Song for the New Year (Excerpt)

Old time has turned another page

of eternity and truth;

He reads with a warning voice to age,

And whispers a lesson to youth.

A year has fled o'er heart and head

Since last the yule log burnt;

And we have a task to closely ask,

What the bosom and brain have learnt?

Oh! let us hope that our sands have run

With wisdom's precious grains;

Oh! May we find that our hands have done

Some work of glorious pains.

Then a welcome and cheer to a merry new year,

While the holly gleams above us;

With a pardon for the foes who hate,

And a prayer for those who love us.

We may have seen some loved ones pass

To the land of hallow'd rest;

We may miss the glow of an honest brow

And the warmth of a friendly breast;

But if we nursed them while on earth,

With hearts all true and kind,

Will their spirits blame the sinless mirth

Of those true hearts left behind?

No, no! It were not well or wise

To mourn with endless pain;

There's a better world beyond the skies,

Where the good shall meet again.

Then a welcome and cheer to the merry new year,

While the holly gleams above us;

With a pardon for the foes who hate,

and a prayer for those who love us.

Eliza Cook, public domain, published in Poem-a-Day, December 29, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets

When the Song of the Angels Is Stilled

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace between brothers and sisters,
To make music in the heart.

Howard Thurman

The Prayer of Saint Francis

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
      where there is hatred, let me sow love,
      where there is injury, pardon,
      where there is doubt, faith,
      where there is despair, hope,
      where there is darkness, light,
      where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master:
      grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console,
      to be understood as to understand,
      to be loved as to love,
      for it is in giving that we receive,
      it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
      it is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.

Francis of Assisi, Italy, 13th century
   

Christmas Blessing

May the coming of Christ
deepen your wonder
and widen your gratitude.

May the helpless child
bring forth your tenderness
and strengthen your love.

May the gentle mother
give you courage to embrace the holy
and find the divine within yourself.

May the child who shares our death
bring light into your darkness
and hope to your weariness.

May the holy family in the stable
open your heart to the poor,
the homeless, the refugee.

May the child sought by soldiers
embolden you to cry out
and empower you to resist injustice.

May the angels who sing above you
awaken your heart
and surround you with beauty.

May the One Who Comes
remind you of your belovedness
and fill you with kindness and mercy
and give you joy.

Steve Garness-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net. December 23, 2019

What Do I Want for Christmas

What do I want for Christmas?
I want to kneel in Bethlehem,
    the air thick with alleluias,
        the angels singing
            that God is born among us.
In the light of the Star,
    I want to see them come,
        the wise ones and the humble.
I want to see them come
    bearing whatever they treasure
        to lay at the feet
            of him who gives his life.

What do I want for Christmas?
To see in that stable
    the whole world kneeling in thanks
        for a promise kept:
            new life.
For in his nativity
    we find ours.

Ann Weems, Kneeling in Bethlehem (The Westminister Press, 1987)

Are you ready for Christmas?

What does "ready" mean?

Boxes with bows, shining paper neatly trimmed
and taped, a heap of planning.

I always worry nothing I give
is enough. Wishing to share a mood,

breeze, hope, a better idea . . . I want the kids
in Gaza to have electricity all day long

and the kids in Bethelem to feel peace with
their neighbors and no walls blocking movements,

no kids sad about houses crushed or
parents disappeared. I want no trees uprooted.

O little town of Bethlehem, might the year end
on a high note of joy?

Could people in hospitals
come bounding forth, suddenly well,

and no one feel abandoned? Everyone surprised
by love. A man said,

Whatever you are planning to give,
give twice as much.

That's what I want.
Then I will be ready.

Naomi Shihab Nye, "Christmas Is Coming!: Celebrate the Holiday with Art, Stories, Poems. Songs, and Recipes" (Harry N. Abrams, 2019)

Prayer of Peace

God, when I close my eyes to this world

may your presence nudge me awake.

When I am weary and ready to quit,

your passion for this world energize me.

When I am hopeless, your gaze raise me up.

When I am afraid, your love enfold me.

When I am angry and want to blame,

your kindness sweep me off my feet.

When I am bitter and ready to fight,

your forgiveness quiet me.

When I find myself in a land of sorrow,

your presence accompany me.

When I am broken and I despair,

your delight make me whole.

God of grace, as you send me into this world

may your hope live in me, your love, your joy.

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net

Like Our Sister Mary, A Christmas Affirmation

Like our sister Mary, we say yes

Yes to your favor
Your blessing
Your presence

Yes that we are enough just as we are
Where we are

Yes to your calling
and the power of the Holy Spirit coming upon us to fulfill it

Yes to bearing and birthing
Your Word and Your promises and your Kingdom
in this time and place

Yes to all things being possible with you

Like our sister Mary we say
Here I am, the Lord's humble servant
As you have said, let it be done to me
in me
through me

Like our sister Mary we sing and celebrate you
Our God, Our Liberator
For though we are your humble servants
You have noticed us

Lisa Degrenia, Revlisad.com, December, 24, 2017

Caretake This Moment

Caretake this moment.

Immerse yourself in its particulars.

Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed.

Quit the evasions.

Stop giving yourself needless trouble.

It is time to really live: to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now.

You are not some disinterested bystander.

Exert yourself.

Respect your partnership with providence.

Ask yourself often: how can I perform this particular deed

such that it would be consistent with and acceptable to the divine will?

Heed the answer and get to work.

When your doors are shut and your room is dark you are not alone.

The will of nature is within you as your natural genius is within.

Listen to its importunings. 

Follow its directives.

As concerns the art of living, the material is your own life.

No great thing is created suddenly.

There must be time.

Give your best and always be kind.

Epictetus, Epictetus: The Art of Living, The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness, trans. Sharon Lebell (HarperOne, 2007)

  

Favor

My soul magnifies the Holy One,
for God, you have looked with favor
on the lowliness of your servant.
                                       Luke 1:46

What if there was nothing special about Mary at all?
What if she was not particularly pious or virtuous,
but simply willing to hear the Word:
"You have found favor with God."

What if all that's needed to ignite a miracle
is the willingness to accept God's favor?
What if to bring salvation to the world all God needs of us
is to receive God's delight in us?
To imagine God's saving grace growing within us.
To trust God's tender regard for us
despite our lowliness, despite our undeserving;
despite all the hardships and struggles,
even the sin and despair, to trust God's joy?
Not that we are better, only that we are beloved.
What if all God asks of us is
to say Yes to God's Yes?
To hear God's hope for us
and to reply with all our hearts,
"Let it be to me according to your word."

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net, December 12, 2019

Wolf and Lamb

      The wolf shall live with the lamb . . .
      and a little child shall lead them.
                                        Isaiah 11:6

God, there are wolves and lambs in me,
kind spirits and angry ones.
Make gentle my bitter wolves,
and defend the lambs of mercy.
Heal the wounds that feed my rage,
and give courage to my love.
Grant that the wolf renounces its appetites,
the lamb surmounts its fears.

May the Christ Child lead wolf and lamb together,
that I may be whole, and all of me be welcomed.
May I find joy in what is strong and gentle
and in the power of tenderness,
and gratitude for creatures who all need each other.

Christ Child, lead me to a place of peace.

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net, December 4, 2019

My mother said

        My mother said, "Of course,
it may be nothing, but your father
        has a spot on his lung."
That was all she said. My father
        at fifty-one could never
speak of dreadful things without tears.
        When I started home,
I kissed his cheek, which was not our habit.
        In a letter, my mother
asked me not to kiss him again
        because it made him sad.
In two weeks, the exploratory
        revealed an inoperable
lesion.
            The doctors never
        told him, he never asked,
but read The Home Medical Guidebook.
        Seven months later,
just after his fifty-second birthday
        -- his eyesight going,
his voice reduced to a whisper, three days
        before he died -- he said,
"If anything should happen to me . . ."

