poem of the week

Poem of the Week, by Brynn Saito

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Match (excerpt)
– Brynn Saito

You live in a house of sound and you live
with a ghost. The one who stole your heart
also lives in your heart so you cut it out
with a carving knife and send it flying.
You say sometimes you wake and wait
for the god of loneliness to leave you alone.
I say our city is small and teeming
with ghosts and there are no seasons
for hiding. So we let go of the ones
who called us by our names. We make
ourselves new names by tracing letters
in a sand tray with sharp stones.
This is called Patience or Practicing
Solitude or The Wind Will Ruin Everything
but what does it matter let’s go for beauty
every time. You say the price we pay for love
is loss. I say the price we pay for love
is love.


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For more information on Brynn Saito, please click here: http://brynnsaito.com/bio/
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Poem of the Week, by Yehuda Amichai

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Forgetting Someone
– Yehuda Amichai (tr. Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell)

Forgetting someone is like forgetting to turn off the light
in the backyard so it stays lit all the next day

But then it is the light that makes you remember.


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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 Paul Hostovsky

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The Violence of Violins
– Paul Hostovsky

It was in them, they would say.
It was what they were, what they
did. It was part of them, carved
into them like an F hole, like
a clef tattooed onto a biceps.
And there was nothing you
could say or do to change that.
It was their way. It was the way
of the world, and also of the sun
exploding a million miles away,
warming your soft cheek. Face
the music, they would say. Stop
listening with your eyes closed.
See the string tightened almost
to breaking, the bow torturing it
into song. Feel the skin stretched
over the drum so tightly it makes
your heart pound. And where
did you think it all came from,
the easy melody, the high tinkling
finery? We are hurt into beauty.
And you, up in the balcony, rising
to your feet, applauding fiercely, look
down at what your own hands are doing.


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For more information on Paul Hostovsky, please click here: http://www.paulhostovsky.com/
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Poem of the Week, by Gregory Djanikian

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First Winter in America
– Gregory Djanikian

I walked out into the January blizzard,
my breath froze into small clouds,
and ice was hanging from the trees.

The dunes were dreamy animals;
I heard shovels striking music.

White eyelashes, white mittens,
I thought I could become
whatever I touched.

A year before, in another language,
I held the desert in my hand,
I tasted the iridescent sea.

Now I stayed quiet, afraid
I would never see it again, the sky
shattered into a million pieces
and falling around me.

I watched my mother inside
walking back and forth in her heavy coat,
and my sister rubbing her hands
to make some kind of spark.

I could imagine furnaces rumbling
all over America, heat rising
through the vents, parching the air.

And I stayed where I was,
someplace I had no name for,
not for the snow or my standing still
and watching it fall

beautiful wreckage
deepening
with hardly a sound.


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For more information about Gregory Djanikian, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/gregory-djanikian
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Poem of the Week, by Julia Koets

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Paper Birds
– Julia Koets

Moths must tire of sleeping near the ceiling.
All that waiting for their wings to match
color that changes where wall folds to eave.

This afternoon I found her at the table, asleep
amongst paper, delicate as dreams, elaborate
birds made of folding, made for our ceiling.

I try unfolding one, tail and beak of pleats,
green and yellow flowers on a patch
of wing. No cuts or glue to hold to evening,

to have them flying from fishing line. Geese,
swans, a hummingbird. Window unlatched,
and wind wakes their sleeping from the ceiling.

Song of paper rustling; song of crease
and bend; song of watching
color that changes where wall folds to eave.

We fall asleep like this, a counting sheep,
a listening for paper birds, a grasping
for sounds that sleep near the ceiling,
in colors that change where wall folds to eave.


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For more information on Julia Koets, please click here: http://www.versedaily.org/2012/aboutjuliakoets.shtml
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Poem of the Week, by Rick Barot

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Brown Refrigerator
– Rick Barot

You don’t have to understand it
but you will carry it anyway.
A couple whose baby died,
when they had to move
to another state, took the baby
from the years-long ground
and brought her with them.
They did this again a second
time, their memory always
tied to its embodiment,
new burials for an old grief.
In a short film I once saw,
ants lifted away the silver
and gold confetti from a party,
making a trail of suns
and moons on the floor.
The filmmaker must have put
something sweet on the circles,
like a painter dabbing
little points of white paint
to give highlights to an eyeball.
Some of the recipes that
a friend keeps making
go so far back in her family
the recipes are like snapshots
of villages and forests,
mountains and falling snow.
Apples and trout rise up
into the night’s constellations,
a dark without yellow stars.
What I remember of childhood
sometimes comes down
to the brown refrigerator
in our house. Its chrome
handle was always angry
with static, so that now when
I reach for the doorknob
or the gas pump, the sharp
charge on my fingers is
childhood calling its child back.


