poem of the week

Poem of the Week, by Maureen Micus Crisick

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Suppose
– Maureen Micus Crisick

the ghetto stars pinned to cloth
could lift from history
like angels soaring to the sky.
The air which holds cinders
of Buddhist robes, burned hair
of ones who doused themselves, set fire,
suppose the plume of smoke
becomes clear and white.

What did I say?
I said: what if Sarajevo is not burning
and no city is burning
and in the market square
no human head is impaled on a stick
or mute limbs strewn on the streets,
and no fingers exist without hands.

Suppose grenades side with sunlight.
Bullets in boxes become
chocolate wrapped in gold foil,
and in Guatemala, the men come back
from their disappearance,
and in the morning, wake in their own beds
because love is the white moon
and light moves in us like blood.

Yes
there will be holes left in clothes
but not from ripped stars,
only from wear,
to let the darkness out.


—
I found Maureen Micus Crisick’s poem in this book: http://www.amazon.com/Poets-Companion-Pleasures-Writing-Poetry/dp/0393316548/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358000383&sr=1-1&keywords=Maureen+Micus+Crisick
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Poem of the Week, by Alden Nowlan

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Great Things Have Happened
– Alden Nowlan

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, “Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time.” But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn’t mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I’m sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

“Is that all?” I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you’ve never visited
before, when the bread doesn’t taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.


—
For more information on Alden Nowlan, please click here: http://www.poemhunter.com/alden-nowlan/biography/
—
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Poem of the Week, by Yehuda Amichai (tr. by Chana Bloch)

Posted on by alisonmcghee

A Quiet Joy
– Yehuda Amichai (translated by Chana Bloch)

I’m standing in a place where I once loved.
The rain is falling. The rain is my home.
I think words of longing: a landscape
out to the very edge of what’s possible.
I remember you waving your hand
as if wiping mist from the windowpane,
and your face, as if enlarged
from an old blurred photo.
Once I committed a terrible wrong
to myself and others.
But the world is beautifully made for doing good
and for resting, like a park bench.
And late in life I discovered
a quiet joy
like a serious disease that’s discovered too late:
just a little time left now for quiet joy.

—
For more information on Yehuda Amichai, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/yehuda-amichai

—

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Poem of the Week, by Gary Johnson

Posted on by alisonmcghee

December
– Gary Johnson

A little girl is singing for the faithful to come ye
Joyful and triumphant, a song she loves,
And also the partridge in a pear tree
And the golden rings and the turtle doves.
In the dark streets, red lights and green and blue
Where the faithful live, some joyful, some troubled,
Enduring the cold and also the flu,
Taking the garbage out and keeping the sidewalk shoveled.
Not much triumph going on here—and yet
There is much we do not understand.
And my hopes and fears are met
In this small singer holding onto my hand.
Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark
And are there angels singing overhead? Hark.


—
For more information on Gary Johnson, please click here: http://www.amazon.com/Head-Trauma-Sonnets-Other-Poems/dp/0595403387
—
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Poem of the Week (excerpt), by Hafiz

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Tired of Speaking Sweetly (excerpt)
– Hafiz

Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
break all our teacup talk of God.

If you had the courage and
could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
he would just drag you around the room
by your hair,
ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
that bring you no joy.

Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
and wants to rip to shreds
all your erroneous notions of truth

that make you fight within yourself, dear one,
and with others,

causing the world to weep
on too many fine days.

God wants to manhandle us,
lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
and practice His dropkick.

The Beloved sometimes wants
to do us a great favor:

hold us upside down
and shake all the nonsense out.


—
For more information on Hafiz, please click here: http://www.poetseers.org/the-poetseers/hafiz/
—
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Poem of the Week, by Edward Hirsch

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My Father’s Track and Field Medal, 1932
– Edward Hirsch

Cup the tarnished metal in your palm.
Look closely and you’ll see a squirrel
scampering up a beech-wood in the forest.
You’ll see a cardinal flaming in the branches.
You’ll see a fleet-footed antelope racing
through the woods ahead of the hunters.