Donald Hall, found in Good Poems, Garrison Keillor, ed (Viking, 2002)

December

A little girl is singing for the faithful to come ye
Joyful and triumphant, a song she loves,
And also the partridge in a pear tree
And the golden rings and the turtle doves.
In the dark streets, red lights and green and blue
Where the faithful live, some joyful, some troubled,
Enduring the food and also the flu,
Taking the garbage out and keeping the sidewalks shoveled.
Not much triumph going on here -- and yet
There is much we do not understand.
And my hopes and fears are met
In this small singer holding my hand.
        Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark
        And are there angels singing overhead? Hark.

Gary Johnson, published online by The Writer's Almanac (December 22, 2011)

Blessed Are the Merciful

Amish schoolhouse shooting, Nickle Mines, PA

I didn't trust their forgiveness.

Before the blood cooled on the schoolhouse floor
they held the killer's widow in their arms,

raised money for his children,
lined his grave site with a row of patient horses.

Somewhere in town there had to be a father
splitting a trunk and imagining the crush

of the murderer's skull. There had to be a mother
hurling a Bible at the wall that received her prayers.

Or is it just the flash and noise of my own life
that primes me for anger? Does scrolling

through playlists in traffic fill the spaces
in my mind reserved for grace?

Forgiveness requires imagination.
Eye for an eye is efficient.

For the man brought chains.
He brought wires, eyehooks, and boards.

He brought a bag of candles and lubricant
and secured little girls with plastic ties.

Two sisters begged to be shot first
to spare the others.

He shot them first. Then the rest.
One child with twenty-four bullets.

Perhaps they know something that I don't,
something to do with the morning rising

over an open field. The fathers receive
the meadowlark, the swallowtail,

the good corn rising into the fog.
The mothers ride their carriages into town,

accepting the rumbles of the stony road,
tripping into the rough hands of God.

Tania Runyan, Simple Weight (FutureCycle Press, 2010)

Advent Credo (Excerpts)

It is not true that creation and the human
family are doomed to destruction and loss --
This is true: For God so loved the world that
He gave his only begotten Son, that whoever
believes in Him shall not perish but have
everlasting life;

It is not true that we must accept inhumanity
and discrimination, hunger and poverty, death
and destruction --
This is true: I have come that they may have
life, and that abundantly.

It is not true that violence and hatred should
have the last word, and that war and
destruction rule forever --
This is true: Unto us a child is born, unto us a
Son is given, and the government shall be upon
his shoulder, his name shall be called
wonderful councilor, mighty God, the
Everlasting, the Prince of Peace.

So let us enter Advent in hope, even hope
against hope. Let us see visions of love and
peace and justice. Let us affirm with humility,
with joy, with faith, with courage: Jesus Christ
-- the life of the world.

Alan Boesak, Walking on Thorns (Eerdmans, 2004)

In Search of Our Kneeling Places

In each heart lies a Bethlehem,
      an inn where we must ultimately answer
          whether there is room or not.
When we are Bethlehem-bound
      we experience our own advent in his.
When we are Bethlehem-bound we can no longer look the other way
          conveniently not seeing stars
              not hearing angel voices.
We can no longer excuse ourselves by busily
      tending our sheep or our kingdoms.
   
This Advent let's go to Bethlehem
      and see this thing that the Lord has made known to us,
In the midst of shopping sprees
      let's ponder in our hearts the Gift of Gifts.
Through the tinsel
      let's look for the gold of the Christmas Star.
In the excitement and confusion, in the merry chaos,
      let's listen for the brush of angels' wings.
This Advent, let's go to Bethlehem
      and find our kneeling places.

Ann Weems, Kneeling in Bethlehem, (The Westminster Press, 1987)    
           

I Will Not Die an Unlived Life

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not die in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible;
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.

Dawna Markova, I Will Not Die an Unlived Life: Reclaiming Passion and Purpose (Conari Press, 2000)

Christ Comes

Christ comes, the promised peace of God,
His hands with healing filled,
In Him is brokenness made whole
And love from hate distilled.
And when He comes, for whom we long,
Then will all rage be stilled.

Christ comes, the promised hand of God,
To cast the veil aside
That shrouds the world in bitter grief,
Where none from death can hide.
And when He comes, for whom we long,
Then will all tears be dried.

Christ comes, the promise kept by God,
The faithful One, and true.
In him is ev'ry hope confirmed
And ev'ry fear subdued.
And when he comes, for whom we long,
Then all will be made new.

Sr. Genevieve Glen, O.S.B., witnessestohope.org, accessed November 30, 2019

Of Love

I have been in love more times than one,
thank the Lord. Sometimes it was lasting
whether active or not. Sometimes
it was all but ephemeral, maybe only
an afternoon, but no less real for that.
They stay in my mind, these beautiful people,
or anyway people beautiful to me, of which
there are so many. You, and you, and you,
whom I had the fortune to meet, or maybe
missed. Love, love, love, it was the
core of my life, from which, of course, comes
the word for heart. And, oh, have I mentioned
that some of them were men and some were women
and some -- now carry my revelation with you --
were trees. Or places. Or music flying above
the names of their makers. Or clouds, or the sun
which was the first and the best, the most
loyal for certain, who looked so faithfully into
my eyes, every morning. So I imagine
such love of the world -- its fervency, its shining, its
innocence and hunger to give of itself -- I imagine
this is how it began.

Mary Oliver, Red Bird (Beacon Press, 2008)

Grace

Thanks & blessings be

to the Sun & the Earth

for this bread & this wine,

this fruit, this meat, this salt,

this food:

Thanks be & blessing to them

who prepare it, who serve it;

thanks & blessing to them

who share it

(& also the absent & the dead).

Thanks & Blessing to them who bring it

(may they not want),

to them who plant & tend it,

harvest & gather it

(may they not want);

thanks & blessing to them that work

& blessing to them who cannot;

may they not want -- for their hunger

sours the wine & robs

the taste from the salt.

Thanks be for the sustenance & strength

for our dance & work of justice, for peace.

Rafael Jesus Gonzalez, In Praise of Fertile Land ed. by Claudia Mauro (Whit Press, 2006)

Horse Play

I am floating in the public pool, an older guy
who has achieved much, including a mortgage,
two children, and health insurance, including dental.

I have a Premier Rewards Gold Card
from American Express, and my car
is large. I have traveled to Finland.
In addition, I once met Toni Morrison
at a book signing and made some remarks
she found "extremely interesting." And last month
I was the subject of a local news story
called "Recyclers: Neighbors Who Care." In short,
I am not someone you would take lightly.

But when I began playfully to splash my wife,
the teenaged lifeguard raises her megaphone
and calls down from her throne, "No horse play in the pool,"
and suddenly I am twelve again, a pale worm
at the feet of a blond and suntanned goddess,
and I just wish my mom would come pick me up.

George Bilgere, Blood Pages (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018)

Desire

The slim, suntanned legs
of the woman in front of me in the checkout line
fill me with yearning
to provide her with health insurance
and a sporty little car with personalized plates.

The way her dark hair
falls straight to her slender waist
makes me ache
to pay for a washer/dryer combo
and yearly ski trips to Aspen, not to mention
her weekly visits to the spa
and nail salon.

And the delicate rise of her breasts
under her thin blouse
kindles my desire
to purchase a blue minivan with a car seat,
and soon another car seat, and eventually
piano lessons and braces
for two teenage girls who will hate me.

Finally, her full, pouting lips
make me long to take out a second mortgage
in order to put both girls through college
at first- or second-tier institutions,
then cover their wedding expenses
and help out financially with the grandchildren
as generously as possible before I die
and leave them everything.

