poetry

Poem of the Week, by Virginia R. Terris

Posted on by alisonmcghee

The Uninvited
– Virginia R. Terris

As the heads of state feast with one another, the tables in the
gilded hall loaded with caviar, venison, exotic fruits and veg-
etables and gallons of champagne, there’s a tapping on the
windows. A child’s face, then another, presses against the
panes, the eyes in them black as the night the children stand
in, their mouths open as if they were howling with the wind.

“Who are they?” ask the guests uneasily. “Where did they
come from?”

“Keep them out!” yells the host. “Get Security! Where’s
Security?”

But the children are so thin, they slip under the doors,
around the edges of the windows. Noiselessly. In great
numbers. They move forward to the tables. Their fingers
grip the edges of the tables. Their eyes gaze upwards into the
enormous openings and closings of official mouths.

For more information on Virginia R. Terris (who died last year), please click here: http://www.virginiarterris.zoomshare.com/0.html
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Poem of the Week, by Wendell Berry

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There is No Going Back
– Wendell Berry

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

For more information on Wendell Berry, please click here: http://www.wendellberrybooks.com/

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Poem of the Week, by Moya Cannon

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Viola D’Amore
– Moya Cannon

Sometimes, love does die,
but sometimes, a stream on porous rock,
it slips down into the inner dark of a hill,
joins with other hidden streams
to travel blind as the white fish that live in it.
It forsakes one underground streambed
for the cave that runs under it.
Unseen, it informs the hill
and, like the hidden streams of the viola d’amore,
makes the hill reverberate,
so that people who wander there
wonder why the hill sings,
wonder why they find wells.


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For more information on Moya Cannon, please click here: http://www.californiapoetics.org/interviews/3818/an-interview-with-moya-cannon
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Poem of the Week, by Dorianne Laux

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Dark Charms
– Dorianne Laux

Eventually the future shows up everywhere:
those burly summers and unslept nights in deep
lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.
Here’s the corner store grown to a condo,
the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,
the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail
no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.
The clear water we drank as thirsty children
still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then
we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often.
The old tunes play and continue to move us
in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,
lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.
We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the keys to lost names.

 

For more information on Dorianne Laux, please click here: http://doriannelaux.com/

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Poem of the Week, by Maureen Micus Crisick

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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.


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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)

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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.

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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 Gary Johnson

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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.


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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.


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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.

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For more information on Edward Hirsch, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/edward-hirsch
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