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