What Gorgeous Thing

I do not know what gorgeous thing
the bluebird keeps saying,
his voice easing out of his throat,
beak, body into the pink air
of the early morning. I like it
whatever it is. Sometimes
it seems the only thing in the world
that is without dark thoughts.
Sometimes it seems the only thing
in the world that is without
questions that can’t and probably
never will be answered, the
only thing that is entirely content
with the pink, then clear white
morning and, gratefully, says so.

Mary Oliver, Blue Horses (Penguin Press, 2014)

Sins of Omission

Suppose hell were a room
where the lovers you broke
up with, the spouses you left,
the friends you discarded

all were waiting to question
you, with no time limit ever
but the explanations could last
halfway into eternity. Who

wouldn't sooner leap into
a fire? There is no excuse
for the end of love or for
the fact that it never started

its engine into that lovely
roar but just coughed again
and again until you gave up
and got out and went off.

Some friendships are just not
sturdy enough to bear the daily
wear and weight. How to say,
but simply you bored me.

Then all the people you did
not help, the ones you hung
up on, the letters unanswered,
loans denied, calls not returned

that endless line will be snaking
through the horizon, waiting
to demand what you would
not give, life's unpaid bills.

Marge Piercy, mondaypoems.blogspot.com May 4, 2015

First Skating Party

Dozens of kids circle
the worn wooden floor
on old rental skates,
and none of them wear
helmets or pads,
so when they collide
or fall or stop themselves
by the simple technique
of steering straight
into the cinder-block barrier,
you can feel the pain
of the parents
who watch from booths
by the concession stand;
they know their children
have bones of balsa
and skin that tears
as easily as a napkin,
but they can do nothing
except yell, Be Careful!
and make hand gestures
to slow down
                             —Slow Down!—
as the ones they love
strobe past them
faster and faster
just beyond their reach.

Joseph Mills, The Miraculous Turning (Press 53, 2014)

Titanic

Who does not love the Titanic?

If they sold passage tomorrow for that same crossing,

who would not buy?

To go down…We all go down, mostly

alone. But with crowds of people, friends, servants,

well fed, with music, with lights! Ah!

And the world, shocked, mourns, as it ought to do

and almost never does. There will be the books and movies

to remind our grandchildren who we were

and how we died, and give them a good cry.

Not so bad, after all. The cold

water is anesthetic and very quick.

The cries on all sides must be a comfort.

We all go: only a few, first class.

 

David R. Slavitt, Big Nose (Louisiana State University Press, 1983)

The First Green of Spring

Out walking in the swamp picking cowslip, marsh marigold,
this sweet first green of spring. Now sautéed in a pan melting
to a deeper green than ever they were alive, this green, this life,

harbinger of things to come. Now we sit at the table munching
on this message from the dawn which says we and the world
are alive again today, and this is the world’s birthday. And

even though we know we are growing old, we are dying, we
will never be young again, we also know we’re still right here
now, today, and, my oh my! don’t these greens taste good.

David Budbill, Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse (Copper Canyon Press, 1999)

The Snowy Egret

Give me another word for regret,
             something more like forget
                        only better, more effective,

since in fact we really don’t forget
            the bad things we did
                        or caused. I read in a letter

to The Sun Magazine where a man
            will always remember the egret
                        lying, a silent heap of cirrus clouds,

at his 12-year-old feet. It was his first
            and last time shooting a gun.
                        His confession stabbed me

into a memory of unremembered shame
            and the ache in my stomach telling me
                        I had joined humanity.

Nancy Keating, American Life in Poetry December 13, 2021

Child Development

As sure as prehistoric fish grew legs
and sauntered off the beaches into forests
working up some irregular verbs for their
first conversation, so three-year-old children
enter the phase of name-calling.

Every day a new one arrives and is added
to the repertoire. You Dumb Goopyhead,
You Big Sewerface, You Poop-on-the-Floor
(a kind of Navaho ring to that one)
they yell from knee level, their little mugs
flushed with challenge.
Nothing Samuel Johnson would bother tossing out
in a pub, but then the toddlers are not trying
to devastate some fatuous Enlightenment hack.

They are just tormenting their fellow squirts
or going after the attention of the giants
way up there with their cocktails and bad breath
talking baritone nonsense to other giants,
waiting to call them names after thanking
them for the lovely party and hearing the door close.

