Shiloh: A Requiem

 Skimming lightly, wheeling still,

  The swallows fly low

Over the field in clouded days,

  The forest-field of Shiloh—

Over the field where April rain

Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain

through the pause of night

That followed the Sunday fight

  Around the church of Shiloh—

The church so lone, the log-built one,

That echoed to many a parting groan

          And natural prayer

  Of dying foemen mingled there—

Foemen at morn, but friends at eve—

  Fame or country least their care:

(What like a bullet can undeceive!)

  But now they lie low,

While over them the swallows skim,

  And all is hushed at Shiloh.

 

Herman Melville, public domain

Before the Deployment

He kisses me before he goes. While I,

still dozing, half-asleep, laugh and rub my face

 

against the sueded surface of the sheets,

thinking it’s him I touch, his skin beneath

 

my hands, my body curving in to meet

his body there. I never hear him leave.

 

But I believe he shuts the bedroom door,

as though unsure if he should change his mind,

 

pull off his boots, crawl beneath the blankets

left behind, his hand a heat against my breast,

 

our heart rates slowing into rest. Perhaps

all good-byes should whisper like a piece of silk—

 

and then the quick surprise of waking, alone

except for the citrus ghost of his cologne.

 

Jehanne Dubrow, Stateside (Northwestern University Press, 2010) 

How to Sacrifice

Pivot in the box. Square up.
Surrender to the pitcher.

Slide your top hand up the barrel,
don't squeeze, keep your hands

soft, bend your knees.
You need to keep your balance.

Let the ball come to you --
be patient. Don't stab at it.

Point your bat, absorb the shock,
and hope the ball stays fair.

Afterwards expect no high-fives,
no headlines, no contract

extension. No one bunts
himself unto an all-star team.

You do it because that runner
on first, he needs to come home.

He's your teammate,
he's your brother, he's your son.

and you, you're the guy who still
knows how to lay one down.

Mike Cochrane, Southern Poetry Review, 55.2.

I Go Back to the House for a Book

I turn around on the gravel
and go back to the house for a book,
something to read at the doctor’s office,
and while I am inside, running the finger
of inquisition along a shelf,
another me that did not bother
to go back to the house for a book
heads out on his own,
rolls down the driveway,
and swings left toward town,
a ghost in his ghost car,
another knot in the string of time,
a good three minutes ahead of me —
a spacing that will now continue
for the rest of my life.

Sometimes I think I see him
a few people in front of me on a line
or getting up from a table
to leave the restaurant just before I do,
slipping into his coat on the way out the door.
But there is no catching him,
no way to slow him down
and put us back in synch,
unless one day he decides to go back
to the house for something,
but I cannot imagine
for the life of me what that might be.

He is out there always before me,
blazing my trail, invisible scout,
hound that pulls me along,
shade I am doomed to follow,
my perfect double,
only bumped an inch into the future,
and not nearly as well-versed as I
in the love poems of Ovid —
I who went back to the house
that fateful winter morning and got the book.

 

Billy Collins, smashy.wordpress.com September 14, 2012

Ice Cream Shop

The circus train made an ice cream stop
At the fifty-two-flavor ice cream stand.
The animals all got off the train
And walked right up to the ice cream man.
“I’ll take Vanilla,” yelled the gorilla.
“I’ll take Chocolate,” shouted the ocelot.
   “I’ll take the Strawberry,” chirped the canary.
      “Rocky Road,” croaked the toad.
         “Lemon and Lime,” growled the lion.
      Said the ice cream man, “‘Til I see a dime.
   You’ll get no ice cream of mine.”
Then the animals snarled and screeched and growled
And whinnied and whimpered and hooted and howled
And gobbled up the whole ice cream stand,
All fifty-two flavors
(Fifty-three with Ice Cream Man).

 

Shel Silverstein, Falling Up (Harper Collins Publishers, 1996)

Snowglobe

It is late and I want to sleep

but the two girls who work at the gas-station-convenience store

next door have gotten out of work and it’s 2AM and they are laughing

and scraping their cars and I want to peek out the window to see

them push their little plastic scrapers over their early 90s models

Fords and toss snowballs and talk about “Jaime just called” and “God girl, you’re

graced” and I wonder how they will spend the minimum wage

they made tonight, a slow night, with everyone staying in

because of the storm, whether Jaime will take the tall one

out (I recognize her voice from when I buy milk every other

day for my child) and whether she will say My Treat!  Or

maybe they will go to a bar, since they seem like they may

almost be that age, though I doubt it, it is so hard

for me to tell now, and they will drink beers

and dance and tenderly wipe the sweat

off of each other’s faces, but then I wonder about the other

girl, where will she go, now that they have started their cars

and I hear their engines about to roar but they don’t, only idle

and idle and I figure they are warming them to get the ice that was too hard

for their little plastic scrapers but they just sit there

so finally I rise from my chair and peek out my curtain

and am startled to see them both in the front seat of the tall girl’s car

and the other one, the one who I think is prettier and who says to my son,

hey sport when he comes in and once tugged his hat over his eyes, she is crying,

crying and saying something I can't hear over the engine's

idle, some song is playing something hard on their radio and the snow

is falling and the tall girl is staring up through the windshield and I can’t make out

her expression through the fog whether she is upset or wondering come on

how can I get out of this and get home cause I’m tired when I see her bend

over and take the other girl’s head in her hands and now I can’t get to bed

and they are still holding onto each other and the whole world is snowing all at once like a snowglobe and everything has become fragile and holy, amen.

