Red Stilts

Seventy years ago I made a pair of stilts
from six-foot two-by-twos, with blocks
to stand on nailed a foot from the bottom.

If I was to learn to walk on stilts I wanted
them red and I had to wait almost forever
for the paint to dry, laid over the arms

of a saggy, ancient Adirondack chair
no longer good for much but holding hoes
and rakes and stakes rolled up in twine,

and at last I couldn’t wait a minute longer
and took the stilts into my hands and stepped
between them, stepped up and stepped out,

tilted far forward, clopping fast and away
down the walk, a foot above my neighborhood,
the summer in my hair, my new red stilts

stuck to my fingers, not knowing how far
I’d be able to get, and now, in what seems
just a few yards down the block, I’m there.

Ted Kooser, Red Stilts (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

Did I Miss Anything

                        Question frequently asked by students after

                        missing a class

Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here

we sat with our hands folded on our desks

in silence, for the full two hours

 

     Everything. I gave an exam worth

     40 percent of the grade for this term

     and assigned some reading due today

     on which I’m about to hand out a quiz

     worth 50 percent

 

Nothing. None of the content of this course

has value or meaning

Take as many days off as you like:

any activities we undertake as a class

I assure you will not matter either to you or me

and are without purpose

 

     Everything. A few minutes after we began last time

     a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel

     or other heavenly being appeared

     and revealed to us what each woman or man must do

     to attain divine wisdom in this life and

     the hereafter

     This is the last time the class will meet

     before we disperse to bring the good news to all people  on earth.

 

Nothing. When you are not present

how could something significant occur?

 

     Everything. Contained in this classroom

     is a microcosm of human experience

     assembled for you to query and examine and ponder

     This is not the only place such an opportunity has been gathered

     but it was one place

      And you weren’t here

Tom Wayman, Did I Miss Anything: Selected Poems 1973-1993 (Harbour Publishing, 1993)

At Arby's, At Noon

Some of us were arriving, hungry,

impatient, while others had eaten

and were leaving, bidding goodbye

to our friends, and among us

stood a pretty young woman, blind,

her perfect fingers interwoven

about the top of her cane,

a flimsy wand pressed to her cheek,

and she was bending forward,

open-eyed, to find the knotted lips

of a man whose disfigured face

had been assembled out of scars

and who was leaving, hurrying off,

and though their kiss was brief

and askew and awkwardly pursed,

we all received it with a kind of

wonder, and kept it on our own lips

through the afternoon.

Ted Kooser, Splitting an Order (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)

Ain't I a Woman

 

That man over there say

   a woman needs to be helped into carriages

and lifted over ditches

   and to have the best place everywhere.

Nobody ever helped me into carriages

   or over mud puddles

      or gives me a best place…

 

And ain’t I a woman?

   Look at me

Look at my arm!

   I have plowed and planted

and gathered into barns

   and no man could head me…

And ain’t I a woman?

   I could work as much

and eat as much as a man--

   when I could get to it--

and bear the lash as well

   and ain’t I a woman?

I have born 13 children

   and seen most all sold into slavery

and when I cried out a mother’s grief

   none but Jesus heard me…

and ain’t I a woman?

   that little man in black there say

a woman can’t have as much rights as a man

   cause Christ wasn’t a woman

Where did your Christ come from?

   From God and a woman!

Man had nothing to do with him!

   If the first woman God ever made

was strong enough to turn the world

   upside down, all alone

together women ought to be able to turn it

   rightside up again.

Erlene Stetson, Ain't I a Woman: A Book of Women's Poetry from around the World, ed. Illona Linthwaite (Gramercy, 1993)

Supple Cord

 

My brother, in his small white bed,

held one end.

I tugged the other

to signal I was still awake.

We could have spoken,

could have sung

to one another,

we were in the same room

for five years,

but the soft cord

with its little frayed ends

connected us

in the dark,

gave comfort

even if we had been bickering

all day.

When he fell asleep first

and his end of the cord

dropped to the floor,

I missed him terribly,

though I could hear his even breath

and we had such long and separate lives

ahead.

