Find and share the perfect poems.
The child asks, bringing it to me in handfuls.
We stop at the Walt Whitman Service Area—
No sign of Him save some “Democratic Vistas”
& “Drum Taps” on a plaque near the Micky D’s
Let’s go find the grass
I say to my two-year-old beauty and
We pick one blade from the median
Then back we go in the forever car
Hours later, pulling into Richmond
She, half awake in my arms mumbles
Let’s go find the grass
Copyright © 2014 by Lee Ann Brown. Used with permission of the author.
for Carl & Lillian Sandburg’s Connemara, Flat Rock, NC
As a child I was taken
to visit Connemara
as I remember
a little display of concrete poems
in the shapes of shoes
next to a typewriter
on an orange crate
let me know
I was taken
to visit poetry
All the books on the staircase
Said never back away from love
Of the word
O what is louder than the thorn
in the window of her thunder?
Sheaves of wheat in cement relief
Supply the beauties of Archer Ave.
Past the scaffolded brick church spire
We turn on the vacant corner lot
Through winds worthy of Hopkins (Gerard M.)
New words — Alexus — Everything must go
“Include everything in poetry”
Even the things you think are nothing
Like the way the new white snowflake
Decoration waves its wild tentacles
against the high blue sky
loop and angle
Black graffiti palimpsests the
yellow official sign of Danger
Come on, you who remembers your dreams who acts upon them in this world Come you who I often and silently call so that I may be with you Come and sustain me and I will sustain you with what sustenance I have with the curls of revolutionary quiet with lovely baroque convolutions of thought Come make with me a baby of both of us A new and separate being with brothers & sisters born & unborn Who we will meet and recognize as time progresses we know not How Yet isn't that the Beauty of it late into the nights early in the Day sleeping and waking when apart not separate fo