 

Sean Thomas Daugherty, All You Ask for Is Longing: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions, 2014) 

The Whistler

All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden
I mean that for more than thirty years she had not
whistled. It was thrilling. At first I wondered, who was
in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and
she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild and
cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds war-
bled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.

Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she
said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can
still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled
through the house, whistling.

I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and an-
kle. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too.
And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin
to know each other? Who is this I’ve been living with
for thirty years?

This clear, dark, lovely whistler?

 

Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems: Volume 1  (Beacon Press, 2004) 

How Much Do You Weigh?

A question asked often by old men or young, friends, strangers

on the road. How much? I didn’t know how to answer. Certainly

 

not a question you’d ask of a woman—not in America where

I’d come from—but common in the village where I lived, deep 

 

in the Land of the Lozi, people of cattle and sand. Zambians 

living twenty miles from Angola. Twenty miles from civil war. 

 

Tins of cheese from the United Nations, vividly marked Not for Sale 

gathered dust in our nearly empty market. Exorbitant price. Unobtainable.

 

When a fat campaigning politician came slick to our village, 

gaunt mothers with emaciated children gathered and pointed, astonished. 

 

Admired his weight as if wealth. Look! He can eat and eat, 

more than enough! What to make of a man who is fat? Unimaginable 

 

fantasy to anemic mothers with brittle-boned children, bellies swollen

by hunger, legs weeping with sores. What a relief just to eat not defeated

 

by dry empty fields, crops gone to dust. Such ease to eat and eat

what you please and not stop. How much do you weigh? No longer

 

unseemly, no longer a goad. Compassionate. Tender. Driven by hunger,

rendered by need. A question which reconfigured might just as well ask,

 

do you have enough? Have you eaten today? Will you sleep hungry? 

Tell me. How much do you weigh?

 

Jill Kandel, Rattle #75 Spring 2022

things

 

What happened is, we grew lonely

living among the things,

so we gave the clock a face,

the chair a back,

the table four stout legs

which will never suffer fatigue.

 

We fitted our shoes with tongues

as smooth as our own

and hung tongues inside bells

so we could listen

to their emotional language,

 

and because we loved graceful profiles

the pitcher received a lip,

the bottle a long, slender neck.

 

Even what was beyond us

was recast in our image;

we gave the country a heart,

the storm an eye,

the cave a mouth

so we could pass into safety.

 

Lisel Mueller, Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 1996)

13 Very Short Ones by Billy Collins

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Trouble was not

his middle name.

-----------------------------------------

 

Reflections On An Amish Childhood

I was a little square

in a round hat.

------------------------------------------

Adolescence

The gulf widened between my parents and me

but that doesn't mean they lived on a houseboat.

-----------------------------------------

Another Hotel

Unlike the breakfast menu

I have no desire to be hung outside before 3AM.

------------------------------------------

Corridor

I've grown old.

Now my own name

rings a bell.

--------------------------------------------

Elegy

I have turned over

all 52 cards

on the kitchen table.

Still, I think

you must be hiding

somewhere in the deck.

--------------------------------------------

Carbon Dating

He tried it once

as a last resort

but most of the women

were a million years old

---------------------------------------

3 A.M.

Only my hand

is asleep,

but it’s a start.

---------------------------------------

Flaubert

As he looked for the right word,

several wrong words

appeared in his window.

-------------------------------------

Dog

When she runs in her sleep,

eyelids twitching,

legs churning sideways on the floor,

I wonder if she's chasing a squirrel

or being chased

by an angry farmer waving a rake.

----------------------------------------------

Morning Walk

The dog stops often

to sniff the poems of others

before reciting her own.

-------------------------------------------

The Exception

Whoever said there's a poem

lurking in the darkness of every pencil

was not thinking of this one.

----------------------------------------------

Children

There’s a movie out

titled Children.

I don’t know what it’s about

but I like the voice

on the radio

when it says:

“Children now playing everywhere.”

 

Billy Collins, otherpeoplespoems.blogspot.com March 13, 2023 

You Took the Last Bus Home

you took
the last bus home

i still don’t know
how you got it through the door

but you’re always doing amazing stuff

like the time
when you caught that train

 

Brian Bilston, otherpeoplespoems.blogspot.com May 10, 2023

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 happened in that county,

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 soft-bodied humans say when the news is bad.
The I love you 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 Backwaters Press, 2016) 

My Grandparents' Generation

They are taking so many things with them:
their sewing machines and fine china,

their ability to fold a newspaper
with one hand and swat a fly.