But now the cashier rings her up
and she walks out of my life forever,
leaving me alone
with my beer and toilet paper and frozen pizzas.

George Bilgere

The Feast of Christ the King

Our King is calling from the hungry furrows
While we are cruising through the aisles of plenty,
Our hoardings screen us from the man of sorrows,
Our soundtracks drown his murmur: "I am thirsty."
He stands in line to sign in as a stranger
And seek a welcome from the world he made,
We see him only as a threat, a danger,
He asks for clothes, we strip-search him instead.
And if he should fall sick then we take care
That he does not infect our private health,
We lock him in the prisons of our fear
Lest he unlock the prison of our wealth.
But still on Sunday we shall stand and sing
The praises of our hidden Lord and King.

Malcolm Guite, Sounding the Seasons (Canterbury Press, 2012)

Chemotherapy

I did not imagine being bald
at forty-four. I didn't have a plan.
Perhaps a scar or two from growing old,
hot flushes. I'd sit fluttering a fan.

But I am bald, and hardly ever walk
by day. I'm the invalid of these rooms,
stirring soups, awake in the half dark,
not answering the phone when it rings.

I never thought that life could get this small,
that I would care so much about a cup,
the taste of tea, the texture of a shawl,
and whether or not I should get up.

I'm not unhappy. I have learnt to drift
and sip. The smallest things are gifts.

Julia Darling, Sudden Collapses in Public Places (Arc Publications, 2003)

Perennials

I've betrayed them all:
columbine and daisy,
iris, day-lily,
even the rain barrel
that spoke to me in a dream.

I inherited this garden,
and miss my grandmother
in her big sun hat.
My inexperienced hands
don't know what to hope for.

Still, flowers come: yellow,
pink, and blue. Preoccupied,
I let them go
until weeds produce spikes
and seeds around them.

I never used the rain barrel.
Water froze in the bottom;
too late, I set it on its side.

Now lily-of-the-valley comes
with its shy bloom,
choked by a weed
I don't know the name of. One day,
too late, I'll weed around them,
and pull some lilies by mistake.

Next year we'll all be back,
struggling.

Just look at these flowers
I've done nothing to deserve:
and still, they won't abandon me.

Kathleen Norris, Journey (University of Pittsburg Press, 2001)

Bear Witness

Among the chaos and evil of the world
you bring something different.
You are not tainted by the world's fear and hatred.
You bear love to the world.
To nations in warlike frenzy
or to neighbors afraid
or to families upset and struggling
you bring peace.
You bring trust in God.
Their resentment and resistance
is your opportunity to love.
Their craziness is deadly.
Hold steadfast to love;
that's how you stay alive.
"By your endurance you will gain true life."

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net

The Phone

There are things you can't learn over the phone,
like how each day your mother's losing weight.
Her hug has turned to a burlap sack of bones.
You imagine it sharp and cold. Her heart beats

jaggedly. There's dark beneath her eyes.
You know she cooks herself three meals a day,
but over the phone you cannot see what lies
behind her silence: she throws the food away.

She yawns and says she is a little tired,
while exhaustion settles ashen on her face.
You can't see how the neatness you admired --
the dishes clean, everything in its place --

has disappeared. The kitchen's out of order.
She doesn't make her bed. Her clothes smell bad.
And you keep moving further, moving forward
(after dad left you thought she'd drive you mad):

first Tennessee, then Arkansas, now Texas.
She's back home in the Carolina foothills
while the tumor near her cardiac plexus
grows. You can't see her refuse the pills,

but you hear it in each hesitation, in every
sick, quiet hanging on the line.
So when she says she's "feeling better, very,"
it sends the worry ringing up your spine.

After the dial tone dies away,
you stand in the sunlight of your own kitchen.
You know she's dying, that she'll never say.
You know you will never be forgiven.

Chad Abushanab, The Last Visit (Autumn House Press, 2019)

Re-Seeing the Obvious

When pregnant it was clear
I was along for the ride with a miracle.
Sure, I could eat organic broccoli,
walk and eschew caffeine,
but that was just taking care
of the vessel. Life itself
was doing the real work.

Imagine my surprise today
to realize I'm still along for the ride.
How did I ever kid myself
that I was in charge?
And oh, the bliss today
to notice anew these hands,
these eyes, these feet!
What joy to see them again
as the miracle they are,
to offer them in service to life.

Rosemary Wahtola Trommer, ahundredfallingveils.com

Nourished

I worry seriously
about only a handful of things.
Eyes to the ground
furrowed brow
beating heart
sleep.

Then I remember
that I am here right now.
Here -
with good work and a big bright love.
With a dog who just had a bath
after running in the mud.
With a mother who gardens and does yoga
and a father who makes rosaries and reads books.
And my brother, my friend, with a sweet baby daughter.

And I have my legs
and they walk for miles when I am worried.
And I have my soul
and it is vast and kinder
than this wild world.
And I have books
with their strong spines and medicine.
And music, all the music
and there is the mailman
who delivers mail almost every single day
bless him.

And the market with wine and radishes.
And the flowers falling through my hands
trusting me to make bouquets.
And there is the green earth and the tall mountain
the water birds, seedlings, snowfall, the sound of rain, sun finally
spring!

The bed and the water.
The paper and the pens,
The bathtub and the salt.
And the food he made me
and the letter she sent me
and Spain, San Francisco
your bedroom, this kitchen.

It's all been so much beauty among
the worry.
And I have kept nourished
and alive
this way.

Jeannette Encinias, jeannetteencinias.com accessed on August 24,2019

Canine Grace

Donnie attends church every Sunday morning.
He guides Chuck to a back pew,
lies down at his long-time companion's feet.
Sunlight through stained glass windows
gilds his blonde fur with rainbows.
He enters into an hour of silence,
his own realm of meditation,
or sleep. Just before the benediction
Donnie stands, shakes his harness,
his unique practice in the ringing of bells.
His expression is hopeful
as the two of them head toward
the Fellowship Hall. Will there be
a cookie, or perhaps a bit of left-over
communion bread?

Lois Parker Edstrom, Glint (MoonPath Press, 2019)

dharma

The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her dog house
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance --
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single cup, a single spoon?
Gandhi with staff and his holy diapers?

Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.

If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment
she would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.

If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind her ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.

Billy Collins, Poetry (August, 1998)

Airport Security

In the airport I got wanded,
though not by a fairy princess.

I had to remove my shoes,
prove they were not twin bombs.

But the strangest scene I saw
that day was where random checks

delayed the suspicious --
the gray lady in her wheelchair

and the toddler boy tugged
from his mother's hand, pulled

through the metal detector's arch.
She tried to follow but was

restrained by two guards who grasped
her arms as she yelled, "But I told him

not to talk to strangers!"
The child wailed bloody murder.

A female guard patted the boy
all over, although he did not giggle.

I myself went on profiling terrorists.
                   They were so obvious.

David Ray, The Death of Sardanapalus: and Other Poems of the Iraq Wars (Howling Dog Press, 2004)

The Death of Marilyn Monroe

The ambulance men touched her cold
body, lifted it, heavy as iron,
onto the stretcher, tried to close
her mouth, closed the eyes, tied the
arms to the side, moved a caught
strand of hair, as if it mattered,
saw the shape of her breasts, flattened by
gravity, under the sheet,
carried her, as if it were she,
down the steps.

These men were never the same. They went out
afterwards, as they always did,
for a drink or two, but they could not meet
each other's eyes.

            Their lives took
a turn -- one had nightmares, strange
pains, impotence, depression. One did not
like his work, his wife looked
different, his kids. Even death
seemed different to him -- a place where she
would be waiting.

