficult journey; living is more
—I was going to say, more difficult,
but more alone will do, imprudent—
unlike art—always falling below or rising
above the Aristotelian mean. In France,
a common rural road sign reads:
Animal Prudence. Purely cautionary,
it has nothing to do with Aristotle,
but offers sound advice nonetheless.
These days, I caution my father more
than he ever cautioned me. He hears
his aural hallucinations better and shows
greater interest: sportscasters at ballgames,
revelers at the parties he insists on.
He’s got all his own teeth, so toothpicks
must do the job. His pockets fill with them.
There are always half a dozen rattling
like desert bones in my dryer. I think
of the mason who chiseled his face
in the cathedral wall; he couldn’t write
his name. The yellow bouquets I’d offer
my mother by the fistful also got their name
in France: dent de lion, meaning teeth of the lion.
Copyright © 2016 by Kathy Fagan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 23, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
Somewhere between what it feels like, to be at
one with the sea, and to understand the sea as
mere context for the boat whose engine refuses
finally to turn over: yeah, I know the place—
stumbled into it myself, once; twice, almost. All
around and in between the two trees that
grow there, tree of compassion and—much taller—
tree of pity, its bark more bronze, the snow
settled as if an openness of any kind meant, as well,
a woundedness that, by filling it, the snow
might heal…You know what I think? I think if we’re
lost, you should know exactly where, by now; I’ve
watched you stare long and hard enough at the map
already…I’m beginning to think I may never
not be undecided, about all sorts of things: whether
snow really does resemble the broken laughter
of the long-abandoned when what left comes back
big-time; whether gratitude’s just a haunted
space like any other. This place sounds daily
more like a theater of war, each time I listen to it—
loss, surprise, victory, being only three of the countless
fates, if you want to call them that, that we don’t
so much live with, it seems, as live for now among. If as
close as we’re ever likely to get, you and I, is this—this close—
Copyright © 2016 by Carl Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 19, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
There are poets with history and poets without history, Tsvetsaeva claimed living
through the ruin of Russia.
Karina says disavow every time I see her. We, the daughters between countries,
wear our mean mothers like scarves around our necks.
Every visit, mine recounts all the wrongs done against her
ring sent for polishing returned with a lesser diamond, Years of never rest and,
she looks at me, of nothing to be proud of.
I am covered in welts and empty pockets so large sobs escape me in the backroom of
my Landlord's fabric shop. He moves to wipe my tears
as if I’m his daughter
or I’m no one’s daughter.
It’s true, I let him take my hand, I am a girl who needs something. I slow cook bone
grief, use a weak voice.
My mother calls me the girl with holes in her hands, every time I lose something.
All Russian daughters were snowflakes once, and in their hair a ribbon long
as their body knotted and knotted and knotted into a large translucent bow.
It happens, teachers said, that a child between countries will refuse to speak.
A girl with a hole in her throat, every day I opened the translation book.
Silent, I took my shoes off when I came home, I
put my house clothes on.
We had no songs, few rituals. On Yom Kippur, we lit a candle for the dead
and no one knew a prayer.
We kept the candle lit, that’s all.
The wave always returns, and always returns a different wave.
I was small. I built a self outside my self because a child needs shelter.
Not even you knew I was strange,
I ate the food my family ate, I answered to my name.
Copyright © 2018 by Gala Mukomolova. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 9, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
The hurt returns as it always intended—it is tender as the inside of my thighs, it is as blue, too. O windless, wingless sky, show me your empire of loneliness, let me spring from the jaws of what tried to kill me. Let me look at your face and see a heaven worth having, all your sorry angels falling off a piano bench, laughing. Do you burn because you remember darkness? Outside the joy is clamoring. It is almost like the worst day of your life is ordinary for everyone else.
Copyright © 2019 by Ruth Awad. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 5, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
When the forensics nurse inspected me, she couldn’t
see the tenderness he showed me after. My walk home
squirmed sore with night. I passed the earthworms
displaced to sidewalk, their bodies apostrophed
in the sun. I did not anticipate a grief
so small, my noun of a prayer, Eat dirt to make dirt.
