How the Stars Came Down

 

Night. How the stars came down
arching over us, and the only name
we had for them was shooting stars.
Why there were so many was anybody's guess.
My great grandmother thought the world
was coming to an end when Haley's comet
flared across the sky. I lay flat on my back
and watched the night sky falling
all around me and I wanted,
more than anything, never to go home.
I did, of course. They put us campers into busses
and drove us back to tenements,
asphalt and streetlights in the city.
What I didn't know that night
in my bedroll at Sherwood Forest Camp
was that when I got home,
home wasn't my real home anymore.
I had a new home in my remembering
and it was dark and safe and beautiful
with shooting stars still falling all around.

Pat Schneider, Another River: New and Selected Poems (Amherst Writers and Artists Press, 2008)

Things My Mother Said

When I was a child
she said I’ve got eyes in the back of my head
she said I just don’t understand you
you should be ashamed of yourself
she said Look what you’ve made me do now
When I asked how old she was she said
As old as my gums and a little bit older than my teeth
She said Don’t let anyone see you down there
Men! she said Men!

When I was a teenager she looked me up and down
and said That dress does nothing for you
But sometimes she said Go and enjoy yourself love
and when I came back she said Who did you meet?
Whoever it was she knew their family history
She often asked me What’s the skeet?
but I had none and if I had
I wouldn’t have told it to her.

She always had her sights on the weather
You’re not going out without a coat in this
It’s fit to blow your head off
Sometimes she’d look me in the eye and say
Bless you love. Bless you, meaning thank you,
meaning I love you.

When her hearing went she said
Speak up you’re mumbling
she said It’s no joke getting old
and I’ll never make old bones
In her last year she said
86! Would you believe it?

skeet – a Manx word meaning gossip

 

Chrissy Banks, andotherpoems.com accessed on July 27, 2023

Found

My wife waits for a caterpillar
to crawl onto her palm so she
can carry it out of the street
and into the green subdivision
of a tree.

Yesterday she coaxed a spider
into a juicier corner. The day
before she hazed a snail
in a half-circle so he wouldn’t
have to crawl all the way
around the world and be 2000
years late for dinner.

I want her to hurry up and pay
attention to me or go where I
want to go until I remember
the night she found me wet
and limping, felt for a collar
and tags, then put me in
the truck where it was warm.

Without her, I wouldn’t
be standing here in these
snazzy, alligator shoes.

 

Ron Koertge, Fever (Red Hen Press, 2006)

Turkey Love

At the corner of our fenced yard
a tom fans his feathers, drops
first one barred wing, then the other,
sashays before our shed, a blue-faced
matador, red wattles swinging
as he taunts imagined rivals.
It is pure theater, and we, his only audience,
enchanted by the mysteries of wild courtship.
Two hens, bored or unimpressed,
peck under the bird feeder
before sauntering away.
Engrossed in his performance, the tom
fails to notice their exit at first, then panics,
dashing back and forth along the pickets
unable to find the open gate—
deflated and frantic, a comic Casanova.
Sympathetic to his plight, knowing well
how miscommunication leads to heartache,
I stand on our deck, cheering encouragements
while you go to his aid waving arms
to herd him out, because even turkey love
deserves a second chance.

 

Kathe Palka, Miracle of the Wine (Grayson Books, 2012)

At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed-or were killed-on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

 

William Stafford, The Way It Is (Graywolf Press, 1999)

Religion

The last thing the old dog brought home
from her pilgrimages through the woods
was a man's dress shoe, a black, still-shiny wing-tip.

I feared at first a foot might be in it.
But no, it was just an ordinary shoe.
And while it was clear it had been worn,

and because the mouth of the dog —
a retriever, skilled at returning ducks and geese —
was soft, the shoe remained a good shoe

and I might have given it
to a one-legged friend
but all of them dressed their prostheses too,

so there it was. A rescued
or a stolen odd shoe. Though in the last months
of the dog's life, I noticed

how the shoe became her friend, almost,
something she slept on or near
and nosed whenever she passed,

as though checking it to see if,
in her absence, that mysterious, familiar,
missing foot, might not have come again.

 

Robert Wrigley, Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin Press, 2006)

Lead

Here is a story

to break your heart.

Are you willing?

This winter

the loons came to our harbor

and died, one by one,

of nothing we could see.

A friend told me

of one on the shore

that lifted its head and opened

the elegant beak and cried out

in the long, sweet savoring of its life

which, if you have heard it,

you know is a sacred thing,

and for which, if you have not heard it,

you had better hurry to where

they still sing.

And, believe me, tell no one

just where that is.

The next morning

this loon, speckled

and iridescent and with a plan

to fly home

to some hidden lake,

was dead on the shore.

I tell you this

to break your heart,

by which I mean only

that it break open and never close again

to the rest of the world.

 

Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. II