poem of the week

Poem of the Week, by Ted Kooser

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A Washing of Hands
– Ted Kooser

She turned on the tap and a silver braid
unraveled over her fingers.
She cupped them, weighing that tassel,
first in one hand and then the other,
then pinched through the threads
as if searching for something, perhaps
an entangled cocklebur of water,
or the seed of a lake. A time or two
she took the tassel in both hands,
squeezed it into a knot, wrung out
the cold and the light, and then, at the end,
pulled down hard on it twice,
as if the water were a rope and she was
ringing a bell to call me, two bright rings,
though I was there.



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For more information on Ted Kooser, please click here: http://tedkooser.net/


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Poem of the Week, by Rainer Maria Rilke

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from The Ninth Elegy, by Rainer Maria Rilke

Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you won’t impress him with your glorious emotions; out there,
where he feels with more feeling, you’re but a novice. Rather show him
some common thing, shaped through the generations,
that lives as ours, near to our hand and in our sight.
Tell him of things. He’ll stand more awed; as you did
beside the ropemaker in Rome or the potter by the Nile.
Show him how joyful, how pure, how much ours, a thing can be,
how even the lamenting of sorrow resolves into pure form,
serves as a thing, or dies into a thing –, and, in going across,
blissfully flows from the violin. –And these things,
that live by going away, know that you praise them; fleeting,
they look to us for rescue, us, the most fleeting of all.
They want us to transform them completely in our invisible heart
into – oh infinitely – into ourselves. Whoever finally we will be.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Lieberman)


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For more information on Rilke, please click here: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/295


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Poem of the Week, by Czeslaw Milosz

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Blacksmith Shop, by Czeslaw Milosz

I liked the bellows operated by rope.
A hand or a foot pedal – I don’t remember.
But that blowing and blazing of fire!
And a piece of iron in the fire, held there by tongs,
Red, softened, ready for the anvil,
Beaten with a hammer, bent into a horseshoe,
Thrown in a bucket of water, sizzle, steam.
And horses hitched to be shod,
Tossing their manes; and in the grass by the river
Plowshares, sledge runners, harrows waiting for repair.
At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor,
Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds,
I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this:
To glorify things just because they are.

Translated by the author and Robert Hass
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For more information about Czeslaw Milosz, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/czeslaw-milosz

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Poem of the Week, by Jane Hirshfield

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Optimism
– Jane Hirshfield

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs–all this resinous, unretractable earth.



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For more information on Jane Hirshfield, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/jane-hirshfield


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Poem of the Week, by Tony Hoagland

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Jet
– Tony Hoagland

Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth

and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.
On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,

and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.

And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though

no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.

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​For more information on Tony Hoagland, please click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/books/05book.html?_r=0​

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Poem of the Week, by Shelley Whitaker

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The Fox Den
–  Shelley Whitaker

As a kid on Spring evenings
while junebugs hooked their legs
into every drop of water and lassos
of grey moths sliced the air,
I would sit mid-driveway
waiting for a family of fox pups
to emerge from their hole in the earth
beside our house. Every May evening
they were born from red straw beds
of those woods; sharp-eyed, black-chinned
creatures burning behind the trees
like apparitions of the sunset.

I would always rise too quickly,
plastic zippers buzzing, shoelace
slapping concrete, scaring them
underground again. It knocked
the heart out of me to send something
back into blackness, to think a necklace
of sun-hungry dogs was snaking its way
back towards the center of the world,
all because I shuddered, all because
I thought I heard the wind call
my name, and rushed to meet it.



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For more information on Shelley Whitaker, please click here: http://www.versedaily.org/2014/aboutshelleywhitaker.shtml


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Poem of the Week, by Gregory Djanikian

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Something Else
– Gregory Djanikian

There’s the lush grass again,
the white pines green and mysterious.
And the barn, too, in the distance,
fading red, the color of longing.

The afternoon light is gilding the hillside,
the clouds are moving together,
huge, incipient thoughts,

and you’re swooning with desire
wanting the beautiful to lie down with you,
gold-leaf your fingertips and tongue,
green you with fragrance

though you don’t know exactly
what you’re after, whether it’s beauty itself
or whatever lives inside it,
elusive, entire,
peripheral to your wanting—

shadow of wings
you catch obliquely
along the woods’ edge,

river that you hear
without listening.

* * *

For more information on Gregory Djanikian, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/gregory-djanikian

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Poem of the Week, by Sharon Olds

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Station
– Sharon Olds

Coming in off the dock after writing,
I approached the house,
and saw your long grandee face
in the light of a lamp with a parchment shade
the color of flame.

An elegant hand on your beard. Your tapered
eyes found me on the lawn. You looked
as the lord looks down from a narrow window
and you are descended from lords. Calmly, with no
hint of shyness you examined me,
the wife who runs out on the dock to write
as soon as one child is in bed,
leaving the other to you.

Your long
mouth, flexible as an archer’s bow,
did not curve. We spent a long moment
in the truth of our situation, the poems
heavy as poached game hanging from my hands.

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For more information on Sharon Olds, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/sharon-olds
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Poem of the Week, by Pablo Neruda

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Love Sonnet LXXXIX
– Pablo Neruda

When I die, I wish your hands upon my eyes:
I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands
to pass once more their cool touch over me:
to sense the softness that changed my fate.

I want you to live while I, asleep, await you.
I want your ears to go on hearing the wind.
I want you to smell the sea’s aroma we loved so together,
and to go on walking the sands we walked.

I want what I love to go on living.
And you, whom I loved and sung above all else,
for all that, flourish again, my flower,

to reach for everything my love demands of you,
so that my shadow is passed through your hair,
so that all can know the reason for my song.

(Translation: Terence Clarke)


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For more information on Pablo Neruda, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/pablo-neruda


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Poem of the Week, by Galway Kinnell

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St. Francis and the Sow
– Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

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For more information on Galway Kinnell, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/galway-kinnell

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