Took a man’s hand as he led me to cave. So long
as I breathed, I could huff violets in his dank, practice
earth’s gasp. Mother lifts daughter, daughter casts
look at camera, a killer, a stick in the mud. I hold
my own hand. When the forensic nurse inspected
me, I described the house, historic blue. Asked me
to push my hips down. Little crescent moons
where his nails stabbed into me. She gave me
the word abrasion so gently I offered consent. Blue
as the moon when I sighed wait, blue as the no of my
throat. Abrasion, possibly extended form of red.
Harm results in a starry night too, many galaxies
scraped under the nail of a heavenly body. Ah my
second earth, its wounds hardened into swallowed
prophylaxis, an injection pooling between muscle
and skin. A woke seed. Deadarmed anti-moons
aggregated. A storm can travel seeds up to 30 miles
away. They dust on the sidewalks like lost data.
He did not intend Did not. Bloody speculum
a telescope searching the angry night sky for proof.
Copyright © 2019 by Natalie Eilbert. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 21, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
Translated by Jacob Rogers
I, wearing heron symmetrically opposed over my chest,
swore to the five emperors that there was no such thing as balance, that if herons upheld
the rivers on all Chinese porcelain it was
simply due to
a locking mechanism in their joints.
they awarded me for risking everything in my defense.
I wrote to you a few years later. I said:
Rostock, sixth of July,
it’s awful of me to interrupt, but I just
need you to understand how certain kinds of wounds can be useful.
I’m finishing up an essay
on pre-modern explanations for bird migration,
and all the species seen since Aristotle’s time as either moon travelers
or sailors that very rarely return.
I even studied a pamphlet from 1703
that argues for the communion of swallows,
that they gather in wetlands
and follow a specific choreography to perch on top of the rushes
until they sink.
they spend winters underwater, in the hypnotic calm of the muck,
and that’s why they emerge so klein damp in spring.
but in 1822 (I carefully attached the photograph),
an arrow pierced the neck of a stork in central Africa
and the bird began its flight bearing both weapon and wound.
when it reached Germany, someone identified the origin of the projectile,
and went on to form a scientific hypothesis.
I don’t remember much more of the letter, except:
pain and brightness are distributed in equal parts,
and lightness only exists because of past excess.
Since it’s the migratory season (I concluded)
I hope you don’t mind if I bypass the formula for farewells—
Atlantic in between us,
every anemone is fluttering along with the currents.
"Historia apócrifa do descubrimento das migracións ou O sacrificio das Pfeilstörchen"
eu, que levo garzas simetricamente opostas sobre o peito,
xurei ante os cinco emperadores que o equilibrio non existía, que se as garzas sostiñan
os ríos de toda a porcelana chinesa era
tan só
por un mecanismo de bloqueo na articulación.
premiáronme por arriscar todo na defensa.
uns anos despois escribinche. dicía:
Rostock, seis de xullo,
que atroz interromperte; verás,
necesito que entendas a utilidade de certo tipo de feridas.
estou rematando un ensaio
sobre as explicacións pre-modernas da migración das aves,
e as especies tratadas, desde Aristóteles, como viaxeiras á lúa
ou mariñeiras que raramente volven.
estudei incluso un panfleto de 1703
que defende a comuñón das andoriñas,
a súa reunión en pantanos
e a coreografía que respectan para pousarse nos xuncos
até afundilos.
invernan baixo as augas, na calma hipnótica dos lameiros,
e por iso emerxen tan klein mollado en primavera.
pero en 1822 (adxuntei coidadosamente a fotografía),
unha frecha atravesa o pescozo dunha cegoña en África central
e a ave emprende o voo cargado coa arma e coa ferida.
cando chega a Alemaña, alguén identifica a orixe do proxectil
e confirma, así, unha hipótese científica.
pouco máis lembro da carta, salvo:
a partes iguais se distribúe a dor e a luz,
e ao final, a lixeireza existe porque existiu o exceso.
