poem of the week

Poem of the Week, by Jeanne Murray Walker

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If Found, Drop In Any Mail Box. Owner Will Pay Postage
– Jeanne Murray Walker

I’m grading papers in the motel room,
the teacher in me watching as my students
fumble with their keys in the lock of the world.

I crack down on the one who misspells
the minuet amount of imagination a person needs
to live well. And I give a C to the one I suspect

of telling me whatever I want: that summer is a newspaper
printed with no alphabet but pleasure. But I confess,
I feel a twinge for the one who postures,

as if he can’t imagine anyone loving him for himself.
And I admit, I cheat on the good side to help the one
who writes that he and his girl are one cell,

sliced apart by the scalpel of her parents.
When I get to the one who says
that he’s a lonely space ship flying between stars,

I put my red pen down. I could go under the knife
with him, I think, knowing that I won’t.
But let’s say this. It surprises me to find out I love them.

I’d like to tell someone, the woman in the next room, maybe,
like to spread this sweetness, to bring about some
minor good. Can I offer you this pale translation

of my students’ essays? Nothing special.
The sound of their keys turning in the lock of the world.
I drop it as I close the door, in case you need it.

—
For more information on Jeanne Murray Walker, please click here: http://www.jeannemurraywalker.com/poems.php

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Poem of the Week, by Phebe Hanson

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Somewhere I’ll Find You
– Phebe Hanson

So we moved from my small town in western Minnesota
to St. Paul where I had to go to Murray High, a school
with more people than in the entire town of Sacred Heart,

and I had to walk two and a half miles every day because
there were no school buses, but it turned out to be not so
bad after all because I met a boy in confirmation class who

let me ride on the handlebars of his bike on the way home from
school and one Sunday my dad even let this boy pick me up
to go for a walk in Como Park, since after all the paths were

safe, filled with many families swarming with children, and
even though my dad knew the devil went about the city like a
roaring lion seeking whom he might devour, he let me go

with this boy because after all he was a Luther Leaguer and
we had sung together sitting side by side in church, “Yield not to
temptation, for yielding is sin / each vict’ry will help you,

some other to win / fight manfully onward, dark passions subdue /
look only to Jesus, He’ll carry you through,” but as soon as we
left my house this boy said he was going to take me some other

place I’d like very much and it was going to be a surprise so
off we went on the streetcar and new to the city I had no idea where
we were going until we got off and were standing in front of a

movie marquee and I said, “I can’t go in. You know my father
doesn’t let me go to movies. It’s a sin,” but he gently guided me
with his seductive hands, saying “Just come into the lobby to talk.”

There below the sign “Somewhere I’ll Find You,” starring Clark Gable
and Lana Turner in a “torrid tale of love between two people caught
in the chaos of war,” he persuaded me at least to go inside and sit

down and watch part of the movie and if I didn’t like it, we could get
right back on the streetcar and go to Como Park, so I decided since
I already was in this lobby den of iniquity surrounded by posters of

Jezebel movie queens and devilish leading men, I was doomed anyway,
so I might as well go into the darkness with him and even let him put
his arm around me and hold my hand and that’s the way it’s been ever since.


—
For more information on Phebe Hanson, please click here: http://www.rusoffagency.com/authors/hanson_p/phebe_hanson.htm
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Poem of the Week, by John Hodgen

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My Mother Swimming
– John Hodgen

Chest-deep, my brothers and I, the waters of Comet Pond leaping at our little hearts
as we held on for dear life, shrivel-fingered, blue, to the cement boat dock,
as far as we dared go, the self-declared demarcation of our drowning,
our father back on the blanket, lonely as Liechtenstein, his shirt still on, always,
the polioed hunch of his back like a boat overturned on a beach,
my mother swimming alone before us, back and forth, smoothly, shining,
this one time and never again. Soon she would come in to us, gleaming,
pack up the blanket, the basket, sit like silence next to my father all the way home,
their heads and shoulders looming before us, the Scylla and Charybdis
we knew even then we would have to get past to make our way in the world.