The mature save their hothead invective
for things: an errant hammer, tire chains,
or receding trains missed by seconds,
though they know in their adult hearts,
even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bed
for his appalling behavior,
that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids,
their wives are Dopey Dopeheads
and that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants.

Billy Collins, smashey.wordpress.com July 9, 2011 

Old Friends

Old friends are a steady spring rain,

or late summer sunshine edging into fall,

or frosted leaves along a snowy path—

a voice for all seasons saying, I know you.

The older I grow, the more I fear I'll lose my old friends,

as if too many years have scrolled by

since the day we sprang forth, seeking each other.

 

Old friend, I knew you before we met.

I saw you at the window of my soul—

I heard you in the steady millstone of my heart

grinding grain for our daily bread.

You are sedimentary, rock-solid cousin earth,

where I stand firmly, astonished by your grace and truth.

And gratitude comes to me and says:

 

"Tell me anything and I will listen.

Ask me anything, and I will answer you."

Freya Manfred, Loon in Late November Water (Red Dragonfly Press, 2018)

The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb

Whatever he needs, he has or doesn’t have by now.

Whatever the world is going to do to him

it has started to do. With a pencil and two

Hardy Boys and a peanut butter sandwich and

grapes he is on his way, there is nothing

more we can do for him. Whatever is

stored in his heart, he can use, now.

Whatever he has laid up in his mind

he can call on. What he does not have

he can lack. The bus gets smaller and smaller, as one

folds a flag at the end of a ceremony,

onto itself, and onto itself, until

only a heavy wedge remains.

Whatever his exuberant soul

can do for him, it is doing right now.

Whatever his arrogance can do

it is doing to him. Everything

that’s been done to him, he will now do.

Everything that’s been placed in him

will come out, now, the contents of a trunk

unpacked and lined up on a bunk in the underpine

    light.

Sharon Olds, inwardboundpoetry.blogspot.com January 3, 2022 

Walking with Jesus

In the Blue Ridge Mountains, eating corn fritters

and okra, passing the black-eyed peas. He loves

redbirds and kudzu, all that green tenaciousness.

He's not so much of a fan of men in white sheets,

gun racks, the Stars and Bars, but he's Jesus, so 

he loves them anyway. The gospel of football

eludes him, but he sure likes to tailgate. He tells

me that all the commandments are really

about sitting with your neighbors on a wide

front porch, eating peach pie, watching the sun

go down. Why are you still going on about sin

and salvation, he asks me, when you have all this,

right here, right now?

Barbara Crooker, published online by Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought 

(March/April 2014)

Do You Love Me?

She's twelve and she's asking the dog,

who does, but who speaks

in tongues, whose feints and gyrations

are themselves parts of speech.

 

They're on the back porch

and I don't really mean to be taking this in

but once I've heard I can't stop listening. Again

and again she asks, and the good dog

 

sits and wiggles, leaps and licks.

Imagine never asking. Imagine why:

so sure you wouldn't dare, or couldn't care

less. I wonder if the dog's guileless brown eyes

 

can lie, if the perfect canine lack of abstractions

might not be a bit like the picture books

she "read" as a child, before her parents' lips

shaped the daily miracle of speech

 

and kisses, and the words were not lead

and weighed only air, and did not mean

so meanly. "Do you love me?" she says

and says, until the dog, sensing perhaps

 

its own awful speechlessness, tries to bolt,

but she holds it by the collar and will not

let go, until, having come closer,

I hear the rest of it. I hear it all.

 

She's got the dog's furry jowls in her hands,

she's speaking precisely

into its laid-back, quivering ears:

"Say it," she hisses, "say it to me."

 

Robert Wrigley, Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 2006)

What Matters

What other people think of you,
what they say, are burdens
no one should carry. Lift a spoon,

a cup, things that fit in your hand.
Carry on a conversation, 
pick up a baby. Listen to the wind

when it whispers, nothing else.
There is no one watching you, 
no one straining to hear what

you say. The present has arrived
and you are in it. Your heart
is pumping. Your breath moves

in and out of your lungs without
anyone’s help or permission.
Let go of everything else. Let

your life, handed to you through
no effort of your own, be all
the proof you need. You are loved.