Sendo o tempo das migracións (concluía)
permíteme evitar a fórmula de despedida,
Atlántico por medio,
ondean coas correntes todas as anemones.
© 2019 Alba Cid and Jacob Rogers. Published in Poem-a-Day in partnership with Words Without Borders on September 14, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
Spring in Hell and everything’s blooming.
I dreamt the worst was over but it wasn’t.
Suppose my punishment was fields of lilies sharper than razors, cutting up fields of lies.
Suppose my punishment was purity, mined and blanched.
They shunned me only because I knew I was stunning.
Then the white plague came, and their pleas were like a river.
Summer was orgiastic healing, snails snaking around wrists.
In heat, garbage festooned the sidewalks.
Old men leered at bodies they couldn’t touch
until they did. I shouldn’t have laughed but I laughed
at their flesh dozing into their spines, their bones crunching like snow.
Once I was swollen and snowblind with grief, left for dead
at the castle door. Then I robbed the castle and kissed my captor,
my sadness, learned she was not a villain. To wake up in this verdant field,
to watch the lilies flay the lambs. To enter paradise,
a woman drinks a vial of amnesia. Found in only the palest
flowers, the ones that smell like rotten meat. To summon the stinky
flower and access its truest aroma, you have to let its stigma show.
You have to let the pollen sting your eyes until you close them.
Copyright © 2019 by Sally Wen Mao. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 31, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
Mayagüez, Puerto Rico 1856
I. The First Horse
Cholera swarmed unseen through the water, lurking in wells and fountains,
squirming in garbage and excrement, infinitesimal worms drilling the intestines,
till all the water and salt would pour from the body, till the body became a worm,
shriveling and writhing, a slug in salt, till the skin burned blue as flame, the skin
of the peasant and the skin of the slave gone blue, the skin in the slave barracks blue,
the skin of ten thousand slaves blue. The Blue Death, face hidden in a bandanna,
dug graves with the gravediggers, who fell into holes they shoveled for the dead.
The doctors died too, seeing the signs in the mirror, the hand with the razor shaking.
II. The Second Horse
Doctor Betances stepped off the boat, back from Paris, the humidity of the plague
glistening in his beard. He saw the stepmother who fed him sink into a mound
of dirt, her body empty as the husk of a locust in drought.He toweled off his hands.
In the quarantine tents there was laudanum by the bitter spoonful, the lemonade
and broth; in the dim of the kerosene lamps there was the compress cool against
the forehead, the elixir of the bark from the cinchona tree. For peasants and slaves
moaning to their gods, the doctor prescribed chilled champagne to soothe the belly.
For the commander of the Spanish garrison, there was silence bitter as the spoon.
III. The Third Horse
At every hacienda, at every plantation, as the bodies of slaves rolled one by one
into ditches all hipbones and ribs, drained of water and salt, stripped of names,
Doctor Betances commanded the torch for the barracks where the bodies would
tangle together, stacked up as if they never left the ship that sailed from Africa,
kept awake by the ravenous worms of the plague feasting upon them. Watching
the blue flames blacken the wood, the doctor and the slaves saw another plague
burning away, the plague of manacles scraping the skin from hands that cut
the cane, the plague of the collar with four spikes for the runaways brought back.
IV. The Fourth Horse
The pestilence of the masters, stirred by spoons into the coffee of the world,
spread first at the marketplace, at auction, the coins passing from hand to hand.
So Doctor Betances began, at church, with twenty-five pesos in pieces of eight,
pirate coins dropped into the hands of slaves to drop into the hands of masters,
buying their own infants at the baptismal font. The secret society of abolitionists
shoved rowboats full of runaways off the docks in the bluest hour of the blue night,
off to islands without masters. Even the doctor would strangle in the executioner’s
garrote, spittle in his beard, if the soldiers on watch woke up from the opiate of empire.
V. The Fifth Horse
The governor circled his name in the name of empire, so Doctor Betances
sailed away to exile, the island drowning in his sight, but a vision stung
his eyes like salt in the wind: in the world after the plague, no more
plague of manacles; after the pestilence, no more pestilence of masters;
after the cemeteries of cholera, no more collar of spikes or executioners.