Naomi Shihab Nye, A Maze Me (Greenwillow, 2005)

Not Seeing Talon or Beak

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit.

                                                                                            Audre Lorde

The pistols glinted in the moonlight

pouring through the trees by the bike path

as two men robbed my son and his friend.

One gun pressed into his friend's temple

as he lay face-down on the ground;

the other pointed at my son's chest. He obeyed:

slipped off his backpack, emptied 

his pockets, handed the taller man his chapstick

and his phone, which, minutes before,

had sent the message, On my way, to me.

He knelt down and turned his back when asked,

as one might before uttering a prayer,

the universal gesture of supplication.

In the grass, damp with dew, he prepared

for the closing of night, the silencing

of tree frogs, but the gunshot never

arrived. Instead the men ordered them

to run away, and so they ran, hearts glad

to be pounding louder than their footsteps

like bass drums at some celebratory parade

all the way home. Later, telling the story,

he says he imagined as he ran the desperation

of those men -- Not much older than me! --

that pushed them into a life like that.

Like a rabbit looking up at the hawk

and not seeing talon or beak,

but the soft underside of the wing.

Heather Swan, Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Consolation, James Crews and Ted Kooser, eds. (Green Writers Press, 2019) 

Everyday Grace

It can happen like that:
meeting at the market,
buying tires amid the smell
of rubber, the grating sound
of jackhammers and drills,
anywhere we share stories,
and grace flows between us.

The tire center waiting room
becomes a healing place
as one speaks of her husband’s
heart valve replacement, bedsores
from complications. A man
speaks of multiple surgeries,
notes his false appearance
as strong and healthy.

I share my sister’s death
from breast cancer, her
youngest only seven.
A woman rises, gives
her name, Mrs. Henry,
then takes my hand.
Suddenly an ordinary day

becomes holy ground.

Stella Nesanovich, Healing the Divide: Poems of Consolation and Connection, James Crews and Ted Kooser, eds. (Green Writers Press, 2019)

Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes

First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer's dividing water,
and slip inside.

You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women's undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything -
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that reason is a plank,
that life is a loaded gun

that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

Billy Collins, Poetry February, 1998

Matters of the Heart

Cardiac Unit

Patient # 30527

Monitored heart.

Heartache, heartbreak

Heart tests.

Stressed heart

Heart-to-heart talk.

Years of pain, anger, work, hostility.

Straight from the heart.

Heart valve, heartstrings.

Open heart.

Loss of heart.

By-passed heart.

Grafted heart.

Heart beat.

Heart sounds.

Relaxing mended heart.

Forgiving heart.

Change of heart.

Jose Rodriguez, Waiting Rooms of the Heart: Poems of a Health Care Chaplin (iUniverse Press, 2005)

Hug

I'm a hugger.
I'm a southerner, an extrovert, a 7, and a caregiver by profession.
I'll hug anyone -- a side hug, a bear hug, a quick squeeze --
they're all good by me.
I'm a firm believer that a good hug is like duct tape, or fresh air and sunshine.

Social distancing is hard for people like me,
but since I'm called to care for my community by distancing,
I'm hugging you in my heart
and in the ways I am able;
like seeing patients, running an errand, or saying a prayer.

I'm a hugger.
I feel connected when I'm in the presence of another
(closer than 6 feet).
Today I'm thankful we can reach out online,
but I also see the hurt and the lack of real social connection
in a world where we are virtually over-connected.

So when this need for social distancing passes over
and we can be close together again,
I imagine we will be much more appreciative
of the worth and power of social connection,
and I'll be the first in line to offer free hugs.

Erin Brackbill, yourdailypoem.com., June 1, 2020

Kindness

Last week, a nurse pulled a warm blanket

from a magical cave of heated cotton

and lay it upon my lap, even wrapping

my feet. She admired my red sandals. 

Once, a friend brought me a chicken

she'd roasted and packed with whole lemons.

I ate it with my fingers while it was still warm.

Kindnesses appear, then disappear so quickly

that I forget their brief streaks: they vanish,

while cruelty pearls its durable shell.

