#poem
New Year’s Day
By Kim Addonizio
The rain this morning falls
on the last of the snow
and will wash it away. I can smell
the grass again, and the torn leaves
being eased down into the mud.
The few loves I’ve been allowed
to keep are still sleeping
on the West Coast. Here in Virginia
I walk across the fields with only
a few young cows for company.
Big-boned and shy,
they are like girls I remember
from junior high, who never
spoke, who kept their heads
lowered and their arms crossed against
their new breasts. Those girls
are nearly forty now. Like me,
they must sometimes stand
at a window late at night, looking out
on a silent backyard, at one
rusting lawn chair and the sheer walls
of other people’s houses.
They must lie down some afternoons
and cry hard for whoever used
to make them happiest,
and wonder how their lives
have carried them
this far without ever once
explaining anything. I don’t know
why I’m walking out here
with my coat darkening
and my boots sinking in, coming up
with a mild sucking sound
I like to hear. I don’t care
where those girls are now.
Whatever they’ve made of it
they can have. Today I want
to resolve nothing.
I only want to walk
a little longer in the cold
blessing of the rain,
and lift my face to it.
#poem #poetry #literature
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42518/new-years-day-56d2211123c2e
The People, Yes
By Carl Sandburg
Lincoln?
He was a mystery in smoke and flags
Saying yes to the smoke, yes to the flags,
Yes to the paradoxes of democracy,
Yes to the hopes of government
Of the people by the people for the people,
No to debauchery of the public mind,
No to personal malice nursed and fed,
Yes to the Constitution when a help,
No to the Constitution when a hindrance
Yes to man as a struggler amid illusions,
Each man fated to answer for himself:
Which of the faiths and illusions of mankind
Must I choose for my own sustaining light
To bring me beyond the present wilderness?
Lincoln? Was he a poet?
And did he write verses?
“I have not willingly planted a thorn
in any man’s bosom.”
I shall do nothing through malice: what
I deal with is too vast for malice.”
Death was in the air.
So was birth.
https://us12.campaign-archive.com/?e=58c6df03ad&u=c993b88231f5f84146565840e&id=bd19fa6fb5
hm... on New Year's Eve I read the following poem aloud:
EINFACH SO
Sich in der Hingabe bergen,
ins große Wagnis der Liebe,
Sich keine Sicherheit errechnen,
nur eine Gewissheit haben:
den Tod.
Vielleicht kann man so
das Leben erfüllen.
SIMPLY SO
To take refuge in devotion,
into the great risk of love,
Do not calculate security,
have only one certainty:
death.
Perhaps this is how
to fulfill life.
The birthday of the world
By Marge Piercy
On the birthday of the world
I begin to contemplate
what I have done and left
undone, but this year
not so much rebuilding
of my perennially damaged
psyche, shoring up eroding
friendships, digging out
stumps of old resentments
that refuse to rot on their own.
No, this year I want to call
myself to task for what
I have done and not done
for peace. How much have
I dared in opposition?
How much have I put
on the line for freedom?
For mine and others?
As these freedoms are pared,
sliced and diced, where
have I spoken out? Who
have I tried to move? In
this holy season, I stand
self-convicted of sloth
in a time when lies choke
the mind and rhetoric
bends reason to slithering
choking pythons. Here
I stand before the gates
opening, the fire dazzling
my eyes, and as I approach
what judges me, I judge
myself. Give me weapons
of minute destruction. Let
my words turn into sparks.
--
https://us12.campaign-archive.com/?e=58c6df03ad&u=c993b88231f5f84146565840e&id=68a4cf47de
ALL THAT I HAVE
by Chris Anderson
We’re in a busy shopping mall, very crowded—
this was before the virus—and an ordinary-looking man
walks out of the crowd into the center of the atrium.
He’s middle-aged, wearing a leather jacket, hands in his pockets.
And he starts to sing. He opens his mouth and starts to sing,
loudly and clearly. At first you think he’s crazy,
he’s some kind of crank, but then you realize, wait a minute,
his voice is beautiful, it’s powerful—he’s singing
a famous aria—he’s singing Nessun Dorma, from Puccini.