In his eye burned the blue of the rebel flag and the rising of his island.
The legend calls him the doctor who exhausted five horses, sleepless
as he chased invisible armies into the night. Listen for the horses.
*To read this poem in its intended format, please click here from your laptop or desktop.
Copyright © 2020 by Martín Espada. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 23, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
On nights like this, she sleeps with the car’s jack handle
in her hand, the smell of oil and metal oddly comforting
in such a public place. She keeps her clothes
in a cardboard box on the ’54 Chevy’s back seat,
along with a green wool blanket, two towels, a bag
of books. And tonight she piles blouses, blue jeans,
sweater, skirt—all of it—on top of her body, hunkering
down low on the front seat. She’s parked beneath
the brightest overhanging street light she could find
at the edge of this shopping mall parking lot, slammed
the door locks down tight. Tomorrow, she’ll drive
across town, tell a pack of lies to a do-gooder doctor.
She’ll lie about her name, her address, her age—
she’ll invent a husband. After the impossible
calendar questions, the awkward, back-opening
gown, the cold feet in iron stirrups, the knees
spreading, the gloved hand pressing, the fingers
probing—the earnest-faced doctor will tell her
(while pulling gloves off, while tossing them
into a gray metal bin), will tell her: yes. A baby
is arriving in late August—as if
she should expect a visitor, maybe stepping off
the Greyhound bus, suitcase in hand—
and she remembers how her grandmother would call
her period the unwelcome visitor, how she’d say
the only thing worse than the monthly visitor
is no visitor at all. The doctor will say everything
looks fine. He’ll say No charge for today. He’ll smile a little,
shake her hand. The best he can do.
Then he’ll leave her alone in that white, white room
and she’ll button up her wrinkled work uniform, slip out
onto the street, and make her way back
to the shopping mall to work the snack bar’s sorry
evening shift, serving coffee, burgers and fries to bored
store clerks and tired housewives. Soon, like everyone else,
her high school principal will notice the swelling arc
of her belly, and he’ll call her into his windowless office,
sit her down on a metal chair, and recite
district policy excluding pregnant students
from attending school. He will insist
it’s for her own good. The girl will say he’s wrong.
She’ll say she’s not pregnant at all. He’ll call in
the kind, freckled woman who teaches history, and the girl
will deny it again. She’ll deny it
over and over—to all of them—determined to hold them off
until graduation in June. Spring will be long, and filled with rain.
But tonight, large flakes of snow hover in the light
and she thinks of her mother, scrambling toward the promise
of a job—her mother and the five younger kids, sleeping
600 miles away on the floor of a rented house in a warm
desert town this girl has never seen, and she starts the car, lets it run
a few minutes with heater on and the urgency
of Grace Slick’s “Somebody to Love” on the radio,
and she pulls the blanket close around her shoulders, imagines
the dense, pressed asphalt under the car, and the ancient
earth beneath the asphalt, and she watches
the snow grow heavy, pile up, darkening.
Copyright © 2021 by Corrinne Clegg Hales. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 3, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Copyright © 2021 by Mariah Bosch. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 17, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
You can’t remember what they did to you. Your loneliness isn’t welcome here, you know, but still you walk the dream-lit village, looking for someone gentle enough. There must be an animal trapped under your shirt, you think, because little claws scratch against your chest and you throb there, but you're afraid to look because looking means remembering. You ask a man passing on the road to lift your shirt and check and he retches at what he sees, says the flesh there overflows, as if grinding its own meat, that strips of skin curl away from the wound like rot mushrooms growing on a tree, and he can't help you, you make him sick, he says, he has to go now, so you wander some more until you reach the gate, which is the end of who you could have been, the end of the dream of your body made full with starmilk, propelled by a heart of sea anemone. You’ll be hungry forever if you stay here, trying to hide your secret mouth from all this light. Before you can cross the gate into that dark valley, you must look at yourself. You can think of other words for red: crimson, cherry, scarlet. But there's no other name for blood, no name for a shame like this, its hiss of pain when you press your finger to it, the sweet stain it leaves on your fingertip. You just have to taste it.
