*Poem of the day thread

[bluescreen]

It's Also Fine

It’s also fine to die in our beds
on a clean pillow
and among our friends.
It’s fine to die, once,
our hands crossed on our chests,
empty and pale,
with no scratches, no chains, no banners,
and no petitions.
It’s fine to have a clean death,
with no holes in our shirts,
and no evidence in our ribs.
It’s fine to die
with a white pillow, not the pavement, under our cheek,
with our hands resting in those of our loved ones,
surrounded by desperate doctors and nurses,
with nothing left but a graceful farewell,
paying no attention to history,
leaving this world as it is,
hoping that, someday, someone else
will change it.

Mourid Barghouti (1944-2021)
translated by Radwa Ashour

 

[bluescreen]

A new provocation from Danez Smith:

anti poetica

there is no poem greater than feeding someone
there is no poem wiser than kindness
there is no poem more important than being good to children
there is no poem outside love’s violent potential for cruelty
there is no poem that ends grief but nurses it towards the light
there is no poem that isn’t jealous of song or murals or wings
there is no poem free from money’s ruin
no poem in the capital nor the court
most policy rewords a devil’s script
there is no poem in the law
there is no poem in the west
there is no poem in the north
poems only live in the south of something
meaning beneath and darkened and hot
there is no poem in the winter nor in whiteness
nor are there poem’s in the landlord’s name
no poem to admonish the state
no poem with a key to the locks
no poem to free you


Danez Smith

See also a different poem with the same title, written in 2020:

anti poetica

who cares how long i’ve spent with my poems

poets.org

 

[Winot]

Modern Love

It is summer, and we are in a house
That is not ours, sitting at a table
Enjoying minutes of a rented silence,
The upstairs people gone. The pigeons lull
To sleep the under-tens and invalids,
The tree shakes out its shadows to the grass,
The roses rove through the wilds of my neglect.
Our lives flap, and we have no hope of better
Happiness than this, not much to show for love
Than how we are, or how this evening is,
Unpeopled, silent, and where we are alive
In a domestic love, seemingly alone,
All other lives worn down to trees and sunlight,
Looking forward to a visit from the cat.

Douglas Dunn

(from here)

 

[hitmouse]

Deborah Landau

III

Are we done with life? I am still so into it.
I like to drink and read and use my mouth
our bodies constellating in the smothering heat

as the trucks slam by, the song of a siren
has a sort of infinity in it, so too the poof
of dove on the sill, dropcloth of sheets, a drench,

the coming dusk, drizzle of sky
its fading and spanning-
days become decades and then-

(We belong to a generation of hideous inattention
clutching our rectangles of light like-
who am I talking to?)

 

[bluescreen]

This popped up on my FB feed just now. I do rather like what I've read of Merwin

To the Light of September

When you are already here
you appear to be only
a name that tells of you
whether you are present or not

and for now it seems as though
you are still summer
still the high familiar
endless summer
yet with a glint
of bronze in the chill mornings
and the late yellow petals
of the mullein fluttering
on the stalks that lean
over their broken
shadows across the cracked ground

but they all know
that you have come
the seed heads of the sage
the whispering birds
with nowhere to hide you
to keep you for later

you
who fly with them
you who are neither
before nor after
you who arrive
with blue plums
that have fallen through the night
perfect in the dew

--W. S. Merwin
[from Poetry (September 2003)]

 

[hitmouse]

I think this one definitely counts as poem of the day, by Robert Cording:

 

[VivaE]

A snippet from L'Allegro (John Milton) that never fails to give me joy -

Haste thee nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful Jollity,
Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles,
Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles,
Such as hang on Hebe's cheek,
And love to live in dimple sleek;
Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides.

 

[hitmouse]

Lydia Unsworth, Indirect Modes of Taxation:

Lydia Unsworth | Abridged Zone

www.abridged.zone

Just comes up as a big PDF and I can't work out how to put it into a post.

 

[hitmouse]

Apparently we've only had one June Jordan poem in 84 pages of this thread. Here's another:

Apologies to All the People in Lebanon​

Dedicated to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983.

I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

They said you shot the London Ambassador
and when that wasn’t true
they said so
what
They said you shelled their northern villages
and when U.N. forces reported that was not true
because your side of the cease-fire was holding
since more than a year before
they said so
what
They said they wanted simply to carve
a 25 mile buffer zone and then
they ravaged your
water supplies your electricity your
hospitals your schools your highways and byways all
the way north to Beirut because they said this
was their quest for peace
They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery
stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors
to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys
whose bodies
swelled purple and black into twice the original size
and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby
and then
they said this was brilliant
military accomplishment and this was done
they said in the name of self-defense they said
that is the noblest concept
of mankind isn’t that obvious?
They said something about never again and then
they made close to one million human beings homeless
in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed
40,000 of your men and your women and your children

But I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

They said they were victims. They said you were
Arabs.
They called your apartments and gardens guerrilla
strongholds.
They called the screaming devastation
that they created the rubble.
Then they told you to leave, didn’t they?

