Bassey the bassist
loves his lady
hugs her to him
like a baby
plucks her
chucks her
makes her
boom
waltz or tango
bop or shango
watch them walk
or do the ’dango:
bassey and his lovely lady
bassey and his lovely lady
like the light and not the shady:
bit by boom
they build from duty
humming strings and throbbing
beauty:
beat by boom
they build this beauty:
bassey and his lovely lady
Kaman Brathwaite, americanscholar.org November 27, 2021
On the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963
“Mother dear, may I go downtown
Instead of out to play,
And march the streets of Birmingham
In a Freedom March today?”
“No, baby, no, you may not go,
For the dogs are fierce and wild,
And clubs and hoses, guns and jails
Aren’t good for a little child.”
“But, mother, I won’t be alone.
Other children will go with me,
And march the streets of Birmingham
To make our country free.”
“No, baby, no, you may not go,
For I fear those guns will fire.
But you may go to church instead
And sing in the children’s choir.”
She has combed and brushed her night-dark hair,
And bathed rose petal sweet,
And drawn white gloves on her small brown hands,
And white shoes on her feet.
The mother smiled to know her child
Was in the sacred place,
But that smile was the last smile
To come upon her face.
For when she heard the explosion,
Her eyes grew wet and wild.
She raced through the streets of Birmingham
Calling for her child.
She clawed through bits of glass and brick,
Then lifted out a shoe.
“O, here’s the shoe my baby wore,
But, baby, where are you?”
Dudley Randall, Cities Burning (Broadside Press, 1968)
In the airport bar, I tell my mother not to worry.
No one ever tripped and fell into the San Andreas
Fault. But as she dabs at her dry eyes, I remember
those old movies where the earth does open.
There's always one blonde entomologist, four
deceitful explorers, and a pilot who's good-looking
but not smart enough to take off his leather jacket
in the jungle.
Still, he and Dr. Cutie Bug are the only ones
who survive the spectacular quake because
they spent their time making plans to go back
to the Mid-West and live near his parents
while the others wanted to steal the gold and ivory
then move to Los Angeles where they would rarely
call their mothers and almost never fly home
and when they did for only a few days at a time.
Ron Koertge, Geography of the Forehead (University of
Arkansas Press, 2000)
Try to love everything that gets in your way:
the Chinese women in
flowered bathing caps
murmuring together in
Mandarin, doing leg exercises in your lane
while you execute
thirty-six furious laps,
one for every item on
your to-do list.
The heavy-bellied man
who goes thrashing through the water
like a horse with a
harpoon stuck in its side,
whose breathless
tsunamis rock you from your course.
Teachers
all. Learn to be small
and swim through
obstacles like a minnow
without grudges or
memory. Dart
toward your goal,
sperm to egg. Thinking Obstacle
is another
obstacle. Try to love the teenage girl
idly lounging against
the ladder, showing off her new tattoo:
Cette vie est la mienne, This life is mine,
in thick blue-black
letters on her ivory instep.
Be glad she’ll have
that to look at all her life,
and keep going, keep
going. Swim by an uncle
in the lane next to
yours who is teaching his nephew
how to hold his
breath underwater,
even though kids
aren’t allowed at this hour. Someday,
years from now, this
boy
who is kicking and
flailing in the exact place
you want to touch and
turn
will be a young man,
at a wedding on a boat
raising his champagne
glass in a toast
when a huge wave hits,
washing everyone overboard.
He’ll come up
coughing and spitting like he is now,
but he’ll come up
like a cork,
alive. So your
moment
of impatience must
bow in service to a larger story,
because if something
is in your way it is
going your way, the
way
of all beings;
towards darkness, towards light.
Alison Luterman, The Sun June 2010
Men marry what they need. I marry you,
morning by morning, day by day, night by night,
and every marriage makes this marriage new.
In the broken name of heaven, in the light
that shatters granite, by the spitting shore,
in air that leaps and wobbles like a kite,
I marry you from time and a great door
is shut and stays shut against wind, sea, stone,
sunburst, and heavenfall. And home once more
inside our walls of skin and struts of bone,
man-woman, woman-man, and each the other,
I marry you by all dark and all dawn
and have my laugh at death. Why should I bother
the flies about me? Let them buzz and do.
Men marry their queen, their daughter, or their mother
by hidden names, but that thin buzz whines through:
where reasons are no reason, cause is true.
Men marry what they need. I marry you.
John Ciardi, blog.bestamericanpoetry.com May 16, 2012
When the boy asked the man,
“How much do you love me?”
the man went down on one knee,
then he leaned toward the child,
and opened his thick arms
as wide as the earth
until his hands were behind him,
and, like Atlas, the world rested
on his shoulders and back.
At the funeral home before the burial,
I asked to see my father’s body,
even though the Rabbi said,
“I would not recommend it.”
It laid in a black walnut casket
in a room behind drapes.
When they opened the casket,
I saw it dressed in a shroud.
A hood covered the head.
I wanted to see it.
The director said,
“It is not recommended,”
but Susan and I insisted,
so they undid the tie.
His skin was pale white.
The Rabbi said, “Jewish bodies
are not prepared for viewing.”
His face felt cool.
I ran my finger down his cheek.
When the ceremony began,
the Rabbi asked me to speak.
The measure of a father
is not only how much he loves children,
but also how much children love him.
I have a picture of him on my refrigerator
holding his grandson, Daniel, in his arms.
I can see my father beaming as Daniel sleeps.
Twenty-five years ago that baby was my son, Joshua.
Twenty-five years before that, he was me.
As I left his hospital room that last Sunday night,
I kissed him on the cheek and turned to go,
but then I turned back and kissed him again.
Then we flew home, and then he died,
so we all turned around again
and in the night between coming and going,
I stood at the side of my bed
with my suitcase laid open.
I saw the shirts, underwear, pants,
socks, belts, and ties, and I couldn’t remember,
was I packing or unpacking,
or for where or why?
Then, back in Tennessee,
the other pallbearers and I carried the casket
to the grave and lowered it into the ground,
and each family member in turn—
I was first, then Susan, Josh, Bonnie, Nancy,
and the rest, except for my mother—she couldn’t—
each threw a shovel-full of dirt.
The earth went thud as it hit the black
walnut.
Later, Daniel asked his mother
why we throw dirt on Papa Joe?
Then he asked his father why are we sad?
Then he asked Joshua why we laugh when we’re sad?
So we told him, “When we love, we feel it all,”
and we showed him the world on our backs.
Robert S. Carroll, M. D. Rattle #8 (Winter 1997)
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Alfred
A. Knopf, 1954)