Copyright © 2021 by Sara Eliza Johnson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 6, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Wind rising in the alleys
My spirit lifts in you like a banner
Streaming free of hot walls.
You are full of unspent dreams . . .
You are laden with beginnings . . .
There is hope in you . . . not sweet . . .
acrid as blood in the mouth.
Come into my tossing dust
Scattering the peace of old deaths,
Wind rising in the alleys
Carrying stuff of flame.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 11, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
When you turned into a hundred rooms,
I returned each month as a door
that opened only one.
When you turned into a hundred rooms
the wind flung through
each of them wailing
and left a hundred songs
in hopes you would return for it
and me and
once, finding a doe locked up,
the trees blued up
the mountain pass, I understood
you had transformed into your multiple,
as the rain is different
each step from the moon. Sleeping
in a hundred rooms, a hundred dreams
of you appear—though by day
your voice has frozen into standing stones.
When you turned into a hundred rooms,
I met with a mirror in each eye
your growing absence.
When I moved, the shadows without you
followed me. In the hundred rooms,
I cannot pick one,
for each combines into the other
where I piece-by-piece the shadows
you have ceased
to remember. As the rain
is different each day of the year,
when I turned for you
and hoped you’d return to me,
was it I who left
and you who remained the same?
For when you changed,
I changed
the furniture in the rooms.
A hundred birds flew over a hundred fields.
A mountain flowed into a hundred rivers
then ended.
In a hundred rooms,
I turned and turned,
hoping to return to you.
O, the chrysanthemums grew
in the hundred rooms!
Far in the past and far in the future
were those numinous and echoing stars.
Copyright © 2021 by Yanyi. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 29, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
I have made grief a gorgeous, queenly thing,
And worn my melancholy with an air.
My tears were big as stars to deck my hair,
My silence stunning as a sapphire ring.
Oh, more than any light the dark could fling
A glamour over me to make me rare,
Better than any color I could wear
The pearly grandeur that the shadows bring.
What is there left to joy for such as I?
What throne can dawn upraise for me who found
The dusk so royal and so rich a one?
Laughter will whirl and whistle on the sky—
Far from this riot I shall stand uncrowned,
Disrobed, bereft, an outcast in the sun.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 14, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
I have come
not to beg nor barter but to enter.
Who are you seeking?
The past
opens and opens, fleshing me
with loss.
I descend
to find my way,
I who am
haunted and a haunting.
What are you willing to abandon?
In the before, I continue:
a woman carrying on with the dishes,
the dusting, the sweeping.
But here, I am the voice of the petitioner.
Dearest, who was once of earth,
Dearest, whose departure has cleft me,
Dearest, who was my country,
my soil, my sun and sky,
every migration
is a bird taking wing.
Is this the place you seek?
And if at last I arrive,
will I find you in that room
with every window like the soul
flung open and flooded
with sounds of the distant sea.
And if I spill
out into the yard, will she be still
there, the child who was me
set down in the grass,
watching the stars blinkering
on and off, their light burning
with the knowledge of death.
How will you carry this?
I will have to use the flowers to address you.
Wild-blooming frangipani (your cloying scent marks me).
Pointillist-starred ixora (I braid you into my hair).
Indigo-blue plumbago (you obliterate the sky).
Lignum vitae (you foretell all histories).
Roses that grow ragged along the shore (stay with me).
How will you return to the living?
Called back by the susurrating wind and sea.
Called back by the roots of my hair, dirt
beneath my nails, the body’s sweat and stink.
Called back by their voices, yours
still clenched in my fist. Called back
to all that is matter, bone, and skin,
what fragment of you survives in me
as I open my mouth to speak?
Copyright © 2021 by Shara McCallum. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 8, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
for my cousins
“First the meat disappeared from our rations,
then the rice, then the barley and millet,
then the rations vanished.
