Tag Archives: Great Poems or Pieces Thereof

POSTMANTERRORISM

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from this week’s Writer’s Almanac. I really love this poem. Gotta go buy the book.

POSTMANTERRORISM

by Nick Lantz

Would it make a difference to say we suffered
from affluenza in those days? Could we blame
Reaganomics, advertainment, the turducken
and televangelism we swallowed by the sporkful,
all that brunch and Jazzercise, Frappuccinos
we guzzled on the Seatac tarmac, sexcellent
celebutantes we ogled with camcorders while
our imagineers simulcast the administrivia
of our alarmaggedon across the glocal village?
Would it help to say that we misunderestimated
the effects of Frankenfood and mutagenic smog
to speculate that amid all our infornography
and anticipointment, some crisitunity slumbered
unnoticed in a roadside motel? Does it count
for nothing that we are now willing to admit
that the animatronic monster slouching across
the soundstage of our tragicomic docusoap
was only a distraction? Because now, for all our
gerrymandering, the anecdata won’t line up for us.
When we saw those contrails cleaving the sky
above us, we couldn’t make out their beginning
or their end. What, in those long hours of ash,
could our appletinis tell us of good or of evil?

“POSTMANTERRORISM” by Nick Lantz, from The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House. © The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010.

Well, damn, it’s a relief to be a slut

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Marilyn Hacker, from Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons. Sonnets can be damn fun, oh yes they can.

Well, damn, it’s a relief to be a slut
after such lengths of “Man delights not me,
nor woman neither,” that I honestly
wondered if I’d outgrown it. Chocolate
or wine, a cashmere scarf, a cigarette,
had more to do with sensuality
than what’s between my belly and my butt
that yearns toward you now unabashedly.
I’d love to grip your head between my thighs
while yours tense toward your moment on my ears,
but I’ll still be thankful for this surprise
if things turn out entirely otherwise,
and we’re bar buddies who, in a few years,
will giggle about this after two beers.

Henri Cole – Bees

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Bees

Poured through the bees, the sunlight, like flesh

and spirit, emits a brightness pushing everything

else away except the bees’ vibrating bronze bodies

riding the air as if on strings that flex

and kick back as they circle the hive outside

my window, where they are cheerful and careful

in their work, their audible bee-voices

in solidarity with summer, as it is getting on,

and all the leaves of the forest quiver toward

nothingness on Earth, where we are all fallen

and where we sin and betray in order

to love and where the germinating seeds

of the soul are watered by tears of loneliness,

fear, and emotional revenge.

Henri Cole – Ambulance

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Ambulance

Gentleness had come a great distance to be there,

I thought, as paramedics stanched the warm blood,

signaling one another with their eyes.

I was not as I was, and I didn’t know why,

so I was aware of a shattering, of an unbidden,

moving under the influence of a restoring force.

Like a Japanese fan folding, my spirit seem possessed

of such a simple existence, the sexual principle

no longer at its center, nor memory.

I felt like the personification of an abstraction,

like mercy. My hands were red and swollen.

A great chain, the twitch of my life, dragged against decay.

Then I heard shouts. Far off, a horse whinnied.

I blinked back tears as I was lifted forth.

Blackberry Eating

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Blackberry Eating
by Galway Kinnell

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched, or broughamed
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry eating in late September.

what should have been Obama’s inaugural poem last winter

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Because this poem makes me tear up every time I read it. Because I only hope to write something this good and beautiful and true. Because it didn’t get read at that damn inauguration and should have. Because if you don’t know this poem, you really ought to.

Frederick Douglass
by Robert Hayden

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

rough, this world is. yet our soft tongues

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Carol Burbank:

rough, this world is. yet our soft tongues cut it open, and the sanity of honey pours out between, where meaning lives

Joy

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Joy
Julie Cadwallader Staub

Who could need more proof than honey—

How the bees with such skill and purpose
enter flower after flower
sing their way home
to create and cap the new honey
just to get through the flowerless winter.

And how the bear with intention and cunning
raids the hive
shovels pawful after pawful into his happy mouth
bats away indignant bees
stumbles off in a stupor of satiation and stickiness.

And how we humans can’t resist its viscosity
its taste of clover and wind
its metaphorical power:
don’t we yearn for a land of milk and honey?
don’t we call our loved ones “honey?”

all because bees just do, over and over again, what they were made to do.

Oh, who could need more proof than honey
to know that our world
was meant to be

and

was meant to be
sweet?

study the masters

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study the masters
Lucille Clifton

like my aunt timmie.
it was her iron,
or one like hers,
that smoothed the sheets
the master poet slept on.
home or hotel, what matters is
he lay himself down on her handiwork
and dreamed. she dreamed too, words:
some cherokee, some masai and some
huge and particular as hope.
if you had heard her
chanting as she ironed
you would understand form and line
and discipline and order and
america.

Yusef Komunyakaa “Back Then”

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I’ve eaten handfuls of fire
back to the bright sea
of my first breath
riding the hipbone of memory
& saw a wheel of birds
a bridge into the morning
but that was when gold
didn’t burn out a man’s eyes
before auction blocks
groaned in courtyards
& nearly got the best of me
that was when the spine
of every ebony tree wasn’t
a pale woman’s easy chair
black earth-mother of us all
crack in the bones & somber
eyes embedded like beetles
in stoic heartwood
seldom have I needed
to shake a hornet’s nest
from the breastplate
fire over the ground
pain tears me to pieces
at the pottery wheel
of each dawn
an antelope leaps
in the heartbeat
of the talking drum