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For more information about Rick Barot, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/rick-barot
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Poem of the week, by Helen Wickes

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Single Thread
– Helen Wickes

When I was a weaver, I chose
a red silk thread to get me to the heart
of my creation and then back out,
across the loom, to whatever life was waiting.

And when you found the little red pathway,
buried between warp and woof, you were sure
you’d found a flaw. Please remember what happens

when there’s no exit. Years of breathing
wool dust, reeking of lanolin, staring into coils
of green yarn and blue—you go dumb.

You’ve heard the story a thousand times—
that trapped fox, whining and snuffling
then biting her paw
through the bone, and running off into the night.

The mind wants this: a door in the wall,
an open field, a narrow path
through the woods, an open field


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For more information on Helen Wickes, please click here: http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives/poets/helen_wickes.shtml
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Poem of the Week, by Emily Rechnitz

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Wedding
– Emily Rechnitz

I stumbled in high heels
across the wood chips
of the Christmas-tree farm
to take my place with the other guests
under coarse pine boughs.

In a coned damsel cap
the bride glimmered
through the woods, materialized
at the altar microphone.

In the barbecue line
his mother whispered on my neck,
“I thought you would be the one!”

I watched the bride and groom
shake hands, stared at his profile
til it buzzed, remembering
2 a.m. behind the high school
when we rocked on a blanket
rubbing jeans into jeans
until the moon jumped and I fell
off the hill slowly, a diamond in glycerine.

I remember walking down a road to meet him,
how the air tingled, in love
with how I looked in my underwear,
dancing in front of his mirror.


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I could not find any recent information on Emily Rechnitz and her poetry – anyone out there in the know, please update me.
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Poem of the Week, by Laura Kasischke

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Bike Ride with Older Boys

     – Laura Kasischke

The one I didn’t go on.

I was thirteen,
and they were older.
I’d met them at the public pool. I must

have given them my number. I’m sure

I’d given them my number,
knowing the girl I was. . .

It was summer. My afternoons
were made of time and vinyl.
My mother worked,
but I had a bike. They wanted

to go for a ride.
Just me and them. I said
okay fine, I’d
meet them at the Stop-n-Go
at four o’clock.
And then I didn’t show.

I have been given a little gift—
something sweet
and inexpensive, something
I never worked or asked or said
thank you for, most
days not aware
of what I have been given, or what I missed—

because it’s that, too, isn’t it?
I never saw those boys again.
I’m not as dumb
as they think I am

but neither am I wise. Perhaps

it is the best
afternoon of my life. Two
cute and older boys
pedaling beside me—respectful, awed. When we

turn down my street, the other girls see me …

Everything as I imagined it would be.

Or, I am in a vacant field. When I
stand up again, there are bits of glass and gravel
ground into my knees.
I will never love myself again.
Who knew then
that someday I would be

thirty-seven, wiping
crumbs off the kitchen table with a sponge, remembering
them, thinking
of this—

those boys still waiting
outside the Stop-n-Go, smoking
cigarettes, growing older.


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For more information on Laura Kasischke, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/laura-kasischke
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Poem of the Week, by Patrick Cavanaugh

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The Dubliners
– Patrick Kavanagh

On Raglan Road of an autumn day
I saw her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare
That I might one day rue
I saw the danger and I passed
Along the enchanted way
And said let grief be a fallen leaf
At the dawning of the day

On Grafton Street in November
We tripped lightly along the ledge
Of a deep ravine where can be seen
The worth of passion’s pledge
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts
And I not making hay
Oh I loved too much and by such by such
Is happiness thrown away

I gave her gifts of the mind
I gave her the secret signs
Known to the artists who have known
The true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint I did not stint
I gave her poems to say
With her own name there
And her own dark hair
Like clouds over fields of May

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet
I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had loved not as I should
A creature made of clay
When the angel woos the clay
He’ll lose his wings at the dawn of day


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For more information on Patrick Kavanagh, please click here: http://www.tcd.ie/English/patrickkavanagh/life.html
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