———
“We caught croakers, cuttlefish,
hauled creels of eelgrass and whip-wrack
until soldiers fired warning shots to keep us from the sea:
trapped squirrels, snapped sparrows’ necks,
stoned snakes if we were quick, dug mud
for frogs, dragged dogs from their holes:
and when they were wiped out, gnawed rats raw—
until they seemed to grow thinner,
the parasites in our guts wither, the lice on our scalps
starve—
———
하루 두 끼만 먹자!
[LET’S EAT TWO MEALS A DAY!]
———
“We boiled bracken, ground flour for noodles
from bean-stalks, stretched it with sawdust,
cooked gruel from grass or moss:
stripped pine-trees to chew the green inner bark,
picked pigweed, hogweed, horseweed, wort,
pounded acorns into a pulp—
———
고난의 행군에서 승리한 기세로 새
세기의 진격로를 열어나가자!
[LET’S CHARGE FORWARD INTO THE NEW
CENTURY IN THE SPIRIT
OF THE ARDUOUS MARCH!]
———
“Hunt for spilled grain near shipyards and train stations.
Poke through cow-shit for corn.
Wash well.
———
“Crush grubs. Suck leeches. Swallow
the worms that would swallow you.
Eat anything alive to stay alive.
———
“Snatch scraps of black-market meat.
Mother-meat, father-meat, meat of wandering swallows,
meat of tomorrow—?
Is-Was. Eat-Eaten.
———
오늘을 위해 살지 말고 내일을 위해 살자!
[LET US NOT LIVE FOR TODAY,
BUT FOR TOMORROW!]
———
“The children’s skulls swelled, their bellies bloated,
their nails fell off,
their faces leathered, flesh blackened with infection,
hair rusted, eyes ringed with wrinkles
as if steel spectacles had been soldered into skin,
but what was there to see?
———
“Faster, dig faster! Save face, the aid workers are coming!
Hide them, the rotted bodies, lives heaped high as leaves—
There is hardly earth enough to bury all the dead.
Copyright © 2021 by Suji Kwock Kim. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 25, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Joy shakes me like the wind that lifts a sail,
Like the roistering wind
That laughs through stalwart pines.
It floods me like the sun
On rain-drenched trees
That flash with silver and green.
I abandon myself to joy—
I laugh—I sing.
Too long have I walked a desolate way,
Too long stumbled down a maze
Bewildered.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 6, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
for Maria
Sitting across the table from you
I think back to when our friendship
came down from the mountains.
It was a cold day and the miners
had not left for work.
You break a cookie in half like bread
and this sharing is what we both now need.
That which breaks into crumbs are memories.
Your gray hair cut short and you ask if I notice.
How can I tell you that Bolivia will always be
beautiful and everything I notice is you
and yes is you. Our napkins folded in our hands.
Folded as if our meeting now is prayer.
Did I ever tell you that your eyes are a map
and I would lose myself if you ever turned away
Copyright © 2022 by E. Ethelbert Miller. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 14, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
Thomas Jefferson said this, more or less,
After he read the musings of the clever African
Phillis Wheatley, a sensation of both the Colonies
And England, a black patriot, though a slave.
Whatever a black hand can build, he knew,
Could only be guided by a master’s vision,
Like this room of the mansion he probably
Wrote his opinion in—what black mind could
Dream in these proportions? And gather
The slope of these Virginia hills so lovingly
To his window? God could give her words,
But the subtle turn? Like giving a gull
A sack of gold.
Copyright © 2022 by Cornelius Eady. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 24, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
Anvil clouds in the west.
My father dies in hospice
while I’m on the highway,
stuck in roadwork.
Gaunt on the gurney.
Limbs impossibly still.
Mouth slightly open,
as if surprised, as if saying
ah! One eye half closed,
the other looking up,
lit by a further light,
a sky in the ceiling.
I touch his hand, barely
cool. It’s only been
an hour. At the elevator,
I’m not ready to drop
down the bright chute.
I go back. Bend & kiss
his hand. Outside, long
soft nails hammer the earth.