Terri Kirby Erickson, A Sun Inside My Chest (Press 53, 2020)

Middle-Age

The child you think you don’t want
is the one who will make you laugh.
She will break your heart
when she loses the sight in one eye
and tells the doctor she wants to be
an apple tree when she grows up.

It will be this child who forgives you
again and again
for believing you don’t want her to be born,
for resisting the rising tide of your body,
for wishing for the red flow of her dismissal.
She will even forgive you for all the breakfasts
you failed to make exceptional.

Someday this child will sit beside you.
When you are old and too tired of war
to want to watch the evening news,
she will tell you stories
like the one about her teenaged brother,
your son, and his friends
taking her out in a canoe when she was
five years old. How they left her alone
on an island in the river
while they jumped off the railroad bridge.

Pat Schneider, Another River: New and Selected Poems (Amherst Writers and Artists Press, 2005)

The Little Book of Cheerful Thoughts

Small enough to fit 
in your shirt pocket
so you could take it out
in a moment of distress
to ingest a happy 
maxim or just stare
a while at its orange
and yellow cover
(so cheerful in itself
you need go no further),
this little booklet
wouldn’t stop a bullet 
aimed at your heart

and seems a flimsy 
shield against despair,
whatever its contents.
But there it is
by the cash register,
so I pick it up
as I wait in line and
come to a sentence
saying there are few
things that can’t be 
cured by a hot bath
above the name 
Sylvia Plath.

I rest my case,
placing the booklet
back by its petite
companions Sweet Nothings
and Simple Wisdom…
but not The Book of Sorrows,
a multivolume set
like the old Britannica
that each of us receives
in installments
of unpredictable
heft and frequency
over a lifetime.

Jeffery Harrison, poets.org April 22, 2021

Pray for Peace

Pray to whomever you kneel down to:
Jesus nailed to his wooden or plastic cross,
his suffering face bent to kiss you,
Buddha still under the bo tree in scorching heat,
Adonai, Allah. Raise your arms to Mary
that she may lay her palm on our brows,
to Shekhina, Queen of Heaven and Earth,
to Inanna in her stripped descent.

Then pray to the bus driver who takes you to work.
On the bus, pray for everyone riding that bus,
for everyone riding buses all over the world.
Drop some silver and pray.

Waiting in line for the movies, for the ATM,
for your latte and croissant, offer your plea.
Make your eating and drinking a supplication.
Make your slicing of carrots a holy act,
each translucent layer of the onion, a deeper prayer.

To Hawk or Wolf, or the Great Whale, pray.
Bow down to terriers and shepherds and Siamese cats.
Fields of artichokes and elegant strawberries.

Make the brushing of your hair
a prayer, every strand its own voice,
singing in the choir on your head.
As you wash your face, the water slipping
through your fingers, a prayer: Water,
softest thing on earth, gentleness
that wears away rock.

Making love, of course, is already prayer.
Skin, and open mouths worshipping that skin,
the fragile cases we are poured into.

If you’re hungry, pray. If you’re tired.
Pray to Gandhi and Dorothy Day.
Shakespeare. Sappho. Sojourner Truth.

When you walk to your car, to the mailbox,
to the video store, let each step
be a prayer that we all keep our legs,
that we do not blow off anyone else’s legs.
Or crush their skulls.
And if you are riding on a bicycle
or a skateboard, in a wheelchair, each revolution
of the wheels a prayer as the earth revolves:
less harm, less harm, less harm.

And as you work, typing with a new manicure,
a tiny palm tree painted on one pearlescent nail,
or delivering soda or drawing good blood
into rubber-capped vials, twirling pizzas–

With each breath in, take in the faith of those
who have believed when belief seemed foolish,
who persevered. With each breath out, cherish.

Pull weeds for peace, turn over in your sleep for peace,
feed the birds, each shiny seed
that spills onto the earth, another second of peace.
Wash your dishes, call your mother, drink wine.

Shovel leaves or snow or trash from your sidewalk.
Make a path. Fold a photo of a dead child
around your Visa card. Scoop your holy water
from the gutter. Gnaw your crust.
Mumble along like a crazy person, stumbling
your prayer through the streets.

Ellen Bass, The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007)