And one found himself standing at night
in a doorway to a room of sleep, listening to a
woman breathing,  just an ordinary
woman
breathing.

Sharon Olds, The Dead and the Living (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984)

Stroke Patient

Someone came in to ask
how are you

only I couldn't
quite hear the words,
I thought he was asking
who, who are you?

so I started to say
my name's Jordan
only I never
got past the vowel

I'm Joe
just Joe
call me Joe

then I stopped to think
maybe I really am
someone else
maybe all this never
happened

my friend looked so strange to me
till I felt his hand --
his hand took mine
and my hand shook.

Rochelle Ratner, Someday Songs: Poems toward a Personal History (BkMk Press, 1992)

For Those Who Walked With Us

A Poem for All Saints' Day

For those
who walked with us,
this is a prayer.

For those
who have gone ahead,
this is a blessing.

For those
who touched and tended us,
who lingered with us
while they lived,
this is a thanksgiving.

For those
who journey still with us
in the shadow of awareness,
in the crevices of memory,
in the landscapes of our dreams,
this is a benediction.

Jan Richardson, paintedprayerbook.com

The Sun

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone --
and how it slides again

out of the blackness
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance --
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love --
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed --
or have you too
turned from this world --

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One (Beacon Press, 1992)

Ablution

Because one must be naked to get clean,
my dad shrugs out of his pajama shirt,
steps from his boxers and into the tub
as I brace him, whose long illness
has made him shed modesty too.
Seated on the plastic bench, he holds
the soap like a caught fish in his lap,
waiting for me to test the water's heat
on my wrist before turning the nozzle
toward his pale skin. He leans over
to be doused, then hands me the soap
so I might scrub his shoulders and neck,
suds sluicing from spine to buttock cleft.
Like a child he wants a washcloth
to cover his eyes while I lather
a palmful of pearlescent shampoo
into his craniotomy-scarred scalp
and then rinse clear whatever soft hair
is left. Our voices echo in the spray
and steam of this room where once,
long ago, he knelt at the tub's edge
to pour cups of bathwater over my head.
He reminds me to wash behind his ears,
and when he judges himself to be clean,
I turn off the tap. He grips the safety bar,
steadies himself, and stands. Turning to me,
his body is dripping and pale and pink.
And although I am forty,
he has this one last thing to teach me.
I hold open the towel to receive him.

Amy Fleury, Sympathetic Magic (Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2013)

Praise Song for the Day

A Poem for Barack Obama's 
Presidential Inauguration
January 20, 2009
(Excerpts)

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other's
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more 
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Elizabeth Alexander, Praise Song for the Day, (Graywolf Press, 2009) 

My New, Funny Old Mother

Will I ever be as funny as my mother at ninety?
I hope so, for everyone's sake, especially mine.
This woman, who swims, learns Spanish, cooks for herself,
and works Thursdays at the library -- this very Mother --
burps after every bite, wets her pants, washes them,
sports a hearing aid that screeches carols,
and says "Whatever!" to whatever happens,
when in the past she didn't trust much good
would come of anything, or anyone,
and often pointed to what wasn't working
to preserve her worried soul from what could soon go wrong.
When we said, "See you in the morning, Mom!"
she said, "We'll see about that!"
But now she says, "That would be nice."
Relieved of my dreams of perfection, I can't stop laughing,
gently, softly, when her hearing aid syncopates her burps,
and she asks, "What? What's so funny?" -- giggling --
because she knows I love her as she is.
No changes needed. Nothing to fix.
"See," she says, "I told you. Everything's fine."

Freya Manfred, Speak, Mother (Red Dragonfly Press, 2015)

Mysteries, Yes

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
    to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
    mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
    in allegiance with gravity
        while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
    never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
    scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
    who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
    "Look!" and laugh in astonishment,
    and bow their heads.

Mary Oliver, Evidence (Beacon Press, (2009)
 

The Tooth Fairy

They brushed a quarter with glue
and glitter, slipped in on bare
feet, and without waking me
painted rows of delicate gold
footprints on my sheets with a love
so quiet, I still can't hear it.

My mother must have been
a beauty then, sitting
at the kitchen table with him,
a warm wind lifting her
embroidered curtains, waiting
for me to fall asleep.

It's harder to believe
the years that followed, the palms
curled into fists, a floor
of broken dishes, her chain-smoking
through long silences, him
punching holes in the walls.

I can still remember her print
dresses, his checkered taxi, the day
I found her in the closet
with a paring knife, the night
he kicked my sister in the ribs.

He lives alone in Oregon now, dying
slowly of a rare bone disease.
His face stippled gray, his ankles
clotted beneath wool socks.

She's a nurse on the graveyard shift.
Comes home mornings and calls me.
Drinks her dark beer and goes to bed.

And I still wonder how they did it, slipped
that quarter under my pillow, made those
perfect footprints.

Whenever I see her, I ask again.
"I don't know," she says, rocking, closing
her eyes. "We were as surprised as you."

Dorianne Laux, Awake (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013)

Shoulders

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and
south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world's most sensitive cargo
but he's not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy's dream
deep inside him.

We're not going to be able
to live in this world
if we're not willing to do what he's doing
with one another.

The road will always be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

Naomi Shihab Nye, Red Suitcase (BOA Editions Ltd., 1994)

Great Depression Story

Sometimes the season changed in the telling,
sometimes the state, but it was always during

the Great Depression, and he was alone in the boxcar,
the train stalled beneath a sky wider

than any he'd seen so far, the fields of grass
wider than the sky. He'd been curious

to see if things were as bad somewhere else
as they were at home. They were -- and worse,

he said, places with no trees, no water.
He hadn't eaten all day, all week, his hunger

hard-fixed, doubled, gleaming as the rails. A lone
house broke the sharp horizon, the train dreaming

beneath him, so he climbed down, walked out,
the grass parting at his knees. The windows

were open, curtainless. and the screendoor,
unlatched, moved to open, too, when he knocked.

He could see in all the way through to the kitchen --
and he smelled before he saw the lidded

pot on the stove, steam escaping. Her clothes
moved on the line for all reply, the sheets,

a slip. one dress, washed thin, worn to translucence;
through it he could see what he mistook for fields

of roses until a crow flew in with the wind --
sudden, fleeting seam. By the time he got back to the train

he'd guessed already what he had taken -- pot
and all -- a hen, an old one that had quit

laying, he was sure or she wouldn't have killed it.
The train began to move then, her house falling

away from him. The story ended with the meat
not quite done, but, believe him, he ate it

all, white and dark, back, breast, legs, and thighs,
strewing the still-warm bones behind him for miles.

Claudia Emerson, Figure Studies (Louisiana State University Press, 2008)

Prayer Chain

My mother called to tell me
about an old classmate of mine who

was dying on the parish prayer chain --
or was very sick -- or destitute --

or it had not worked out -- the marriage --
or the children were all on drugs -- and

all the old mothers were praying intensely
for all the pain of their children

and for life -- they were praying for life --
in their quiet rooms -- sipping decaf coffee --

I bet they've been praying for me at times --
so I'll find my way -- so I won't rob a bank --

I'll take them -- the mystical prayers of old mothers --
it matters -- all this patient and purposeful love.

Tom Nowlan, The Sound of It (New Rivers Press, 2008)

Zimmer in Grade School

In grade school I wondered
Why I had been born
To wrestle in the ashy puddles
With my square nose
Streaming mucus and blood,
My knuckles puffed from combat
And the old nun's ruler.
I feared everything: God,
Learning, and my school mates.
I could not count, spell, or read.
My report card proclaimed
These scarlet failures.
My parents wrung their loving hands.
My guardian angel wept constantly.