But for now, for just this moment, she glowed. She showed us,
moving like language along the water, like handwriting on the horizon,
that even in the oceans of darkness that would come,
the long rivers of abandoned office buildings on a Sunday afternoon,
the silent crow’s-nest shadows of all the true angels of death,
the first step we would take from the train, alighting into the darkness
of our hometown, our mother and father no longer there to meet us,
their shadows long gone, run off and drowned somewhere –
There will be these moments, she said, smiling, as she turned on her back,
floating, moments like diamonds in our hands, candles on the waves,
that we could make our way to them, hold them one by one,
the gold buttons of the opera singer as he changes music into light,
the smile on the face of your lover as she closes the door and turns to you,
the twilight that gathers all afternoon in the nave of the cathedral,
the silver beads of water on the head of the baby being baptized,
the breath she takes in like a dream and lets go.

—
For more information on John Hodgen, please click here: http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/2010/09/john-hodgen.html
—
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Poem of the Week, by Thomas Lux

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From The Neighborhood of Make-Believe
– Thomas Lux

It is elsewhere, elsewhere, the neighborhood you seek.
The neighborhood you long for,
where the gentle trolley –ding, ding– passes
through, where the adults are kind
and, better, sane,
that neighborhood is gone, no, never
existed, though it should have
and had a chance once
in the hearts of women, men (farmers dreamed
this place, and teachers, book writers, oh thousands
of workers, mothers prayed for it, hunchbacks,
nurses, blind men, maybe most of all soldiers,
even a few generals, millions
through the millennia…), some of whom,
despite anvils on their chests,
despite taking blow after blow across shoulders and necks,
despite derision and scorn,
some of whom still, still
stand up everyday against ditches swollen with blood,
against ignorance, still dreaming,
full-fledged adults, still fighting,
trying to build a door to that place,
trying to pry open the ugly,
bullet-pocked, and swollen gate
to the other side,
the neighborhood of make-believe.


—
For more information on Thomas Lux, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/thomas-lux
—
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Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

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Shoulders
– Naomi Shihab Nye

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.
This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.
His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.
We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.
The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.


—
For more information on Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here.
—
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Poem of the Week, by Philip Booth

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First Lesson
– Philip Booth

Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man’s float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

 

For more information on Philip Booth, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Margaret Mackinnon

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The Invented Child
– Margaret Mackinnon
(I spring from the pages into your arms.)

Someone who once knew him said
Walt Whitman sang before breakfast
behind his bedroom door—
broken arias, bits of patriotic tunes,
the way my child sings this morning
in early spring, the way
the raucous mockingbirds fill the warming air
with their own borrowed songs.
The world is once again its hopeful green.
Bold forsythia bursts its spindly stalks.
The young trees again flicker on the slopes,
and when he ended his days on dusty
Mickle Street, Whitman must have remembered
mornings like this—
Nights, no longer really sleeping, confined
to the paralytic chair, say he remembered
that earlier, softer air, the light on the water
in that clearing he had called Timber Creek,
the idea of it—
Say he thought again of those days
when he was still fat & red & tanned,
when he’d strip off his clothes
and roll his great flesh in the pond’s black marl.

In the close, bug-ridden room in Camden,
he spoke, sometimes, of a grandson,
fine boy, a Southern child who sometimes wrote,
once stopped by—
No one ever saw him.
An old poet. His invented child.
Though why shouldn’t a man
who’d always lived in words create something
to endure his sore, soiled world?
There is at Timber Creek, Whitman wrote about the trees
their rough bark, the massive limbs and trunks
as if they were the bodies of those he’d loved.
Some people believe the souls of unborn children
rest in trees. Say he saw them, then,
caught their soft breath
sweet as the spice bush, lush as the early crocus.
In the long, hard work of his imagination,
say he watched their disembodied hearts
sway among the new leaves,
watched the eager light shine on another fine morning
until the sky lifted above him
like exultant, fresh desire—
and the children descended,
and then the crowns of the trees were all on fire.

