A boy told me
if he
roller-skated fast enough
his
loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,
the best
reason I ever heard
for trying
to be a champion.
What I
wonder tonight
pedaling
hard down King William Street
is if it
translates to bicycles.
A victory!
To leave your loneliness
panting
behind you on some street corner
while you
float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals
that have never felt loneliness,
no matter
how slowly they fell
Naomi Shihab
Nye, Fuel: Poems (BOA Editions, 1998)
She taught
theater, so we gathered
in the theater.
We praised her voice, her knowledge,
how good she was
with Godot and just four months later
with Gigi.
She was fifty. The problem in the liver.
Each of us recalled
an incident in which she'd been kind
or witty.
I told about being unable to speak
from my diaphragm
and how she made me lie down, placed her hand
where the failure was
and showed me how to breathe.
But afterwards
I only could do it when I lay down
and that became a joke
between us, and I told it as my offering
to the audience.
I was on stage and I heard myself
wishing to be impressive.
Someone else spoke of her cats
and no one spoke
of her face or the last few parties.
The fact was
I had avoided her for months.
It was a student's turn to speak, a sophomore,
one of her actors.
She was a drunk, he said, often came to class
reeking.
Sometimes he couldn't look at her, the blotches,
the awful puffiness.
And yet she was a great teacher,
he loved her,
but thought someone should say
what everyone knew
because she didn't die by accident.
Everyone was crying. Everyone was crying and it
was almost over now.
The remaining speaker, an historian, said he'd cut
his speech short.
And the Chairman stood up as if by habit,
said something about loss
and thanked us for coming. None of us moved
except some students
to the student who'd spoken, and then others
moved to him, across dividers,
down aisles, to his side of the stage.
Stephen, Landscape at the Edge of the Century (W. W. Norton)
The one I didn't go on.
I was
thirteen,
and they
were older.
I'd met them
at the public pool. I must
have given
them my number. I'm sure
I'd given
them my number,
knowing the
girl I was. . .
It was
summer. My afternoons
were made of
time and vinyl.
My mother
worked,
but I had a
bike. They wanted
to go for a
ride.
Just me and
them. I said
okay fine,
I'd
meet them at
the Stop-n-Go
at four
o'clock.
And then I
didn't show.
I have been
given a little gift—
something
sweet
and
inexpensive, something
I never
worked or asked or said
thank you
for, most
days not
aware
of what I
have been given, or what I missed—
because it's
that, too, isn't it?
I never saw
those boys again.
I'm not as
dumb
as they
think I am
but neither
am I wise. Perhaps
it is the
best
afternoon of
my life. Two
cute and
older boys
pedaling
beside me—respectful, awed. When we
turn down my
street, the other girls see me ...
Everything
as I imagined it would be.
Or, I am in
a vacant field. When I
stand up
again, there are bits of glass and gravel
ground into
my knees.
I will never
love myself again.
Who knew
then
that someday
I would be
thirty-seven,
wiping
crumbs off
the kitchen table with a sponge, remembering
them,
thinking
of this—
those boys
still waiting
outside the
Stop-n-Go, smoking
cigarettes,
growing older.
Laura
Kasischke, Dance and Disappear (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002)
Even the undertaker is going
out of business. And since the dime store closed,
we can't get parakeets on Main Street
anymore, or sleeveless gingham smocks
for keeping Church Fair pie off the ample
fronts of the strong, garrulous wives
of pipefitters and road agents.
The hardware's done for too.
Yesterday,
a Sunday, I saw the proprietors breaking
up shop, the woman struggling with half
a dozen bicycle tires on each arm,
like bangle bracelets, the man balancing
boxes filled with Teflon pans. The windows
had been soaped to frustrate curiosity,
or pity, and that cheerless satisfaction
we sometimes feel when others fail.
Jane Kenyon, Otherwise: New & Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 1996)
The doctor tells you something is wrong.
The platelets in your blood, the doctor says.
Come back, more tests, a specialist, he says.
At the library, I review the possibilities
and in a minute, or a lifetime, I have watched
you die. I arrange a service
where I tell the ghost
of you how much we loved you but forgot to say.
I remind you how well you did though young
and insecure -- always better than you believed.
Your legacy, I told you, is glorious,
those two children, small but strong,
puzzled because you are not sitting
in the church beside them.
I am terrified I will make this so by thinking it,
am ready to fall over a cliff I built
from no material but fear. I know, finally,
I will drop into the trench where the atheist
finds God and pray, barter, beg.
Elizabeth Notter, essential love (Poetworks/Grayson Books, 2000)
After the
hymn had been sung, the Rev. Mr. Sprague turned himself into a bulletin board,
and read off "notices" of meetings and societies and things till it
seemed that the list would stretch out to the crack of doom – an odd custom
which is still kept up in America, even in cities, away here in this age of
abundant newspapers. Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom,
the harder it is to get rid of it.