This guy’s a tenor, this ordinary man who has emerged
from the crowd is a tenor, and he’s a great tenor, and his voice
is building and rising, and people are stopping and looking,
the expressions on their faces are changing, people who
would never be caught dead at an opera, who don’t have any idea
what opera is, they’re stopped in their tracks. One little girl
turns around and looks up at her mother, amazement
in her eyes. O look at the stars, the tenor sings, that tremble of love
and hope, and his voice builds and builds, it rises to its climax,
and he hits that final, high note, and he holds it, holds it
until it’s ringing in the air of that crowded mall, and something
transcendent has happened, something wonderful has risen up
out of that ordinary gray day, something excellent and pure,
and everyone knows it, they feel it, and they burst into applause,
burst into tears. They clap and clap. And the tenor smiles,
and looks around, then puts his hands in his pockets and walks
back into the crowd. He disappears. O that I might hold
my one note and walk away! O that I might disappear!
—from Rattle #82, Winter 2023
Chris Anderson: “During the pandemic, I happened to watch a video about a flashmob in a shopping mall in Leeds, and it moved me so much I sat down and wrote the poem more or less in one fell swoop. Later, as I was polishing it, I realized that it was about poetry, too, as I guess every poem is underneath. We are all singing our arias in the mall, and we all want them to matter somehow, to make a difference, however briefly, even though we soon disappear, back into the crowd.”
Statement on Energy Policy
By Carter Revard
It’s true we have invented quark-extraction,
and this allows our aiming gravity at will;
it’s true also that time
can now be made to flow
backward or forward by
the same process. It may be true as well that
what is happening at the focal point,
the meristem of this process,
creates a future kind of space,
a tiny universe that has
quite different rules. In this, it seems,
whatever one may choose to do or be becomes
at once the case. In short,
we have discovered heaven and
it’s in our grasp. However,
the Patent Office has not yet approved and cites
less positive aspects of this invention. First, it
does not generate profit, and
it does make obsolete all present
delivery systems for our nukes. Then,
it will let private citizens do things that only
a chosen few, that is, OUR sort, should be allowed—
fly freely from one country
to any other, spreading diseases
and bankrupting transportation.
Home-heating, auto-making industries will be trashed,
employment shelled, depressions spread worldwide,
sheer anarchy descend.
For these and other reasons,
no one must know of this. . . .
A Note from the Editor
75 years ago, Hungarian physical chemist Mária Telkes with American architect Eleanor Raymond designed the first solar-powered heating system for a house.
Carter Revard, “Statement on Energy Policy” from An Eagle Nation. Copyright © 1993 by Carter Revard. Reprinted by permission of University of Arizona Press.
https://us12.campaign-archive.com/?e=58c6df03ad&u=c993b88231f5f84146565840e&id=6a1bb5fab7
“Dead Cats Continue to Meow”
by Nasser Rabah
Behind the walls of the grade school, while the students lined up to salute the flag, the younger kids flay cats alive, they hang the furs on tall sticks, they circle around the school with a continuous meow. The parents, who concluded that their kids became cats, sprinkled salt on the neighborhood’s streets to remove the stench of absence, and washed again and again the children’s clothes for a holiday that won’t come.
A blind man listening to a match replay on his radio said to curious runners-by:
don’t hurry, the match ends with the defeat of both teams; but they didn’t get the joke. They stole his radio and left him cursing the politicians. In those days, we didn’t pay attention to the complaints of walls—so much blood was on them, who cares about walls that complain? One morning, we didn’t find homes, just heaps of red words piled like dirty clothes on sidewalks, no one cared about them either; couples, though, continued—and without walls—their usual business, not only that, but they made more kids who flayed more cats inside the school.
The heart doctor treating me now recommends only one thing:
stop writing the diaries of a dead village.
Nasser Rabah was born in Gaza in 1963 and continues to live there. Like almost everyone in Gaza during the Israeli assault, he has been displaced and communication has been sporadic. Despite this, a poem of his appeared in Amman, several weeks ago, written and sent on the three percent of battery power left on his phone after a family member had been able to use a solar charger.
https://lithub.com/dead-cats-continue-to-meow-a-poem-by-nasser-rabah
Brief reflection on killing the Christmas carp
By Miroslav Holub
You take a kitchen-mallet
and a knife
and hit
the right spot, so it doesn’t jerk, for
jerking means only complications and reduces profit.
And the watchers already narrow their eyes, already admire the
dexterity,
already reach for their purses. And paper is ready
for wrapping it up. And smoke rises from chimneys.
And Christmas peers from windows, creeps along the ground
and splashes in barrels.
Such is the law of happiness.
I am just wondering if the carp is the right creature.