 

– For more information on Margaret Mackinnon, please click here: http://imagejournal.org/page/artist-of-the-month/margaret-mackinnon

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Poem of the Week, by Adam Zagajewski

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Try to Praise the Mutilated World
– Adam Zagajewski

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

 

For more information on Adam Zagajewski, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Coleman Barks

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Word Choice
– Coleman Barks

Slubby comes from the Dutch, who know a lot about mud,
in their lowdown Brueghel-dance ways.

Slubby names the miry-slick stickiness
where ducks might love sliding into a lake.

I love another wet-earth word, sillion. Firmer,
the curve of a furrow the plow has just turned over,
used only one place in poetry as far as I know.
Sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine.

I shall now display more mud-related words.
Mumbledypeg, the knife game where the one who loses
has to dig the peg out with his teeth,
the peg that has been pounded deep with the heel of the knife,
and Barry Heywood goes after it with such earth-eating ferocity
he comes up spewing soil from his dirtface that has now a center
with between his teeth like an ivory narwhal horn, the peg.

A path through tall grass after heavy rain
feels clodgy underfoot. Earth sticking to a spade
when you are digging, that piece of ground
is cledgy to work with.

Gawm is especially sticky and foul-smelling mud.
A wagon axle could get gormed up with gawm.
Gubber is black-rot anaerobic material,
no breath letout-tatall.

A clod is fairly coherent earthen wonderment.
A paunch, among other things, is what a cow does
with its hoof to a clod. They paunch about
crumbling the plowed field to mudproper.
Muddling through, there is a thick pudding
you call stodge. Stug is more watery.
Silt you already know, very fine.
People used to patch their houses with stug.
I have a place I stug.

What do you call the little ridges of parallel tunnels
that mud daubers make? Toy Quonset dobberdoms.
I am become a scholar of mud.

Pug is a kind of loam, the tacky yellow sort.
A slough is a mudhole,
though it may have deep places and be connected to a river.

Smeery means a wet mud-surface, not clodgy, or slobbed up.
Slob and slub, more thick-mud words.
Slub will take your shoe off and keep it.

With these mud-words you can trade vowels around,
because that is the world they are in.

He come home all of a slub.
He slubbed home through the stodge.

Sleech is bottom sediment spread for manure.
Slurry, mud diluted to cream.

Spannel means to make the indoors like the out, as a dog might,
splushing in the slough, then spanneling through the kitchen.

And since embodiment is the river’s use of mud,
to scud the springflood with fleering mist is joy.

—
For more information on Coleman Barks, please click here: http://www.colemanbarks.com/
—
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Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

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Wedding Cake
– Naomi Shihab Nye

Once on a plane
a woman asked me to hold her baby
and disappeared.
I figured it was safe,
our being on a plane and all.
How far could she go?
She returned one hour later,
having changed her clothes
and washed her hair.
I didn’t recognize her.
By this time the baby
and I had examined
each other’s necks.
We had cried a little.
I had a silver bracelet
and a watch.
Gold studs glittered
in the baby’s ears.
She wore a tiny white dress
leafed with layers
like a wedding cake.
I did not want
to give her back.
The baby’s curls coiled tightly
against her scalp,
another alphabet.
I read new new new.
My mother gets tired.
I’ll chew your hand.
The baby left my skirt crumpled,
my lap aching.
Now I’m her secret guardian,
the little nub of dream
that rises slightly
but won’t come clear.
As she grows,
as she feels ill at ease,
I’ll bob my knee.
What will she forget?
Whom will she marry?
He’d better check with me.
I’ll say once she flew
dressed like a cake
between two doilies of cloud.
She could slip the card into a pocket,
pull it out.
Already she knew the small finger
was funnier than the whole arm.

 

For more information on Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/174
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