Goodness streams like hot water through my hair

and down my skin, and I'm able to live

again with the ache. Love wakens the world.

Kindness is my mother, sending me a yellow dress in the mail

for no reason other than to watch me twirl.

Anya Silver, singingbowl.org August 19, 2018

To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl

Do you realize that if you had started 

building the Parthenon on the day you were born,

you would be all done in only one more year?

Of course, you couldn't have done it alone,

so never mind, you're fine just as you are.

You're loved for just being yourself.

But did you know that at your age Judy Garland

was pulling down $150,000 a picture,

Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory,

and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room?

No wait, I mean he had invented the calculator.

Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life,

after you come out of your room

and begin to blossom, or at least pick up all your socks.

For some reason, I keep remembering that Lady Jane Grey

was Queen of England when she was only fifteen,

but then she was beheaded, so forget her as a role model.

A few centuries later, when he was your age,

Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family

but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies,

four operas, and two complete Masses as a youngster.

But of course that was in Austria at the height

of romantic lyricism, not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.

Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15

or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?

We think you are special just being you,

playing with your food and staring into space.

By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes,

but that doesn't mean that he never helped out around the house.

Billy Collins, Aimless Love (Random House, 2013)

Hiroshima

On this day, the sun

Appeared  -- no, not slowly over the horizon --

But right in the city square.

A blast of dazzle poured over,

Not from the middle sky,

But from the earth torn raggedly open.

Human shadows, dazed and lost, pitched

In every direction: this blaze,

Not risen from the east,

Smashed in the city's heart --

An immense wheel

Of Death's swart suncar, spinning down and apart

In every direction.

Instant of a sun's rise and set.

Vision-annihilating flare one compressed noon.

And then?

It was not human shadows that lengthened, paled, and died;

It was men, suddenly become as mist, then gone.

The shadows stay:

Burned on rocks, stones of these vacant streets.

A sun conjured by men converted men to air, to nothing.

White shadows singed on the black rock give back

Man's whiteness to himself.

Sachchidananda Vatsyayan (known as Agyeya) 

"Let Us Be Midwives!" (An Untold Story of August 6, 1945)

Night in the basement of a concrete structure now in ruins.

Victims of the atomic bomb jammed the room;

It was dark -- not even a single candle.

The smell of fresh blood, the stench of death,

The closeness of sweaty people, the moans.

From out of all that, lo and behold, a voice:

"The baby's coming!."

In that hellish basement,

At that very moment, a young woman had gone into labor.

In the dark, without a single match, what to do?

People forgot their own pains, worried about her.

And then: "I'm a midwife. I'll help with the birth."

The speaker, seriously injured herself, had been moaning only moments before.

And so new life was born in the dark of that pit of hell.

And so the midwife died before dawn, still bathed in blood.

Let us be midwives!

Let us be midwives!

Even if we lay down our own lives to do so.

Sadako Kurihara, trans. Richard Minear, Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

The Courage That My Mother Had

The courage that my mother had

Went with her, and is with her still:

Rock from New England quarried;

Now granite in a granite hill.

The golden brooch my mother wore

She left behind for me to wear;

I have nothing I treasure more:

Yet, it is something I could spare.

Oh, if instead she'd left to me

The thing she took into the grave! --

That courage like a rock, which she

Has no more need of, and I have.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, public domain

Something I Could Tell You About Love

The soft smack of pitches from my father

who's never cared for baseball, and never asks

about my Yankees. He doesn't want a glove,

just lets my hardball disappear into his hands

already sore from steering his truck without AC

or radio through the streets of Newark and Elizabeth.

My father, whose shirt is glued with sweat,

knows drums and crates must be loaded tonight,

but still he stands and throws to me across the hood

of his '53 Ford sagging with freight he'll have to carry

tomorrow into stores and warehouses. Tonight

I pound the Rawlings glove he bought me

and watch his face grow dim in the dark of our yard,

then the white ball from his hands into the August heat.

I'm playing catch with my father, who never liked baseball,

who nods when I ask for five minutes more.

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