But I could never hide anything.
If I peed my pants in class
The puddle was always quickly evident,
My worst mistakes were at
The blackboard for Jesus and all
The saints to see.
          Even now,
When I hide my elaborate mask,
It is always known that I am Zimmer,
The one who does the messy papers
And fractures all his crayons,
Who spits upon the radiators
And sits all day in shame
Outside the office of the principal.

Paul Zimmer, Crossing to Sunlight Revisited: New and Selected Poems (The University of Georgia Press, 2007)

Lou Gehrig Day

He was scared and did not
want to speak to 62,000 people.

Maybe he felt facing death
was enough to endure but

they kept calling his name
till he stepped up to the mic

and gave 278 words of thank you
and goodbye. His body trembled

as he spoke with the voice
of a dying man still strong enough

to unlock his heart before thousands
and let them all come in.

Edwin Romond, Home Team: Poems about Baseball (Grayson Books, 2018)

Musial

My father once sold a Chevy
to Stan Musial, the story goes,
back in the fifties,
when the most coveted object
in the universe of third grade
was a Stan-the-Man baseball card.

No St. Louis honkytonk
or riverfront jazz club
could be more musical
than those three syllables
rising from the tongue of Jack Buck
in the dark mouths
of garages on our street,

where men like my father
stood in their shirt-sleeved exile,
cigarette in one hand, scotch
in the other, radios rising
and ebbing with the Cards.

If Jack Buck were to call
my father's drinking that summer,
he would have said
he was swinging for the bleachers.
He was on a torrid pace.
In any case, the dealership was failing,
the marriage a heap of ash.

And knowing my father, I doubt
if the story is true,
although I love to imagine
that big hayseed smile
flashing in the showroom, the salesmen
and mechanics looking on
from their nosebleed seats at the edge
of history, as my dark-suited dad
handed the keys to the Man,
and for an instant each man there
knew himself a part of something
suddenly immense,

as when,
in the old myths, a bored god
dresses up like one of us, and falls
through a summer thunderhead
to shock us from our daydream drabness
with heaven's dazzle and razzmatazz.

George Bilgere, Imperial (University of Pittsburg Press, 2014)

With a Kiss

She, old, labored in death,
he, new, labored in birth,
great-grandmother and grandson
struggling
until they passed one another
somewhere
in an early morning hour,
each on the way to a new world.

Marsha Foss

One Time

When evening had flowed between houses
and paused on the school ground, I met
Hilary's blind little sister following
the gray smooth railing still warm from the sun
with her hand; and she stood by the edge
holding her face upward waiting
while the last light found her cheek
and her hair, and then on over the trees.

You could hear the great sprinkler arm
of water find and then leave the pavement,
and pigeons telling each other their dreams
or the dreams they would have. We were
deep in the well of shadow by then, and I
held out my hand, saying, "Tina, it's me --
Hilary says I should tell you it's dark
and, oh, Tina, it is. Together now --"

And I reached, our hands touched,
and we made our way home.

William Stafford, The Way It Is (Graywolf Press, 1998)

Some Advice from a Mother to Her Married Son

The answer to do you love me isn't, I married you, didn't I?
Or, Can't we discuss this after the ball game is through?
It isn't, Well that all depends on what you mean by 'love'.
Or even, Come to bed and I'll prove that I do.
The answer isn't, How can I talk about love when
      the bacon is burned and the house is a mess and
      the children are screaming their heads off and
      I'm going to miss my bus?
The answer is yes.
The answer is yes.
The answer is yes.

Judith Viorst

Still, I Give Thanks

Day fourteen in the radiation waiting room
and the elderly man sitting next to me
says he gives thanks every day because
he can still roll over and climb out of bed.
We wear the same cotton gowns -- repeating
pattern of gold stars on a field of blue -- that gape
in back, leaving our goose bump flesh exposed.
Lately, I too, give thanks for the things I can do --
sit, stand, take my next breath. Thanks for my feet,
my fingers, the ears on my head. I give thanks
for the scrub jay's audacious cries outside
my window at dawn. He is a hungry soul,
forever foraging to feed his mortal appetite.
Like him, I want more of everything: more light,
more life, another cup of Darjeeling tea and a silver
teaspoon to stir it with. I want to see my mother again
before the winter settles in, and when she's gone,
I want her porcelain Madonna. I want my doctor
to use the word "cure" just once. Each day, supine
on the table, I listen to the razoring whine
of the radiation beam. It hurts to lie still,
the table sharp as an ice floe beneath the bones
of my spine. Still, I give thanks for the hands
that position me, their measurements and marking
pens, the grid of green light that slides like silk
across my skin. I close my eyes and think
of the jay. We wear the same raiment: blood, bone,
muscle. Most days I still feel joy. I give thanks for
that bird, too -- invisible feathers, invisible wings --
a quickening felt deep within the body, vigorous and fleeting.

"Still, I Give Thanks," Marie Reynolds  

Plenitude

Even near the very end
the frail cat of many years
came to sit with me
among the glitter of bulb and glow
tried to the very last to drink water
and love her small world
would not give up on her curious self.
And though she staggered -- shriveled and weak
still she poked her nose through ribbon and wrap
and her peace and her sweetness were of such
that when I held my ear to her heart
I could hear the sea.

Ann Iverson, Mouth of Summer (Kelsay Books, 2017)

Shackleton's Decision

At a certain point he decided they could not afford
the dogs. It was someone's job to take them one by one
behind a pile of ice and shoot them. I try to imagine
the artic night which descended and would not lift,

a darkness that clung to their clothes. Some men objected
because the dogs were warmth and love, reminders
of their previous life where they slept in soft beds,
their bellies warm with supper. Dog tails were made

of joy, their bodies were wrapped in a fur of hope.
I had to put the book down when I read about the dogs
walking willingly into death, following orders,
one clutching an old toy between his teeth. They trusted

the men who led them into this white danger,
this barren cold. My God, they pulled the sleds
full of provisions and barked away the Sea Leopards.
Someone was told to kill the dogs because supplies

were running low and the dogs, gathered around
the fire, their tongues wet with kindness, knew
nothing of betrayal; they knew how to sit and come,
how to please, how to bow their heads, how to stay.

Faith Shearin, Moving the Piano (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2011)

clara: in the post office

I keep telling you, I'm not a feminist.
I grew up an only child on a ranch,
so I drove tractors, learned to ride.
When the truck wouldn't start, I went to town
for parts. The man behind the counter
told me I couldn't rebuild a carburetor.
I could: every carburetor on the place. That's
necessity, not feminism.
I learned to do the books
after my husband left me and the debts
and the children. I shoveled snow and pitched hay
when the hired man didn't come to work.
I learned how to pull a calf
when the vet was too busy. As I thought,
the cow did most of it herself; they've been
birthing alone for ten thousand years. Does
that make them feminists?
It's not
that I don't like men; I love them -- when I can.
But I've stopped counting on them
to change my flats or open my doors.
That's not feminism; that's just good sense.

Linda Hasselstrom, Roadkill (Spoon River Publishing, 1987)

Democracy

"Look at those eyes," she warbles,
as I settle myself and my guide
across from her on the bus.
"What kind of dog is that?"
I am about to answer
when a man farther back clears his throat
and says, "Yellow Labrador."
If he's going to speak for me,
at least he knows his breeds.
But he knows more than that --
he knows their innermost lives.
He says, "Saddest dogs in the world."
I wouldn't presume to know that,
but we live in a free country;
people can think what they want.
"Takes six years to train them."
He sounds likes he enjoys
having tidbits of knowledge to share.
There's only one problem; he's wrong:
it's actually more like six months.
Fortunately for him,
we live in a democracy,
where opinion is equal to fact,
and we all have the right to vote.

