poem of the week

Poem of the Week, by Kaylin Haught

Posted on by alisonmcghee

God Says Yes to Me

     – Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

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Andes Mint #30: Poem of the Week, by Sara Teasdale

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Winter Stars
     – Sara Teasdale
I went out at night alone;
 The young blood flowing beyond the sea
Seemed to have drenched my spirit’s wings—
 I bore my sorrow heavily.
But when I lifted up my head
 From shadows shaken on the snow,
I saw Orion in the east
 Burn steadily as long ago.
From windows in my father’s house,
 Dreaming my dreams on winter nights,
I watched Orion as a girl
 Above another city’s lights.
Years go, dreams go, and youth goes too,
 The world’s heart breaks beneath its wars,
All things are changed, save in the east
The faithful beauty of the stars.

—

For more information on Sara Teasdale, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/sara-teasdale

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Andes Mint #26: Poem of the Week (novel excerpt), by Louise Erdrich

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Excerpt from “The Painted Drum”
– a novel by Louise Erdrich

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
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For more information on Louise Erdrich, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/louise-erdrich
—
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Andes Mint #21: Poem of the Week, by Ellen Bass

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Pleasantville, New Jersey, 1955
– Ellen Bass

I’d never seen a rainbow or picked
a tomato off the vine. Never walked in an orchard
or a forest. The only tree I knew
grew in the square of dirt hacked
out of the asphalt, the mulberry
my father was killing slowly, pounding
copper nails into its trunk.
But one hot summer afternoon
my mother let me drag the cot onto the roof.
Bed sheets drying on the lines,
the cat’s cardboard box of dirt in the corner,
I lay in an expanse of blueness. Sun rippled
over my skin like a breeze over water.
My eyelids closed. I could hear the ripe berries
splatting onto the alley, the footsteps
of customers tracking in the sticky, purple mash.
I heard the winos on the wooden crates,
brown bags rustling at the throats of Thunderbird.
Car engines stuttered, came to life and died
in the A&P parking lot and I smelled grease and coffee
from the diner where Stella, the dyke, washed dishes
with a pack of Camels tucked
in the rolled-up sleeve of her t-shirt.
Next door, Helen Schmerling leaned on the glass case
slipping her fist into seamed and seamless stockings,
nails tucked in, to display the shade, while Sol
sucked the marrow from his stubby cigar,
smoke settling into the tweed skirts and mohair sweaters.
And under me something muscular swarmed
in the liquor store, something alive
in the stained wooden counter and the pungent dregs
of beer in the empties, my mother
greeting everyone, her frequent laughter,
the shorn pale necks of the delivery men,
their hairy forearms. The cash register ringing
as my parents pushed their way, crumpled dollar
by dollar, into the middle class.
The sun was delicious, lapping my skin.
I felt that newly arrived in a body.
The city wheeled around me–
the Rialto movie, Allen’s shoe store, Stecher’s Jewelry,
the whole downtown three blocks long.
And I was at the center of our tiny
solar system flung out on the edge
of a minor arm, a spur of one spiraling galaxy,
drenched in the light.

For more information on Ellen Bass, please click here: http://www.ellenbass.com/poems.php

Andes Mint #15: Poem of the Week, by Jack Gilbert

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Michiko Dead
– Jack Gilbert

He manages like somebody carrying a box
that is too heavy, first with his arms
underneath. When their strength gives out,
he moves the hands forward, hooking them
on the corners, pulling the weight against
his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly
when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes
different muscles take over. Afterward,
he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood
drains out of the arm that is stretched up
to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now
the man can hold underneath again, so that
he can go on without ever putting the box down.


—
For more information on Jack Gilbert, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/jack-gilbert
—
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Poem of the Week, by Fady Joudah

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Mimesis
– Fady Joudah

My daughter
wouldn’t hurt a spider
that had nested
between her bicycle handles
for two weeks
She waited
until it left of its own accord

If you tear down the web I said
it will simply know
this isn’t a place to call home
and you’d get to go biking

She said that’s how others
become refugees isn’t it?

 

* * *

For more information on Fady Joudah, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/fady-joudah

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Poem of the Week, by Dylan Thomas

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Fern Hill
– Dylan Thomas

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

 

For more information, please click here: http://www.dylanthomas.com/
—
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Poem of the Week, by Michelle Boisseau

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Collect Call
– Michelle Boisseau

Whatever he means, my brother means no harm.
It’s 6 a.m. in his time zone. Was he awake
all night dreaming these children? a girl
my daughter’s age named Music,
and 12-year-old twin sons
born six months apart:
Seth Gábriel and Seth Gäbriel, named
for an archangel of double messages
whose secret translations my brother keeps.

