Virus

What if you tried to stay spotless
from one strain and were marked
by a completely different one instead?
What if you are a carrier?
What if no amount of washing,
even a baptism by immersion,
can remove the germ in you,
silently replicating,
passing to everyone you touch,
outfoxing the authorities,
leaping boundaries,
outpacing all our defenses,
changing you forever?
What if you self-quarantine
and it still gets into you,
whether or not you are prepared,
or worthy, or strong enough,
upsetting your life,
your plans, your control?
What if you're too late,
you've already eaten the bread,
unwashed, drunk undefended?
What if by some impossible turn
or some ordinary encounter
it has infected you
and you need to be careful
in touching people
because it spreads,
and soon it will change the world,
this living entity,
with a life and will of its own,
gushing up to eternal life,
this virus of divine love?

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net, March 11, 2020

How to Triumph Like a Girl

I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
But mainly, let's be honest, I like
that they're ladies. As if this big dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don't you want to believe it?
Don't you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it's going to come in first.

Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015)

Degas Wants to Paint Me Ironing

He says it's wonderful to watch me,
I'll just bet it is
when I'm the one who's working.

He's going to pay me, pay me to pretend
and now that I'm pretending
I have time to wonder
how my ironing has changed.

First with little flutters of the heart,
rounding the collars, love details
for the man, the loved one.

Some days my belly so far out
I'd barely touch the table,
slow heavy sweeps just shy of burning;
I was tired in those days.

Then my first deliberate scorch,
joy of a brown triangle on linen,
that smell a second before smoke;
ha that was wickedness, his favorite shirt,
he slapped my face for that, but it was worth it.

And ironing some things for the last time,
small nightgowns of disease.
How carefully I did them
folding my heart into the pleats,
pressing my good-byes into the sleeves.

Anna-May Laugher, andotherpoems.com, November 19, 2012

This poem is an example of ekphrastic poetry -- poetry which is based on another art form, usually a painting. Here Laugher has taken as her point of departure a painting by Degas entitled "Woman Ironing." To see the painting click here.

One-Legged Pigeon

In a flock on Market,
just below Union Square,
the last to land
and standing a little canted,
it teetered -- I want to say now
though its hardly true --
like Ahab toward the starboard
and regarded me
with blood-red eyes.
We all lose something,
though that day
I hadn't lost a thing.
I saw in that imperfect bird
no antipathy, no envy, no vengeance.
It needed no pity,
but just a crumb,
something to hop toward.

Gary Whitehead, A Glossary of Chickens: Poems (Princeton University Press, 2013)

And She Dances

Like a wounded bird you sit propped
in a hospital bed in the middle
of your bedroom, beloved Siamese cat
at your side, the sound of oxygen
pumping, a long plastic lifeline
connected to the machine which helps you
breathe, thumping melodic sounds --
background music to the rhythms of
your heart.

You are angered and saddened by this disease
called ALS that robs you of your life and
your fifty years as a dancer.
Long-legged beauty shown in photos
on the wall, face the light, next to
grinning grandchildren.

You say that you are afraid of dying.
Afraid of the unknown.
So together we close our eyes and try
to imagine a place where you are whole,
where your limbs move at your command.

Where you take your mother's hand
and dance again.

Josie Rodriguez, Waiting Rooms of the Heart: Poems of a Health Care Chaplin (iUniverse, Inc., 2005)

Bach and My Father

Six days a week my father sold shoes
To support our family through depression and war,
Nursed his wife through years of Parkinson's,
Loved nominal cigars, manhattans, long jokes,
Never kissed me, but always shook my hand.

Once he came to visit me when a Brandenburg
Was on the stereo. He listened with care --
Brisk melodies, symmetry, civility, and passion.
When it finished, he asked to hear it again,
Moving his right hand in time. He would have
Risen to dance if he had known how.

"Beautiful," he said when it was done,
My father, who had never heard a Brandenburg.
Eighty years old, bent, and scuffed all over,
Just in time he said, "That's beautiful."

Paul Zimmer, Crossing to Sunlight Revisited (University of Georgia Press, 2007)

Swift Things Are Beautiful

Swift things are beautiful:
Swallows and deer,
And lightning that falls
Bright-veined and clear,
Rivers and meteors,
Wind in the wheat,
The strong-withered horse,
The runner's sure feet.

And slow things are beautiful:
The closing of day,
The pause of the wave
That curves downward to spray,
The ember that crumbles,
The opening flower,
And the ox that moves on
In the quiet of power.

Elizabeth Coatsworth