poetry

Poem of the Week, by Miller Williams

Posted on by alisonmcghee

A Poem for Emily
– Miller Williams

Small fact and fingers and farthest one from me,
a hand’s width and two generations away,
in this still present I am fifty-three.
You are not yet a full day.

When I am sixty-three, when you are ten,
and you are neither closer nor as far,
your arms will fill with what you know by then,
the arithmetic and love we do and are.

When I by blood and luck am eighty-six
and you are someplace else and thirty-three
believing in sex and God and politics
with children who look not at all like me,

sometime I know you will have read them this
so they will know I love them and say so
and love their mother. Child, whatever is
is always or never was. Long ago

a day I watched awhile beside your bed,
I wrote this down, a thing that might be kept
awhile, to tell you what I would have said
when you were who knows what and I was dead
which is I stood and loved you while you slept.

—
For more information on Miller Williams, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/miller-williams
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Poem of the Week, by Rosanna Warren

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From New Hampshire
– Rosanna Warren

It’s not your mountain
but I almost expect
to meet you here

I think you have taken a long late evening walk
Your heavy shoes glisten with dew
I hear your footsteps pause on the dirt road

and I know you are picking out
the dark mass of the sleeping
mountain from the dark

mass of night and testing the heaviness of each
Your hands are small but they know weights and measures
You are a connoisseur of boundaries

You loved the bears
because they pass between
leaving their stories

in fat pudding turds on the grass
Here it’s raspberries they’re after not our
sour Vermont apples     No matter     You will find them

When they hoot in courtship
you always hoot back
more owl than bear

They don’t mind     They always answer you
And tonight I imagine you’re out waiting up for them
by the berries, which is why you don’t cross

the dew-sopped lawn
don’t press open the
warped screen door

of the kitchen where I sit late     by a single glowing bulb

—
For more information on Rosanna Warren, please click here:

Poem of the Week, by Leah Goldberg (translated by Annie Kantar)

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Then I Walked Through the World

Then I walked through the world
as though someone adored me.
Laughter unfurled through heaps of stones,
and a wind through fathomless skies.

Then I walked through the world
as though someone dreamed me fair.
Across the night abysses bloomed
and the sea’s mirrors painted my face,
as though someone were writing poems about me.

I walked, until I reached an utter stillness within:
then, it seemed, something might begin.
—
For more information on Annie Kantar, please click here:
—
For more information on Leah Goldberg, please click here:

Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

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Famous

– Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and is not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

—
For more information on Naomi Nye, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Marie Howe

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The Boy
– Marie Howe

My older brother is walking down the sidewalk into the suburban summer:
night
white T-shirt, blue jeans — to the field at the end of the street.

Hangers Hideout the boys called it, an undeveloped plot, a pit overgrown
with weeds, some old furniture thrown down there,

and some metal hangers clinking in the trees like wind chimes.
He’s running away from home because our father wants to cut his hair.

And in two more days our father will convince me to go to him — you know
where he is — and talk to him: No reprisals.  He promised.  A small parade
of kids

in feet pajamas will accompany me, their voices like the first peepers in
spring.
And my brother will walk ahead of us home, and my father

will shave his head bald, and my brother will not speak to anyone the next
month, not a word, not *pass the milk*, nothing.

What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk
down a sidewalk without looking back.

I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was,
calling and calling his name.
—
For more information about Marie Howe, please click here.

Poem of the Week

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Signing My Name
– Alison Townsend

An artist always signs her name,
my mother said when I brought her my picture,
a puddled blur of scarlet tempera
I thought resembled a horse.

She dipped the brush for me
and watched while I stroked my name,
each letter drying, ruddy,
permanent as blood.

Later, she found an old gilt frame
for me at an auction.
We repainted it pink,
encasing the wobble-headed horse
I’d conjured as carefully
as if it were by da Vinci,
whose notebooks on art
she was reading that summer.

Even when I was six, my mother
believed in my powers, her own unsigned
pencil sketches of oaks and sugar maples
flying off the pad and disappearing,
while her French pastels hardened,
brittle as bone in their box.

Which is why, when I sign my name,
I think of my mother, all she couldn’t
say, burning, in primary colors –
the great, red horse I painted
still watching over us
from the smoke-scrimmed cave of the mind,
the way it did those first years
from the sunlit wall in her kitchen.

Poem of the Week, by Dean Young

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Restoration Ode
– Dean Young

What tends toward orbit and return,
comets and melodies, robins and trash trucks
restore us. What would be an arrow, a dove
to pierce our hearts restore us. Restore us

minutes clustered like nursing baby bats
and minutes that are shards of glass. Mountains
that are vapor, mice living in cathedrals,
and the heft and lightness of snow restore us.

One hope inside dread, “Oh what the hell”
inside “I can’t” like a pearl inside a cake
of soap, love in lust in loss, and the tub
filled with dirt in the backyard restore us.

Sunflowers, let me wait, let me please
see the bridge again from my smacked-up
desk on Euclid, jog by the Black Angel
without begging, dream without thrashing.

Let us be quick and accurate with the knife
and everything that dashes restore us,
salmon, shadows buzzing in the wind,
wren trapped in the atrium, and all

that stills at last, my friend’s cat,
a pile of leaves after much practice,
and ash beneath the grate, last ember
winked shut restore us. And the one who comes

out from the back wiping his hands on a rag,
saying, “Who knows, there might be a chance.”
And one more undestroyed, knocked-down nest
stitched with cellophane and dental floss,

one more gift to gently shake
and one more guess and one more chance.

—
For more information on Dean Young, please click here.