Daniel Simpson in "Poetry Is a Way of Being in the World That Wasn't Made for Us," by Jennifer Bartlett, The New York Times, August 15, 2018

Satisfied

Troubled and burdened, I go to the woods
where the trees are not trying so hard.
Not striving for the light,
simply letting what is in them unfold.

Water in the brook whose flow is merely surrender.
Birds letting go of their songs, songs threading
through woods as far as they go.
Leaves untroubled to be turning the color of death.

A snake growing a skin to shed,
a pod growing a seed to release.
Only gradually do I realize
how content I am to be here.

A nuthatch works a little branch,
finding something tiny here and there,
until she is done and turns and flies off,
satisfied.

Steve Garnaas-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net, September 26, 2019

The Scent of Apple Cake

My mother cooked as drudgery
the same fifteen dishes round
and round like a donkey bound
to a millstone grinding dust.

My mother baked as a dance,
the flour falling from the sifter
in a rain of fine white pollen.
The sugar was sweet snow.

The dough beneath her palms
was the warm flesh of a baby
when they were all hers before
their wills sprouted like mushrooms.

Cookies she formed in rows
on the baking sheets, oatmeal,
molasses, lemon, chocolate chip,
delights anyone could love.

Love was in short supply,
but pies were obedient to
her command of their pastry, crisp
holding the sweetness within.

Desserts were her reward for
cleaning in the acid yellow cloud
of Detroit, begging dollars from
my father, mending, darning, bleaching.

In the oven she made sweetness
where otherwise there was none.

Marge Piercy, Made in Detroit (Knopf, 2015)

The History Teacher

Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.
And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.
The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
"How far is it from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador's hat?"
The War of Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom
on Japan.
The children could leave his classroom
for the playground and torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,
while he gathered his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.

Billy Collins, Sailing Alone around the Room: New and Selected Poems (Random House, Inc., 2002)

Photograph

He washed his feet for the picture,
even his knees,
and wondered about that man
who cared enough to want him to sit there
for a photograph,
even though he didn't have
nothing good to hold in his hands,
nor even a dog to sit by his chair.
It gave him, briefly,
some sort of feeling
of just being
enough.

Cynthia Rylant


Photo by Walker Evans, hired by the Farm Security
Administration to document the country during the
Great Depression

Marks

My husband gives me an A
for last night's supper
an incomplete for my ironing
a B plus in bed.
My son says I am average
an average mother, but if
I put my mind to it
I could improve.
My daughter believes
in Pass/Fail and tells me
I pass. Wait 'till they learn

I'm dropping out.

Linda Pastan, The Five Stages of Grief  (W. W. Norton & Co., 1978)

His Elderly Father as a Young Man

This happened before I met your mother:
I took Jennie Johanson to a summer dance,
and she sent me a letter, a love letter,
I guess, even if the word love wasn't in it.
She wrote that she had a good time
and didn't want the night to end.
At home, she lay down on her bed
but stayed awake, listening to the songs
of morning birds outside her window.
I read that letter a hundred times
and kept it in a cigar box
with useless things I had saved:
a pocket knife with a pearl handle
and a broken blade,
a harmonica that I never learned to play,
one cuff link, an empty rifle shell.

When your mother and I got married,
I threw the letter away --
if I had kept it, she might wonder.
But I wanted to keep it
and even thought about hiding places,
maybe in the barn or the tool shed;
but what if it were ever found?
I knew of no way to explain why
I would keep such a letter, much less
why I would take the trouble to hide it.
Jennie had gone to California
not long after that dance.
I pretty much got over
wanting to see her just once more,
but I wish I could have kept the letter,
even though I know it by heart.

Leo Dangel, Home from the Field (Spoon River Poetry Press, 1997)

Chivalry

He strolls down the middle of the sidewalk
leaving little room for me. I lag behind
to get around an open gate, to avoid
a fence post, a mail box sticking out.
You don't walk as fast as you used to, he says,
striding ahead on his personal red carpet,
feet turned slightly out, a spring in his step
like he's about to go up for a jump shot.
I dodge a low branch and the open door
of a parked car. Just as I decide
to hip-check him out into the street
he stops and crouches to pet
a little white cat, He croons to her,
stroking her arched back. The cat
closes her eyes and I think of how he sleeps
nestled against me, turning when I turn
all night long, and never wakes me.

Debra Spencer, Pomegranate (Hummingbird, Press, 2004)

In Memoriam

In the early afternoon my mother
was doing the dishes. I climbed
onto the kitchen table, I suppose
to play, and fell asleep there.
I was drowsy and awake, though,
as she lifted me up, carried me
on her arms into the living room,
and placed me on the davenport,
but I pretended to be asleep
the whole time, enjoying the luxury --
I was too big for such a privilege
and just old enough to form
my only memory of her carrying me.
She's still carrying me to a softer place.

Leo Dangel, Saving Singletrees (WSC Press, 2013)

The farm wife turns off the TV evangelist

The Jesus I grew up with
likes to be outside.
If he's not fishing, he's picking figs
or showing us his mustard crop.
He prefers dusty roads, the common sparrow,
and lilies of the field.
When he knocks on your door
holding a lantern, you know it's time
to buckle on overshoes
and go with him to feed the sheep.

But this preacher, who looks straight
into the camera and claims he knows
Jesus, says what he wants
is for me to believe in him
so he can come inside.

That sounds shifty to me.
Like a wolf with his paws dipped in flour.

Jesus who knows the blind
said we will know a tree by its fruit.

Shari Wagner, The Farm Wife's Almanac (Dream Seekers Books, 2019)

My time in better dresses

I remember job hunting in my shoddy
and nervous working class youth,
how I had to wear nylons and white
gloves that were dirty in half an hour
for jobs that barely paid for shoes.

Don't put down Jew, my mother
warned, just say Protestant, it
doesn't commit you to anything.
Ads could still say "white" and
in my childhood, we weren't.

I worked in better dresses in Sam's
cut-rate department store, $3.98
and up. I wasn't trusted to sell.
I put boxes together, wrapped,
cleaned out dressing rooms.

My girlfriend and I bought a navy
taffeta dress with cut-out top, wore it
one or the other to parties, till it
failed my sophistication test. The older
"girls" in sales, divorced, sleek,

impressed me, but the man in charge
I hated, the way his eyes stroked,
stripped, discarded. How he docked
our pay for lateness. How he sucked
on his power like a piece of candy.

Marge Piercy, Made in Detroit (Knopf, 2015)

Halleluiah

Everyone should be born into this world happy

and loving everything.

But in truth it rarely works that way.

For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.

Halleluiah, anyway I'm not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes

almost forgetting how wondrous the world is

and how miraculously kind some people can be?

And have you too decided that probably nothing important

is ever easy?

Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I'm sixty now, and even a little more,

and some days I feel I have wings.

Mary Oliver, Evidence (Beacon Press, 2009)

Bad News Good News

I was at a camp in the country,
you were home in the city,
and bad news had come to you.

You texted me as I sat
with others around a campfire.
It had been a test you and I

hadn't taken seriously,
hadn't worried about.
You texted the bad news word

cancer. I read it in that circle
around the fire. There was
singing and laughter to my right and left

and there was that word on the screen.
I tried to text back but,
as often happens in that country,

my reply would not send so I went to higher ground.
I stood on a hill above the river and sent you
the most beautiful words I could manage,

put them together, each following each. Under
Ursa Major, Polaris, Cassiopeia, a space station flashing,
I said what had been said

many times, important times, foolish times:
those words which soft-bodied humans say when the news is bad.
The I love you which we wrap around our

need and hurl at the cosmos: Take this, you heartless
nothing and everything, take this.
I chose words to fling into the dark toward  you


while the gray-robed coyote came out of hiding
and the badger wandered the unlit hill
and the lark rested herself in tall grasses;

I sent the most necessary syllables
we have, after all this time the ones we want to hear:
I said Home, I said Love, I said Tomorrow.