A far better creature surely would be one
which—stretched out—held flat—pinned down—
would turn its blue eye
on the mallet, the knife, the purse, the paper,
the watchers and the chimneys
and Christmas,
And quickly
say something. For instance
These are my happiest days; these are my golden days.
Or
The starry sky above me and the moral law within me,
Or
And yet it moves.
Or at least
Hallelujah!
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51044/brief-reflection-on-killing-the-christmas-carp
WINTER IS COMING II
Winter is coming
She arrives
Glorious voice uplifts the night,
trails splendor, drapes drifts of white.
Taste icy delight, pure wrought fantasy.
Far flight of reflections safe by the fire,
caught ablaze in flame’s magic,
aligns with the greatest of stars, magnificent galaxies.
Snow lit in moonglow. Soft flow of desire.
Wild Wind whispers “Higher, my love; ride sheer mystery.”
Serene, reclined; eyes widen, brightly behold.
A fabulous sleigh swoops from above.
A whirl of aroma, adoring excitement.
She alights, a flash of stunning glee.
Clear aura of peace.
WINTER IS COMING I
Winter is Coming
She arrives!
Cold, clear, glorious crystalline air.
Happy to roast by the fire, spin out yarns for warmth.
Happy for cozy aroma of home and hearth.
Euphorious, heart singing, blood roaring fun.
Out to run, slide, ride through white mist,
escape from resistance; engage with bright bliss.
She alights from her carriage, a vision of charms
carved in ice.
Look into the prism’s flame, wondrous worlds
never twice the same, mesmerized.
Happy to have this gift, this season, this time,
open eyes.
Poem Featuring an Apocalypse **
**Rebecca Aronson
Imagine snow, that clean
tamping down that mutes color
and makes an art of moonlight. The end
of the world begins with a terrible noise,
the breaking down
of mechanisms and order, of protocol
and hierarchies. Sirens
and skirmishes, the cracking of glass and
below it all like a baseline,
weeping.
Then the kind of quiet
you find now only in graveyards or the woods,
snow-filled, low-lit, eerie; a hush
as layered as puff pastry. Snow
making indistinct mounds
of refuse. Our abandoned laptops
and useless phones. Cars
empty of fuel but piled full
of overstuffed backpacks, the bodies
of bicycles and shopping carts
broken and rusting. After snow
comes regrowth.
A disgusting process, so much
to break down, to overcome, to be made
use of. Revision
is always messy. All the parts scattered
like unattached limbs, like the tiny, hard organs
from the game of Operation thrown down
on a table, corresponding to nothing
recognizable. What is needed
is time. The seconds collecting like snow flakes,
piling up, untouched now by anything
that is not scavenging, that is not wind.
From Swamp Pink - https://swamp-pink.cofc.edu/featured/poem-featuring-an-apocalypse/
Rebecca Aronson is the author of three books of poetry: Anchor, Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, and Creature, Creature. She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to Sewanee. She has work appearing recently or soon in The Taos Journal of Poetry, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy, Crosswinds, The Laurel Review, and others. She is co-founder and host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music. She lives in Albuquerque with her husband, teenage son, and a very demanding cat. She teaches writing at Central New Mexico CC.
SHROUD OF LIGHT
by Lisa Majaj
If I must die, you must live to tell my story
—Refaat Alareer
By the time they killed Refaat, there was nothing new
about the rows of bodies rolled up in stark white shrouds,
surprisingly unbesmirched by dust or blood, tied
at both ends in neat bundles, sometimes in the middle
too, so the sheet wouldn’t slip, carried gently through
streets on the way to mass graves, those pits dug
in whatever ground could be reached without the living
being picked off by snipers, the unstained white
of winding cloths belying the odor of carnage
permeating every crevice, miasma of death hanging
like an ashen pall in the sky, clogging the lungs of those
who still try to breathe. A newscaster said, children
are meant to play in the dirt, but in Gaza it’s their shroud.
Even that is beyond many. One Gazan wrote, if I die,
please make sure my children’s bodies are covered—
not left open to wild dogs, the relentless, howling
sky. Lost beneath rubble, Refaat was denied
a poet’s burial, left only stone dust and concrete
for his shroud. But the words that survive his death
wrap his living spirit in a gauze of light.
“There’s a Palestine that dwells inside all of us,”
he wrote. Take his words, inscribe them on a kite,
brilliant white, to fly high over the terrible world,
so that his death is a tale that brings hope,
so that he lives, so that we live, so that Gaza
becomes a place not of shrouds but of freedom,
kites rippling in sunshine, lit by the blaze of life.