And he meant no harm years ago
when he scooped up a toddler at the zoo
and ran with her as far as Monkey Island
before the crowd pried away the child he fought
to save from them. While he was strapped
onto the stretcher and lifted, a cracker on a plate,
he watched me watch him speed away,
climb the stairs that wind through a hole
in the clouds and close around him like an eye.

“Oh, I have lots of children,”
he suddenly remembers, “lots and lots,
but I never get to see them.”
Perhaps each tooth he lost was sown
into a child that sprang up like a god
with a fanciful name. I hunch the phone
against my shoulder, try not to set him off:
“And how do you manage to support them all?”
“I give them lots of ideas.”

Upstairs I hear doors slamming, the kids
awake, running, laughing, a game
of can’t-catch-me. The winner chooses
the place at the table; the other pours the milk.
Perhaps he means the wind loved him.
Or that the blond aspen behind the Seven-Eleven
wept grateful in his arms.

Or maybe he does have real children,
sometime a woman slowly undressed
a small nervous man and gave him
a bit of evidence he wasn’t denied
every fruit in the garden—children,
jobs, houses, beds—our easy windfall.

—
For more information on Michelle Boisseau, please click here: http://www.michelleboisseau.com/bio.html

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Poem of the Week, by Max Garland

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Sciurus Carolinesis
– Max Garland      

It’s hopeless how she loves this life.
The gray squirrel digs a small moon’s
worth of craters in the yard.
Some she fills, some leaves open.
I’ve seen her work a walnut, still green,
round and round, shaving the surface
down to the meat. It moves in her claws
like a planet, or a bead
bigger and quicker than worry.
By love, I mean she uses the day
down to the last morsel of light—digs, barks,
insults the crow, wields
and lashes her tail like a glorified whip.
There’s a charge in her, wild volts.
A livid motion, leaping from red pine
to hackberry, the single forepaw catching first,
swinging under, then over, then onto
the branch. She’s a circus
when she takes to the power lines,
racing the live wire above the lowly
addresses. She’s a spiral of serious sleep
in the high hollow of the pin oak.
By love, I mean filling herself
with small right intentions. By life,
I mean she looks at you from the railings.
A kind of dare is in her, her tail curled
like a bass clef, or mutant fern.
You won’t catch her. She’s scrolling
from scent to sound to slightest motion.
However the light moves
might be ruin, or rich enough to rob.
The way she ransacks, hoards, loses,
lashes, bluffs the crouched cat,
the unleashed dog, her death,
a dozen times a day, is what I mean
by hopeless how she loves this life.

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For more information about Max Garland, please click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Garland
—
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Poem of the Week, by Sydney Lea

Posted on by alisonmcghee

To a Young Father
– Sydney Lea

This riverbend must have always been lovely.
Take the one-lane iron bridge shortcut across
the town’s west end and look downstream
to where the water backs up by the falls.
Boys once fished there with butterball bait
because the creamery churned by hydro
and the trout were so rich, says my ancient neighbor,
they tasted like heaven, but better. Try to
stop on the bridge if no one’s coming
to see the back of the furniture mill

in upside-down detail on the river,
assuming the day is clear and still.
I’ve lived here and driven this road forever.
Strange therefore that I’ve never taken
the same advice I’m offering you.
I’ve lived here, but I’ve too often been racing
to get to work or else back home
to my wife and our younger school-age children,
the fifth and last of whom will be headed
away to college starting this autumn.

I hope I paid enough attention
to her and the others, in spite of the lawn,
the plowing, the bills, the urgent concerns
of career and upkeep. Soon she’ll be gone.
Try to stop on the bridge in fall:
that is, when hardwood trees by the river
drop carmine and amber onto the surface;
or in spring, when the foliage has gotten no bigger
than any newborn infant’s ear
such that the light from sky to stream

makes the world, as I’ve said—or at least this corner—
complete, in fact double. I’d never have dreamed
a household entirely empty of children.
It’ll be the first time in some decades,
which may mean depression, and if so indifference
to the river’s reflections, to leaves and shades,
but more likely—like you, if you shrug off my counsel
or even take it—it’ll be through tears
that I witness each of these things, so lovely.
They must have been lovely all these years.

—
For more information on Sydney Lea, please click here: http://sydneylea.net/
—
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