Marjorie Saiser, I Have Nothing to Say About Fire (The Blackwaters Press, 2016)

Albert Hinckley

Miss Crandall's Boarding School for Young Ladies of Color,

Canterbury, Connecticut, 1833

Last Sunday, a white boy openly smiled at me

where I sat with my sisters at the back of the Baptist Church.

When the pastor spoke of the sin of slavery,

the white boy looked back with his eyebrows arched.

I could read his thoughts, but I dared not meet his glance,

for nothing must pass between us, not one chance

for gossip to pounce with glee on one shared smile.

No one must think of us as eligible girls.

Waylaid by ruffians as we reached the ford,

our wagon was overturned. Our sodden skirts

weighted and slowed us, but no one was hurt.

Splashing to me, his eyes looking truly scared,

that boy took my hand. "Let me help you, miss.

From this day forward, I am an abolitionist."

Marilyn Nelson,  The Cincinnati Review from Collins, B., & Lehman, D. (2006) The Best American Poetry, 2006 New York: Scribner Poetry

Bedside Reading

  for St. Mark's Episcopal, Good Friday 1999

In his careful welter of dried leaves and seeds,
soil samples, quartz pebbles, notes-to-myself, letters,
on Dr. Carver's bedside table
next to his pocket watch,
folded in Aunt Mariah's Bible:
the Bill of Sale.
Seven hundred dollars
for a thirteen-year-old girl named Mary.

He moves it from passage
to favorite passage.
Fifteen cents
for every day she had lived.
Three hundred fifty dollars
for each son.
No charge
for two stillborn daughters
buried out there with the Carvers' child.

This new incandescent light makes
his evening's reading unwaveringly easy,
if he remembers to wipe his spectacles.
He turns to the blooming story
of Abraham's dumbstruck luck,
of Isaac's pure trust in his father's wisdom.
Seven hundred dollars for all of her future.
He shakes his head.

Marilyn Nelson, A Life in Poems (Front Street, 2001)

A Poison Tree

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright,
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine, --
And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning, glad, I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

William Blake, public domain

Diagnosis

By the time I was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long. My mom did not tell him
what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face --
he held me, and conversed with me
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She's doing it now! Look!
She's doing it now! And the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.

Sharon Olds, One Secret Thing (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008)

Small Deeps

We are too complicated.
We seek God here, there and everywhere.
We seek God in holy places, in books,
in rules, regulations, rites and rituals.
We seek God in pomp and glory and ceremony,
in relics and statues
and visions and shrines.
We seek God in Popes and Fathers and saints.
Ah, like lost bewildered children,
we seek outside the God
who waits to be found
in the small deeps
of the human heart.

Edwina Gateley, There Was No Path So I Trod One (Source Books, 1996)

Small Kindnesses

I've been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say "bless you"
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. "Don't die," we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don't want to hurt each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, "Here,
have my seat." "Go ahead - you first," "I like your hat."

Danusha Lameris, Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection (Green Writers Press, 2019)

Notes from the Delivery Room

Strapped down,
victim in an old comic book,
I have been here before,
this place where pain winces
off the walls
like too bright light.
Bear down a doctor says,
foreman to sweating laborer,
but this work, this forcing
of one life from another
is something that I signed for
at a moment when I would have signed anything.
Babies should grow in fields;
common as beets or turnips
they should be picked and held
root-end up, soil spilling
from between their toes --
and how much easier it would be later,
returning them to earth.
Bear up. . . Bear down. . . the audience
grows restive, and I'm a new magician
who can't produce the rabbit
from my swollen hat.
She's crowning, someone says,
but there is no one royal here,
just me, quite barefoot,
greeting my barefoot child.

Linda Pastan, Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998 (W. W. Norton & Company, 1971)

Quilts

(for Sally Sellers)

Like a fading piece of cloth
I am a failure

No longer do I cover tables filled with food and laughter
My seams are frayed my hems falling my strength no longer able
To hold the hot and cold

I wish for those first days
When just woven I could keep water
From seeping through
Repelled stains with the tightness of my weave
Dazzled the light with my
Reflection

I grow old though pleased with my memories
The tasks I can no longer complete
Are balanced by the love of the tasks gone past

I offer no apology only
this plea:

When I am frayed and strained and drizzle at the end
Please someone cut a square and put me in a quilt
That might keep some child warm

And some old person with no one else to talk to
Will hear my whispers
And cuddle
near

Nikki Giovanni, from the Visual Verse Project

Second-Hand Coat

I feel
in her pockets; she wore nice cotton gloves,
kept a handkerchief box, washed her undies,
ate at the Holiday Inn, had a basement freezer,
belonged to a bridge club.
I think when I wake in the morning
that I have turned into her.
She hangs in the hall downstairs,
a shadow with pulled threads.
I slip her over my arms, skin of a matron.
Where are you? I say to myself, to the orphaned body,
and her coat says,
Get your purse, have you got your keys?

Ruth Stone, Second-Hand Coat: Poems New and Selected (David R. Godine Pub., 1967)

Ice Cream Truck

From blocks away we heard the mechanical
music the ice cream truck chimed all over
the neighborhood, calling to kids like the Pied

Piper as we darted into our houses begging
our parents for change to buy Nutty Buddies

and banana popsicles, orange pushups
and ice cream sandwiches. Once the truck

stopped on our street, we swooped like seagulls
around the open window so the ice cream man
could take our money and hand out whatever

treats we asked for, which were always better
than we remembered from the last time his boxy,

hand-painted truck rolled around --the cold,
creamy confections freezing our tongues and

sliding down our parched throats as fast as we
could eat them -- the taste of summer lingering
just long enough to make us wish for more.

Terri Kirby Erickson, A Lake of Light and Clouds (Press 53, 2014)

You Were Asleep

when I came to bed all
curled up like a child

under the blanket and
when I slipped in be-

side you as quietly as
I could you stirred but

didn't really wake and
stretched out a hand to

cup my face as if you were
holding a bowl or a ball.

James Laughlin, The Collected Poems of James Laughlin (New Directions, 2014)

You Could Never Take a Car to Greenland

my daughter says. Unless the car could float.
Unless by car you mean boat. Unless the ocean
turned to ice and promised not to crack.
Unless Greenland floated over here,
having lifted its anchor. Unless we could row
our country there. Our whole continent
would have to come along, wouldn't it? Unless
we cut ourselves free. What kind of saw
could we use for that? What kind of oars
could deliver one country to another?
She asks, Why is Greenland called Greenland
if it's not green? Why is Iceland called
Iceland if it's greener than Greenland?
Unless it's a trick, a lie: the name
Greenland is an ad for Greenland. Who would go
promised nothing but ice? Who would cut
her home to pieces and row away for that?

Maggie Smith, Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017)

Differences of Opinion

He Tells Her

He tells her that the earth is flat --

He knows the facts, and that is that.

In altercations fierce and long

She tries her best to prove him wrong.

But he has learned to argue well.

He calls her arguments unsound

And often asks her not to yell.

She cannot win. He stands his ground.

The planet goes on being round.

