And now
these are the autumn years,
everything turning to gold. As the leaves
let go, so do old friends, the hardest to lose;
they take your history along with them.
These yellow leaves outside my window
flitter down, a flock of finches landing
on the lawn. Which frost will soon
coat with its hard white glitter.
Barbara
Crooker, Canary Fall 2024
He lifts his
violin and gives us the fox
in Ireland running with wild abandon
along the cliff-edge above the wild Irish Sea
and I am back in Connemara where even
the pasture stones have names and the green
slopes are plentiful with stones and the sea-wind
where there are no trees to stop it rollicks
across the commonage and the sea's a wild rolling
and the composer's brown hair is whipping around
his young intense face as his arm jigs and swings
the bow across the strings and his body is swaying
and his shoulders are leaping and the music is leaping
and the fox is running with such joy along that cliff
red fox brilliant green pasture cerulean sky
and the wind and the white-capped
plum-blue ocean and a man's foot measuring time
in the sun that is beyond brilliant and the fox is leaping
forward along the cliff-edge.
Patricia
Fargnoll, Duties of the Spirit (Tupelo Press, 2005)
The minute the doctor says colon cancer
you hardly hear anything else.
He says other things, something
about something. Tests need to be done,
but with the symptoms and family something,
excess weight, something about smoking,
all of that together means something something
something something, his voice a dumb hum
like the sound of surf you know must be pounding,
but the glass window that has dropped down
between you allows only a muffled hiss
like something something. He writes a prescription
for something, which might be needed, he admits.
He hands you something, says something, says goodbye,
and you say something. In the car your wife says
something something and something about dinner,
about needing to eat, and the doctor wanting tests
doesn’t mean anything, nothing, and something
something something about not borrowing trouble
or something. You pull into a restaurant
where you do not eat but sit watching her
eat something, two plates of something,
blurry in an afternoon sun thick as ketchup,
as you drink a glass of something-cola
and try to recall what the doctor said
about something he said was important,
a grave matter of something or something else.
James Valvis, Poetry 180 No. 160, May 7, 2021
We give hummingbirds sugar water
in defiance of dentists’ recommendations
everywhere, and in return
for our sweetness, have been gifted a nest
of thistle and dandelion down
attached with spider silk
to a plant on the front porch
that holds a peeping chick
I’m afraid to look at
lest my giant face and eyes
scare the tiniest heart for miles.
You probably know by now
of the extinction of birds
and the growing similarity
of those that remain, who are becoming
more and more crow-
and sparrow-like, snowy egrets
soon gone, griffon vultures, says thems
that study such things. Forgive me
for making the plural pluraler,
I just want more of everything
in this time of lessening
and to keep us from erasing
the world’s green and red plumage,
its blue and wild defiance of gravity.
And forgive us, for we are big-brained
and small-wisdomed, mostly inadvertently deadly
and largely incapable
of understanding the complexity of life,
yet we have bulldozers, earth movers,
power plants, car and swizzle stick factories,
can dam or redirect rivers, cut off
the tops of mountains and drill miles
below the sea, can even make matter
explode, smash the stuff of all stuff
to bits, making us gods
in diapers, magicians who have no clue
what we’ve pulled out of the hat,
and we need help. In addition to their zip
and chittering, their air wars
at the feeder over the four fake flowers
to sip from, what I love about the hummingbirds
is also what I fear about nature,
the constant demonstration
of human inability
to find a modest niche
and nestle among the other breaths. Are we
an amazing blaze, an evolutionary
oops-a-daisy so devoted to the pursuit
of comfort and ease
that for the sake of hummingbirds
and stoats, bats and bears, waterfalls
and evergreens and everglades
we have to go, or can we change,
can we share, I ask you now,
since my Magic 8 Ball shrugged
at the question, and the river
mumbled something about being late,
and I’m lost somewhere between
the reasonableness of indoor plumbing
and air-conditioning and the insanity
of buying toilet paper on-line. Another way
to put this: how many lives
and species are single-serving puddings
worth? I know: yum. But is yum
enough?