They are taking their rotary telephones,
and fat televisions, and knitting needles,

their cast iron frying pans, and Tupperware.
They are packing away the picnics

and perambulators, the wagons
and church socials. They are wrapped in

lipstick and big band music, dressed
in recipes. Buried with them: bathtubs

with feet, front porches, dogs without leashes.
These are the people who raised me

and now I am left behind in
a world without paper letters,

a place where the phone
has grown as eager as a weed.

I am going to miss their attics,
their ordinary coffee, their chicken

fried in lard. I would give anything
to be ten again, up late with them

in that cottage by the river, buying
Marvin Gardens and passing go,

collecting two hundred dollars.

Faith Shearin, Telling the Bees (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015)

Blessing of the Animals

At my daughter’s Catholic school there is
a blessing of the animals at which
the children line up with their fat hamsters
and gauzy goldfish, their dogs so old

they can barely climb the hill. They bring
their cats with bald patches
and their lizards sleeping in cages
under a fake sun. In the line
to the priest there are snakes

with white eyes and birds without songs.
There are ant farms and worms and rats
with long, exposed tails. The children
wait hours for their animals
to be blessed: for the priest’s hand

to hover over the weight they carry.
They bring shoe boxes full of turtles,
hairy spiders, frogs with dry skin.
I like watching my daughter

among the other children: her dog
small in her arms, her gaze protective.
Children believe in the power
of animals, tucked into their feathers
and shells; they believe

in blessings: the sprinkle
of holy water, each tiny
unexplained life.

 

Faith Shearin, Telling the Bees (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015)

A Few Days after My First Vaccine

 Walking by the lake, I lose an earring

and don’t even notice it at first,

overwhelmed as I am

by the strangeness of everything.

Blocks later, my hand reaches up

to feel that slight absence in one ear.

So then I have to retrace

my steps, as they say to do,

past the guy jogging with his mask pulled down

and the hijab-wearing,

stroller-pushing young mother in stylish jeans

and the homeless man emerging from his tent

on the banks of our urban oasis

bearing a boom box on one shoulder.

And that’s where I spot it, lying on the sidewalk,

miraculously untrampled — small, precious

found thing, a turquoise oval

encircled with rows of beads,

given to me with love by someone

I haven’t hugged in more than a year.

Tiny rescue from the sea of loss,

just as we seem to have found

a raft to grab on to

in the wake of a shipwreck so vast

we cannot yet imagine the end of it.

 

Alison Luterman, The Sun Magazine October 2021

Memory

Spinning up dust and cornshucks
as it crossed the chalky, exhausted fields,
it sucked up into its heart
hot work, cold work, lunch buckets,
good horses, bad horses, their names
and the name of mules that were
better or worse than the horses,
then rattled the dented tin sides
of the threshing machine, shook
the manure spreader, cranked
the tractor’s crank that broke
the uncle’s arm, then swept on
through the windbreak, taking
the treehouse and dirty magazines,
turning its fury on the barn
where cows kicked over buckets
and the gray cat sat for a squirt
of thick milk in its whiskers, crossed
the chicken pen, undid the hook,
plucked a warm brown egg
from the meanest hen, then turned
toward the house, where threshers
were having dinner, peeled back
the roof and the kitchen ceiling,
reached down and snatched up
uncles and cousins, grandma, grandpa,
parents and children one by one,
held them like dolls, looked
long and longingly into their faces,
then set them back in their chairs
with blue and white platters of chicken
and ham and mashed potatoes
still steaming before them, with
boats of gravy and bowls of peas
and three kinds of pie, and suddenly,
with a sound like a sigh, drew up
its crowded, roaring, dusty funnel,
and there at its tip was the nib of a pen.

 

Ted Kooser, Delight & Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 2004)

another poem on my daughter's birthday

There must be soft words
for an evening like this, when the breeze
caresses like gentle fingertips
all over. I don’t know

how not to write darkly and sad.
But it’s two years today since
my little girl was born, cut safely
from the noose.

We meant nothing but hope;
how near death is to that.

Only children, only some children,
get to run free from these snags. She
was born! She lived and she grows
like joy spreading from the syllables

of songs. She reminds me of now
and now and now.
                            I must learn
to have been so lucky.

 

Craig Morgan Teicher, poetrying.wordpress.com September 21, 2021

Inverted

Let us seek out

the tables

we need to flip

the ones that are too full

or too exclusive

those that lack space

for love

to pull up a chair

 

In fact,

let us upend

all the things

that distract us

confine us

box us in

       (or keep others out)

so we can be free

to follow the spirit

of the law

instead of

the letter of it

 

Let us live our lives

with radical acceptance,

this backward way

of offering

blessed belonging

 

Let us be marked by

a countercultural compassion

      that turns heads

and a

gloriously inverted grace

      that turns lives

               upside down

 

Karen Kaiser, Karen Kaiser Poetry (facebook.com) April 20, 2023