Didn’t you read the leaflets that they dropped
from their hotshot fighter jets?
They told you to go.
One hundred and thirty-five thousand
Palestinians in Beirut and why
didn’t you take the hint?
Go!
There was the Mediterranean: You
could walk into the water and stay
there.
What was the problem?

I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that
paid
for the bombs and the planes and the tanks
that they used to massacre your family

But I am not an evil person
The people of my country aren't so bad

You can expect but so much
from those of us who have to pay taxes and watch
American TV

You see my point;

I’m sorry.
I really am sorry.

 

[hitmouse]

By Marcellus Williams:

At last…Another’s heartbeat​

the silhouettes of their bond visible still at the last glow of the sun


they experience each other and the life of the night as it begins to stir


standing there in silence holding hands


no rush to go back inside


there is so much beauty and comfort in being in love and just being…


– amidst sounds of buzzing


chirps


crickets


the pleasant but irregular blowing of the wind


fireflies dancing in step with the light of the moon


how strange it is to become aware of another’s heartbeat but forget one’s own –


finally love.

 

[hitmouse]

Not a poem but a request that poetry-loving urbs might be able to help with - an incarcerated comrade has a birthday coming up and there's a request for people to send in their favourite poems to mark the occasion. If you send your favourite poems to freepeppyandkrystal@riseup.net they'll be passed on.

 

[hitmouse]

Leisure, Hannah, Does Not Agree with You (2)​

By Hannah Gamble
—After Catullus
My house disgusted me, so I slept in a tent.
My tent disgusted me, so I slept in the grass. The grass disgusted me,
so I slept in my body, which I strung like a hammock from two ropes.
My body disgusted me, so I carved myself out of it.

My use of knives disgusted me because it was an act of violence.
My weakness disgusted me because “Hannah” means “hammer.”
The meaning of my name disgusted me because I’d rather be known
as beautiful. My vanity disgusted me because I am a scholar.

My scholarship disgusted me because knowledge is empty.
My emptiness disgusted me because I wanted to be whole.
My wholeness would have disgusted me because to be whole
is to be smug. Still, I tried to understand wholeness

as the inclusiveness of all activities: I walked out into the yard,
trying to vomit and drink milk simultaneously. I tried to sleep
while smoking a cigar. I have enough regrets to crack all the plumbing.
I’m whole only in that I’ve built my person from every thought I’ve ever loved.

 

[Pickman's model]

quite liked this, from the irishman of 16.12.1882

 

[iona]

Worcestershire Apples

On the journey back I filled a bag
with russets in a greengrocers
on Pershore High Street.

I ate the first on a hilltop in Shropshire.
It smelled of late summer,
echoed the colour and cusp of the hills.

In Ireland, they haunted my table:
a trace of their freshness followed me
to work; they perfumed my briefcase.

The last I ate in my car on a rainy bypass.
It left my mouth clean and sweet,
a gash in the pit of my stomach.

– Annette Skade

My mum just sent me this as an awful photo of a screenshot on another screen which I tracked down to this Facebook post.
Last autumn I went down to Sussex and filled an 80L rucksack with my favourite egremont russets to bring back. This year I've had to ask her to post me a box.

 

[hitmouse]

Earl

by Louis Jenkins

In Sitka, because they are fond of them,
People have named the seals. Every seal
is named Earl because they are killed one
after another by the orca, the killer
whale; seal bodies tossed left and right
into the air. "At least he didn't get
Earl," someone says. And sure enough,
after a time, that same friendly,
bewhiskered face bobs to the surface.
It's Earl again. Well, how else are you
to live except by denial, by some
palatable fiction, some little song to
sing while the inevitable, the black and
white blindsiding fact, comes hurtling
toward you out of the deep?

 

[Sasaferrato]

Just a verse.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

 

[hitmouse]

Madeleine Cravens​

Pleasure Principle​

After the party, Ellen choked me against the refrigerator.
It was very quiet. Other students filtered into the snow.

Can there be a story where a character wants nothing?
Even in happiness I did not find much satisfaction––

Or was it the other way around, little crushed-up pills,
desire requiring more desire, streetlights, cruel fields.

Sweet post-nasal drip. Years unwound quickly––
With the momentum of bargains and cold calculations,

destruction could be shaped into a mode of preservation.
I cut my hand on a mirror. A blonde nurse burned it shut.