—
For more information on Edward Hirsch, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/edward-hirsch
—
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Poem of the Week, by Brynn Saito

Posted on by alisonmcghee

The Palace of Contemplating Departure
– Brynn Saito

You wandered through my life like a backwards wish
when I was ready for deliverance.

I was ready for release
like a pinball in God’s mouth
like charanga on Tuesdays
like the summer in Shanghai

when we prayed for a rainstorm
and bartered our shame, then we tore open oranges
with four dirty thumbs.

And the forecast said Super
so we chartered a yacht
and we planted a garden on the unbending prow

but the sea said Surrender
with its arms full of salt, and wind shook the seeds
from our shirt coat pockets

so when we washed up on the shoreline of sunlight
near the city of wind
we were broken and thin, like wraiths at a wake.

But you tilted your head up and told me I was wild
so I lifted my life
and I lifted your life

and we wandered through the gate of radiant days
then we married our splendor
in the hall of bright rule.

And I thank you again: you gave madness a chance
and you lassoed the morning
and we met on a Tuesday
in a dance hall in Shanghai
and I left you in a leap year for the coveted shoreline

and you wept like a book when it’s pulled from a well.

But you were the one who told me I was wild
and you were the one who wrestled the angel

and I knew when I left you
that courage was a choice
and memory, a spear,
and the X of destination is etched on my iris
and shifts with the seasons—

don’t think of the phoenix, think of the mountain.

But where will I go now with my tireless wonder?
And when will I again be brave like that?
—
For more information on Brynn Saito, please click here: http://brynnsaito.com/
—
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Poem of the Week, by Rainer Maria Rilke

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Fear of the Inexplicable
– Rainer Maria Rilke

But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished
the existence of the individual; the relationship between
one human being and another has also been cramped by it,
as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of
endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the
bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone
that is responsible for human relationships repeating
themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and
unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new,unforeseeable
experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes
nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation
to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively
from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of
the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident
that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a
place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and
down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous
insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in
Poe’s stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons
and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode.

We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about
us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us.
We are set down in life as in the element to which we best
correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of
years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we
hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be
distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to
mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors,
they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us;
are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we
arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us
that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now
still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust
and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those
ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into
princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses
who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps
everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless
that wants help from us.

—
For more information on Rainer Maria Rilke, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/rainer-maria-rilke
—
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Poem of the Week, by Reid Bush

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Campbellsburg
– Reid Bush

Driving State Road 60 northwest out of Salem,

10 miles out–
and 10 before you come to Spring Mill Park–

off to your right –for just a blacktop minute–
is Campbellsburg,

which was a town
when the man you were named for had his store there,

but a glance through your window reveals it’s now gray
abandonment–
ugly sag and fall.

And you wonder who lives there now
and how anyone
even to have a brick store all his own
ever could.

But nothing about it matters to you half as much as that your dad
came in from that hill farm to the north
to go to high school there.

And that’s what you always point out to whoever’s with you in the
car.

And through the years what all your passengers have had in
common is
now matter how you point it out
they can’t care enough.

—
For more information on Reid Bush, please click here: http://www.wildviolet.net/blue_moon/contributors.html
—
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Poem of the Week, by Stephen Dunn

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The Sacred
– Stephen Dunn

After the teacher asked if anyone had
a sacred place
and the students fidgeted and shrank

in their chairs, the most serious of them all
said it was his car,
being in it alone, his tape deck playing

things he’d chosen, and others knew the truth
had been spoken
and began speaking about their rooms,

their hiding places, but the car kept coming up,
the car in motion,
music filling it, and sometimes one other person

who understood the bright altar of the dashboard
and how far away
a car could take him from the need

to speak, or to answer, the key
in having a key
and putting it in, and going.

—
For more information on Stephen Dunn, please click here: http://www.stephendunnpoet.com/
—
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