Bob Hicok, rattle.com August 7, 2022
This poem is written in response to an article at newscientist.com/article/2329952
While the
long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher’s ink.
She sits at
the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.
My mother
combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers, pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.
But I know
it is because of the way
my mother’s hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily, like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening.
Li-Young Lee, readalittlepoetry.com September 4, 2005
What can you give in return for your life?
—Mark 8.37
In our money-made world
we understand transaction.
We're ready to make a deal.
What then do we do
with an incommensurate, unanswerable gift?
What can you give in return for your life?
Only your life,
full of what only you can put into it.
Yet think of what we exchange for life.
The way we trade in real life
for the feeling of being liked,
or right, or safe, or worthy.
It's a cheap imitation. Don't buy it.
Receive the gift,
cherish it—
and give it away.
It will be given again to you,
newer, brighter, a good measure,
pressed down, shaken together, running over,
over and over.
Steve
Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net. September 13, 2024
|
Peter Pereira,
Poetry Foundation Newsletter September 6, 2024
They are
serving Toll House cookies
at the toll booth on the Maine Turnpike.
Someone peeps out through pleated drapes
of a swollen ebony hearse
to see if there is some mistake.
But no, attendants are moving
deftly among clogged cars
balancing silver trays heaped high
with succulent cookies
still warm with chocolate oozing
over the fluted rims.
Small dogs gather to catch the excess
as cars continue to pile up
even in the exact change lane
yet no one seems to mind the delay,
The Toll House cookies are golden and good.
The withered face peering out
from the silent hearse
fills with delicate memories
of an uncomplicated childhood.
Marilyn Donnelly,
Coda (Autumn House Press, 2010)
It all
counts as practice—
the way you
stack clean dishes
in the
drainer so they won’t break,
how you wipe
down the counter
and fold the
towels. How you talk
to a
co-worker, or your husband
after a hard
day, saying to him:
You can
lay your head in my lap, then
spending the
rest of the evening
rubbing his
temples to release
the pain
locked inside. And isn’t this
as sacred an
act as bowing to a statue
of the
Buddha, or standing in line
for hours
just to touch the worn
bronze toe
of St. Peter in Rome,
believing
that single gesture might
bless the
rest of your life?
James Crews, ‘The Weekly Pause’ August 2, 2024
Even if no one ever touched you
with the
tenderness you needed,
believe that
the world’s been
holding you
in its arms since
the day you
were born. You are
not an
accident, or afterthought.
Let rain on
the roof remind you.
Let sun on
the skin, and the neon-
orange of
the Mexican sunflower
at which a
hummingbird pauses
to drink.
There are so many ways
to hold and
be held, and you
could spend
your whole life
tallying
them up, without ever
reaching the
end of the list.
James Crews,
Unlocking the Heart (Mandala Publishing, 2024)
And whom do
I call my enemy?
An enemy must be worthy of engagement.
I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.
The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything.
It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.
The door to the mind should only open from the heart.
An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.
Joy Harjo, Conflict
Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems (W. W. Norton & Co 2015)
As
punishment, my father said, the nuns
would send him and the others
out to the schoolyard with the day's erasers.
Punishment? The pounding symphony
of padded cymbals clapped
together at arm's length overhead
(a snow of vanished alphabets and numbers
powdering their noses
until they sneezed and laughed out loud at last)
was more than remedy, it was reward
for all the hours they'd sat
without a word (except for passing notes)
and straight (or near enough) in front of starched
black-and-white Sister Martha,
like a conductor raising high her chalk
baton, the only one who got to talk.
Whatever did she teach them?
And what became of all those other boys,
poor sinners, who had made a joyful noise?
My father likes to think,
at seventy-five, not of the white-on-black
chalkboard from whose crumbled negative
those days were never printed,
but of word-clouds where unrecorded voices
gladly forgot themselves. And that he still
can say so, though all the lessons,
most of the names, and (he doesn't spell
this out) it must be half the boys themselves,
who grew up and dispersed
as soldiers, husbands, fathers, now are dust.
Mary Jo
Salter, Open Shutter (2003)