—from Poets Respond
December 17, 2023
Lisa Majaj: “On December 7th, Gazan writer Refaat Alareer was killed along with family members in a targeted Israeli airstrike. Refaat was a professor of literature, a poet and writer, beloved inside and outside of Gaza for his words and for his role in the non profit organization We Are We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a youth-led project seeking to tell the stories of Gazans. Scores of Gazan poets, writers, artists, musicians and journalists had been killed in the past months. In a recording made before his killing Refaat said, choked with tears, ‘The situation is very bleak. We don’t even have water … I only have my pen.’ Days before his death Refaat pinned this poem to his Twitter account.”
Mistakes Were NOT Made:
An #Anthem for #Justice
The Armenian Genocide was not a mistake.
Holodomor was not a mistake.
The Final Solution was not a mistake.
The Great Leap Forward was not a mistake.
The Killing Fields were not a mistake.
Name your genocide—it was not a mistake.
That includes the Great Democide of the 2020s.
To imply otherwise is to give Them the out they are seeking.
It was not botched.
It was not bungled.
It was not a blunder.
It was not incompetence.
It was not lack of knowledge.
It was not spontaneous mass hysteria.
The planning occurred in plain sight.
The planning is still occurring in plain sight.
The philanthropaths bought The $cience™.
The modelers projected the lies.
The testers concocted the crisis.
The NGOs leased the academics.
The $cientists fabricated the findings.
The mouthpieces spewed the talking points.
The organizations declared the emergency.
The governments erected the walls.
The departments rewrote the rules.
The governors quashed the rights.
The politicians passed the laws.
The bankers installed the control grid.
The stooges laundered the money.
The DoD placed the orders.
The corporations fulfilled the contracts.
The regulators approved the solution.
The laws shielded the contractors.
The agencies ignored the signals.
The behemoths consolidated the media.
The psychologists crafted the messaging.
The propagandists chanted the slogans.
The fact-chokers smeared the dissidents.
The censors silenced the questioners.
The jackboots stomped the dissenters.
The tyrants summoned.
The puppeteers jerked.
The puppets danced.
The colluders implemented.
The doctors ordered.
The hospitals administered.
The menticiders scripted.
The bamboozled bleated.
The totalitarianized bullied.
The Covidians tattled.
The parents surrendered.
The good citizens believed … and forgot.
This was calculated.
This was formulated.
This was focus-grouped.
This was articulated.
This was manufactured.
This was falsified.
This was coerced.
This was inflicted.
This was denied.
We were terrorized.
We were isolated.
We were gaslit.
We were dehumanized.
We were wounded.
We were killed.
Don’t let Them get away with it.
Don’t let Them get away with it.
Don’t let Them get away with it.
#Poem by @MargaretAnnaAl1
Read by @lawrie_dr
ON REALIZING THERE ARE TOO MANY POEMS ABOUT ONIONS, PEARS, AND BRUEGHEL’S PAINTINGS
by M.L. Clark
While cutting an onion I am reminded of Brueghel,
the lack of tears in his art. Mine are everywhere, yet his
paradise of dancers runs dry—too busy with the frenzy
of living—and even in The Triumph, the littered dying
do not weep—busy, in their own way, with the frenzy
of becoming dead. But I am still alone in the kitchen,
no orgiastic throng to advance my sullen mood as art;
there is time enough for me to cry. Who will stop me?
The pears ripening on the sill—bitter, mealy, and hard—
are making more of themselves, growing crisp and fresh
in the wan, white light of the world. Neutral, indifferent,
they cannot tell me what to do. So I think about layers
because they are there, because they are easy. Onions
cannot help being metaphors; they would rather stay
mysteries in the moist soil. They would rather I unwrap
myself. If I could, I tell them through the blur, I would.
—from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
The Robert Poems
How does one know where to begin? / The mirror asks the subject.
FADING LIGHT
Promoters of the end times.
No conspiracy for mundane power,
but intricately weaving out
underpinnings to prophecies.
Let violence and despair ravage planet Earth,
that those who cynically twist evil and good
may transport to their Heaven,
miraculously escaping payment for
horror and destruction
they have wrought.
Annihilation for their own elevation.
*
*
Sorrow, numbing ice, inconsolable
pain too profound to acknowledge.
Vultures circle, maggots feast.
Jovial parasites
imbibe sacrificial delight,
leer, sneer, snarl, slavering.
Whores so eager for noble
favor
fatten themselves for slaughter.