Copyright © 2022 by Willa Carroll. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 7, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
Our love is woven
Of a thousand strands—
The cool fragrance of the first lilac
At morning,
The first dew on the grass,
The smell of wild mint in the wood,
The pungent and earthy smell of ground ivy crushed under our feet;
Songs of birds, songs of great poets;
The leaping of the red squirrel in the tree,
The running of the river,
The commotion of stars and clouds in the high winds at night;
And dark stillness.
It is adorned with all the flowers
That stand in our garden;
It holds the night and the day.
Our love is made
Of the South Wind and the West Wind,
And the soft falling of rain;
Of white April evenings;
It is made of trees,
And of the many-coloured fields on the hills;
Of horizons,
Dark sea-blue of the west, thin sky-blue of the east,
With a yellow road between.
The flames of sunset and sunrise
Mingle in the fire of our love.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on April 10, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on April 16, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
after C. P. Cavafy
You tell me: I’m going to another country,
another city, another body.
Perhaps my heart will stay uncertain,
and I will destroy my history but I am leaving.
Even if on every street, I find the ruins of our bodies,
I’ll roam like a restless soul anyway.
I tell you: you won’t find a new country,
new city, new body. You’ll return to roam
the same ruins, same streets, same quartiere,
return to complain in the same room
of the same house, return to the memory of our intertwined bodies.
You will always end up in Roma: I will always remain in you.
And maybe late, you’ll see, that what you destroyed
is worth more than all the worlds you wasted your time in.
Copyright © 2022 by Nathalie Handal. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 22, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
the way it ricocheted—a boomerang flung
from your throat, stilling the breathless air.
How you were luminous in it. Your smile. Your hair
tossed back, flaming. Everyone around you aglow.
How I wanted to live in it those times it ignited us
into giggles, doubling us over aching and unmoored
for precious minutes from our twin scars—
the thorned secrets our tongues learned too well
to carry. It is impossible to imagine you gone,
dear one, your laugh lost to some silence I can’t breach,
from which you will not return.
for Fay Botham (May 31, 1968–January 10, 2021)
Copyright © 2022 by Lauren K. Alleyne. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 6, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate of earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added.
Everything the same, including sunlight,
because it would be hard on a young girl
to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness
Gradually, he thought, he'd introduce the night,
first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.
Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.
Let Persephone get used to it slowly.
In the end, he thought, she'd find it comforting.
A replica of earth
except there was love here.
Doesn't everyone want love?
He waited many years,
building a world, watching
Persephone in the meadow.
Persephone, a smeller, a taster.
If you have one appetite, he thought,
you have them all.
Doesn't everyone want to feel in the night
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says
I am alive, that means also
you are alive, because you hear me,
you are here with me. And when one turns,
the other turns—
That's what he felt, the lord of darkness,
looking at the world he had
constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind
that there'd be no more smelling here,
certainly no more eating.
Guilt? Terror? The fear of love?
These things he couldn't imagine;
no lover ever imagines them.
He dreams, he wonders what to call this place.
First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden.
In the end, he decides to name it
Persephone's Girlhood.
A soft light rising above the level meadow,
behind the bed. He takes her in his arms.
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you
but he thinks
this is a lie, so he says in the end
you're dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true.