Wendy Cope, originally appeared in Poetry, February, 2006, copyright by Wendy Cope, 2006

Oxygen

Everything needs it: bones, muscles, and even,
while it calls the earth its home, the soul.
So the merciful, noisy machine

stands in our house working away in its
lung-like voice. I hear it as I kneel
before the fire, stirring with a

stick of iron, letting the logs
lie more loosely. You, in the upstairs room,
are in your usual position, leaning on your

right shoulder which aches
all day. You are breathing
patiently; it is a

beautiful sound. It is
your life, which is so close
to my own that I would not know

where to drop the knife of
separation. And what does this have to do
with love, except

everything? Now the fire rises
and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red
roses of flame. Then it settles

to quietude, or maybe gratitude, as it feeds
as we all do, as we must, upon the invisible gift:
our purist, sweet necessity: the air.

Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume Two (Beacon Press, 2005)

Longing

Consider the blackpoll warbler.

She tips the scales
at one ounce
before she migrates, taking off
from the seacoast to our east
flying higher and higher

ascending two or three miles
during her eighty hours of flight
until she lands,
in Tobago,
north of Venezuela
three days older,
and weighing half as much.

She flies over open ocean almost the whole way.

She is not so different from us.
The arc of our lives is a mystery too.
We do not understand,
we cannot see
what guides us on our way:
that longing that pulls us toward light.

Not knowing, we fly onward
hearing the dull roar of the waves below.

Julie Cadwallader Staub, Wing Over Wing (Paraclete Press, 2019)

Country Music Every Time

In every song there's a little story
of a love and the myriad ways
it can go wrong. It can go wrong
as she stands in the kitchen
frying eggs. It can go wrong
as he's driving truck
through slick, black nights
down highways too long
to dream about. It can go wrong
for a strikebreaker or a stargazer.
It can break up with a word, a blow,
a night spent alone, over a TV show,
a menu, a baby who comes
or one who was only dreamed about.
Love, the country singer insists,
is the only thing worth anything.
The heart like a rock in the sand.
The waves in human song
break over it, over it.

Margaret Hasse, Stars Above, Stars Below (Nodin Press, 2018)

Knoxville, Tennessee

I always like summer
best
you can eat fresh corn
from daddy's garden
and okra
and greens
and cabbage
and lots of
barbecue
and buttermilk
and homemade ice cream
at the church picnic
and listen to
gospel music
outside
at the church
homecoming
and go to the mountains with
your grandmother
and go barefooted
and be warm
all the time
not only when you go to bed
and sleep

Nikki Giovanni, Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgment (HarperCollins Publisher, 1968)

The Gift to Sing

Sometimes the mist overhangs my path,
And blackening clouds about me cling,
But, oh, I have a magic way
To turn the gloom to cheerful day --
             I softly sing.

And if the way grows darker still,
Shadowed by Sorrow's somber wing,
With glad defiance in my throat,
I pierce the darkness with a note,
             And I sing, and sing.

I brood not over the broken past,
Nor dread whatever time may bring:
No nights are dark, no days are long,
While in my heart there swells a song,
              And I can sing.

James Weldon Johnson

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly --
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that's what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-clothes on my forehead,
and then led me out into the air light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bone and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift - not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-toned lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Billy Collins, The Trouble with Poetry:And Other Poems (Random House, 2005)

Accidents

There is no infant
this time,
only my own life swaddled
in bandages
and handed back to me
to hold in my two arms
like any new thing,
to hold to my bruised breasts
and promise
to cherish.

The smell of cut
flowers encloses this room,
insistent as anesthetic.
It is spring.
Outside the hospital window
the first leaves have opened
their shiny blades,
and a dozen new accidents
turn over in their sleep,
waiting to happen.

Linda Pastan, Poetry, April, 1987

To a Daughter Leaving Home

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park.
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like
a handkerchief
waving goodbye.

Linda Pastan, Poetry (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988)

The Stare

With a basin of warm water and a towel
I am shaving my father
late on a summer afternoon
as he sits in a chair in striped pajamas.

He screws up his face this way and that
to make room for the razor,
as someone passes with a tray,
as someone else sobs in a corner.

It is impossible to remember
such closeness,
impossible to know too
whether the object of his vivid staring is

the wavering treetops,
his pale reflection in the window,
or maybe just a splinter of light,
a pinpoint caught within the glass itself.

Billy Collins, Nine Horses (Random House, 2002)

Man in Space

All you have to do is listen to the way a man
sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people
and notice how intent he is on making his point
even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver,

and you will know why the women in science
fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own
are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine
when the men from earth arrive in their rocket,

why they are always standing in a semicircle
with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart,
their breasts protected by hard metal discs.

Billy Collins, Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes: Selected Poems (Picador, 2000)

Employed

She just wants to be employed
for eight hours a day. She is not
interested in a career; she wants a job
with a paycheck and free parking. She
does not want to carry a briefcase filled
with important papers to read after
dinner; she does not want to return
phone calls. When she gets home, she
wants to kick off her shoes and waltz
around her kitchen singing, "I am a piece
of work."

Beverly Rollwagen, She Just Wants (Nodin Press, 2004)

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean --
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down --
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver, Dream Work, (Grove/Atlantic Inc., 1986)

For My Daughter

When I die choose a star
and name it after me
that you may know
I have not abandoned
or forgotten you.
You were such a star to me,
following you through birth
and childhood, my hand
in your hand.

When I die
choose a star and name it
after me so that I may shine
down on you, until you join
me in darkness and silence
together.

David Ignatow, Poems: 1934-1969 (Wesleyan University Press, 1975)

The Psychiatrist Says She Is Severely Demented

But she's my mother. She lies in her bed,
Hi, Sweetie, she says.
Hi Mom. Do you know my name?
I can't wait for her answer, I'm Bobbi.
Oh, so you found me again, she says.
Her face and hair have the same gray sheen
like a black and white drawing smudged on the edges.
The bedspread is hot pink, lime green. Her eyes,
Such a distant blue, indifferent as the sky. I put my hand
On her forehead. It is soft, and she resembles my real mother
Who I have not spoken to in so many years.
I want to talk to her as her eyes close.
She is mumbling something, laughing to herself,
All the sadness she ever had has fled.
And when she opens her eyes again, she stares through me
And her eyes well up with tears.
And I stand there lost in her incoherence,
Which feels almost exactly like love.

Bobbi Lurie, Letter from the Lawn: Poems by Bobbi Lurie (CustomWords, 2006)

My Friend's Divorce

I want her
To dig up
every plant
in her garden,
the pansies, the penta,
roses, ranunculas,
thyme and the lilies,
the thing
nobody knows the name of,
unwind the morning glories
from the wire windows
of the fence,
take the blooming
and the almost-blooming
and the dormant,
especially the dormant,
and then
and then
plant them in her new yard
on the other side
of town
and see how
they breathe!

Naomi Shibab Nye, Clackamas Literary Review and Clackamas.cc.or.us/clr and webdesol.com/CLR, copyright 2001-2002 Clackamas Community College

Prayer for my Immigrant Relatives

While they wait in long lines, legs shifting,
fingers growing tired of holding handrails,
pages of paperwork, give them patience.
Help them to recall the cobalt Mediterranean
or the green valleys full of vineyards and sheep.
When peoples' words resemble the buzz
of beehives, help them to hear the music
of home, sung from balconies overflowing
with woven rugs and bundled vegetables.
At night, when the worry beads are held
in one palm and a cigarette lit in the other,
give them the memory of their first step
onto solid land, after much ocean, air and clouds,
remind them of the phone call back home saying,
We arrived. Yes, thank God we made it, we are here.

Lory Bedikian, The Book of Lamenting (Anhinga Press, 2011)

A Poem of Friendship

We are not lovers
because of the love
we make
but the love
we have

We are not friends
because of the laughs
we spend
but the tears
we save

I don't want to be near you
for the thoughts we share
but the words we never have
to speak

I will never miss you
because of what we do
but what we are
together

Nikki Giovanni, Love Poems (HarperCollins Publishers, 1968)