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
among the
rocks
at walnut grove
your silence drumming
in my bones,
tell me your names.
nobody mentioned slaves
and yet the curious tools
shine with your fingerprints.
nobody mentioned slaves
but somebody did this work
who had no guide, no stone,
who moulders under rock.
tell me your names,
tell me your bashful names
and i will testify.
the inventory lists ten slaves
but only men were recognized.
among the rocks
at walnut grove
some of these honored dead
were dark some of these dark
were slaves
some of these slaves
were women
some of them did this
honored work.
tell me your names
foremothers, brothers,
tell me your dishonored names.
here lies
here lies
here lies
here lies
hear
Lucille
Clifton, Quilting Poems, 1987-1990 (BOA Editions, 1991)
Is
it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath,
to save life or to
kill?
—Mark
3.4
In all our discerning
what is right or lawful or acceptable,
it comes down to this:
the choice to be kind or to be unkind.
The “right” thing to do is always kind;
cruelty is never right.
I am wary that what may feel like “justice” to me
is actually revenge; I renounce it.
I may choose not to shield someone
from an uncomfortable truth about them,
but I must do it with kindness, as if it were myself.
I may oppose someone,
or hold them accountable for their actions,
or let them endure unwelcome consequences,
but do so without malice or resentment.
I may stand up to an oppressor,
but do it with compassion.
My kindness may cause another anxiety,
but I will not be cruel to make someone happy.
If kindness to one creates suffering for another,
I seek to be kind also to the one who suffers.
If I seek to be kind but end up doing harm,
I am also kind to myself, bearing forgiveness.
The goal is not to be right but to be loving.
Life is complicated; kindness is not.
Steve
Garnass-Holmes unfoldinglight.net May 27, 2024
Start with the underwear. Sit him down.
Hopping on one leg may stir unpleasant memories.
If he gets his tights on, even backwards, praise him.
Fingers, formerly webbed, struggle over buttons.
Arms and legs, lengthened out of proportion, wait,
as you do, for the rest of him to catch up.
This body, so recently reformed, reclaimed,
still carries the marks of its time as a frog. Be gentle.
Avoid the words awkward and gawky.
Do not use tadpole as a term of endearment.
His body, like his clothing, may seem one size too big.
Relax. There's time enough for crowns. He'll grow into it.
Anna Denise, The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century
Poems from Grimm’s Fairy Tales (Story Line Press, 2003)
I remember
developing breasts,
(it was the same year the Russians launched Sputnik)
and going with my aunt to buy my first fully-trained bra,
and learning from the lady at Tots-to-Teens
how important it would be someday
to bend over at the waist when I put it on
and the
first time I bent over.
I remember
learning that there were men in the world
who wanted to teach me about the men in the world,
and how the faint strong smell of bleach
tinted my sheets last week after I washed the colors
with the whites and left them on the line to dry
bleeding
happily all together.
I don’t
remember learning I would die,
but it must have been like stepping casually
into a freshly laundered dream,
like stepping into a white tulip skirt
trimmed round the hem
with crimson quatrefoils and tears.
I wonder if
I cried,
and when the flowers will start to bleed.
Christine Klocek-Kim, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily (November 19, 2023)
for Ellen
The cruelest
thing I did to my younger sister
wasn't
shooting a homemade blowdart into her knee,
where it
dangled for a breathless second
before
dropping off, but telling her we had
another,
older sister who'd gone away.
What my
motives were I can't recall: a whim,
or was it
some need of mine to toy with loss,
to probe the
ache of imaginary wounds?
But that
first sentence was like a strand of DNA
that
replicated itself in coiling lies
when my
sister began asking her desperate questions.
I called our
older sister Isabel
and gave her
hazel eyes and long blonde hair.
I had her
run away to California
where she
took drugs and made hippie jewelry.
Before I
knew it, she'd moved to Santa Fe
and opened a
shop. She sent a postcard
every year
or so, but she'd stopped calling.
I can still
see my younger sister staring at me,
her eyes
widening with desolation
then filling
with tears. I can still remember
how thrilled
and horrified I was
that
something I'd just made up
had that
kind of power, and I can still feel
the blowdart
of remorse stabbing me in the heart
as I rushed
to tell her none of it was true.
But it was
too late. Our other sister
had already
taken shape, and we could not
call her
back from her life far away
or tell her
how badly we missed her.
Jeffery
Harrison, Feeding the Fire (Sarabande Books, 2001)
A Caucasian
gets on at
the 17th floor.
He is old, fat, and expensively
dressed.
I say hello / I'm friendly.
He says, "Hi."
Then he
looks very carefully at
my clothes.
I'm not
expensively dressed.
I think his left shoe costs more
than everything I am wearing.
He doesn't
want to talk to me
any more.
I think that
he is not totally aware
that we are really going down
and there are no clothes after you have
been dead for a few thousand years.
He thinks as
we silently travel
down and get off at the bottom
floor
that we are going separate
ways.
Tokyo
June
4, 1976
Richard Brautigan,
Quest vol 77, November/December 1977
There is more light than shadow.
There are more smiles than cares,
More grass grows on the meadow
Than brambles, weeds, and tares.
There is more song than weeping,
There is more sun than rain,
There is more golden reaping
Than lost and blighted grain.
There is more peace than terror,
There is more hope than fear,
There is more truth than error,
More right than wrongs appear.
On the long road to glory
We climb more than we fall,
And by and by the story
Comes out right after all.
Clarence Edwin Flynn