"A Myth of Devotion" from Averno by Louise Glück. Copyright © 2006 by Louise Glück. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
In the first version, Persephone is taken from her mother and the goddess of the earth punishes the earth—this is consistent with what we know of human behavior, that human beings take profound satisfaction in doing harm, particularly unconscious harm: we may call this negative creation. Persephone's initial sojourn in hell continues to be pawed over by scholars who dispute the sensations of the virgin: did she cooperate in her rape, or was she drugged, violated against her will, as happens so often now to modern girls. As is well known, the return of the beloved does not correct the loss of the beloved: Persephone returns home stained with red juice like a character in Hawthorne— I am not certain I will keep this word: is earth "home" to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably, in the bed of the god? Is she at home nowhere? Is she a born wanderer, in other words an existential replica of her own mother, less hamstrung by ideas of causality? You are allowed to like no one, you know. The characters are not people. They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict. Three parts: just as the soul is divided, ego, superego, id. Likewise the three levels of the known world, a kind of diagram that separates heaven from earth from hell. You must ask yourself: where is it snowing? White of forgetfulness, of desecration— It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says Persephone is having sex in hell. Unlike the rest of us, she doesn't know what winter is, only that she is what causes it. She is lying in the bed of Hades. What is in her mind? Is she afraid? Has something blotted out the idea of mind? She does know the earth is run by mothers, this much is certain. She also knows she is not what is called a girl any longer. Regarding incarceration, she believes she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter. The terrible reunions in store for her will take up the rest of her life. When the passion for expiation is chronic, fierce, you do not choose the way you live. You do not live; you are not allowed to die. You drift between earth and death which seem, finally, strangely alike. Scholars tell us that there is no point in knowing what you want when the forces contending over you could kill you. White of forgetfulness, white of safety— They say there is a rift in the human soul which was not constructed to belong entirely to life. Earth asks us to deny this rift, a threat disguised as suggestion— as we have seen in the tale of Persephone which should be read as an argument between the mother and the lover— the daughter is just meat. When death confronts her, she has never seen the meadow without the daisies. Suddenly she is no longer singing her maidenly songs about her mother's beauty and fecundity. Where the rift is, the break is. Song of the earth, song of the mythic vision of eternal life— My soul shattered with the strain of trying to belong to earth— What will you do, when it is your turn in the field with the god?
"Persephone the Wanderer" from Averno by Louise Glück. Copyright © 2006 by Louise Glück. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
One summer she goes into the field as usual stopping for a bit at the pool where she often looks at herself, to see if she detects any changes. She sees the same person, the horrible mantle of daughterliness still clinging to her. The sun seems, in the water, very close. That's my uncle spying again, she thinks— everything in nature is in some way her relative. I am never alone, she thinks, turning the thought into a prayer. Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer. No one understands anymore how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers. Also that he embraced her, right there, with her uncle watching. She remembers sunlight flashing on his bare arms. This is the last moment she remembers clearly. Then the dark god bore her away. She also remembers, less clearly, the chilling insight that from this moment she couldn't live without him again. The girl who disappears from the pool will never return. A woman will return, looking for the girl she was. She stands by the pool saying, from time to time, I was abducted, but it sounds wrong to her, nothing like what she felt. Then she says, I was not abducted. Then she says, I offered myself, I wanted to escape my body. Even, sometimes, I willed this. But ignorance cannot will knowledge. Ignorance wills something imagined, which it believes exists. All the different nouns— she says them in rotation. Death, husband, god, stranger. Everything sounds so simple, so conventional. I must have been, she thinks, a simple girl. She can't remember herself as that person but she keeps thinking the pool will remember and explain to her the meaning of her prayer so she can understand whether it was answered or not.
"The Myth of Innocence" from Averno by Louise Glück. Copyright © 2006 by Louise Glück. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie. He says that he believes a person can love someone and still be able to murder that person. I say, No, that’s not love. That’s attachment. Michael says, No, that’s love. You can love someone, then come to a day when you’re forced to think “it’s him or me” think “me” and kill him. I say, Then it’s not love anymore. Michael says, It was love up to then though. I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word. Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist even in the murderous heart. I say that what he might mean by love is desire. Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what is it? We’re walking along West 16th Street—a clear unclouded night—and I hear my voice repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action, I used to say to him. Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to look at someone you want to eat and not eat them. Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby. Meister Eckhardt says that as long as we love images we are doomed to live in purgatory. Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue saying goodnight. I can’t drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I’ve just bought— again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and suck the stuff from the hole the flip top made. What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says. But what I think he’s saying is “You are too strict. You are a nun.” Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him to think these things of me even if he’s not thinking them? Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns clearer and colder. Although the days, after the solstice, have started to lengthen, we both know the winter has only begun.
From The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe. Copyright © 2008 by Marie Howe. Used by permission of W. W. Norton. All rights reserved.