A Poem Thread

Growing up

The school I went to taught me
there was no reason to get excited.
They were going to give me something whether or not I wanted it,
and call it an education.
I would learn initially that it was ok to have fun on the playground,
then later, as I grew, that I should frown at youthful exuberance
and shame myself into something more mature,
more focused on the important things,
like passing my entrance exams and keeping my socks pulled up.
 
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A Laptop Moment

Her curses filled the air, though she didn't usually swear,
She was having a laptop moment.

The thing about advice, is there's no way to be nice,
When she's having a laptop moment.

Her fingers pounded keys, there was shaking in her knees,
She was having a laptop moment.

In between the keyboard bashing and "Oh shit I think it's crashing",
She was having a laptop moment.
 
My Empire
by Kaveh Akbar, 2021

My empire made me
happy because it was an empire
and mine.

I was too stupid to rage at anything.

Babies cried at birth, it was said,
because the devil pricked them as introduction
to knowledge.

I sat fingering my gilded frame, counting
grievances like toes:

here my mother, here my ring,
here my sex, and here my king.

All still there. Wrath is the desire
to repay what you've suffered.

Kneeling on coins
before the minor deity in the mirror.
Clueless as a pearl.

That the prophets arrived not to ease our suffering
but to experience it seems—can I say this?—
a waste?

My empire made me happy
so I loved, easily, its citizens—such loving
a kind of birth, an introduction to pain.

Whatever I learn makes me angry to have learned it.

The new missiles can detect a fly's heartbeat
atop a pile of rubble from 6,000 miles away.
That flies have hearts, 104 cells big, that beat.

And because of this knowing:
a pile of rubble.

The prophets came to participate in suffering
as if to an amusement park, which makes
our suffering the main attraction.

In our brochure:
a father's grief over his dead father,
the thorn broken off in a hand.

My empire made me happy
because it was an empire, cruel,

and the suffering wasn't my own.

 
I went for a walk in the woods because
I wanted to live deliberately,
to front only the essential
facts of life, and see if
I could not learn what it
had to teach, and not
when I came to die, discover
that I had not lived.

- Henry David Thoreau


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Kal
Fatimah Asghar, 2018

Allah, you gave us a language
where yesterday & tomorrow
are the same word. Kal.

A spell cast with the entire
mouth. Back of the throat
to teeth. Tomorrow means I might

have her forever. Yesterday means
I say goodbye, again.
Kal means they are the same.

I know you can bend time.
I am merely asking for what
is mine. Give me my mother for no

other reason than I deserve her.
If yesterday & tomorrow are the same
pluck the flower of my mother's body

from the soil. Kal means I'm in the crib,
eyelashes wet as she looks over me.
Kal means I'm on the bed,

crawling away from her, my father
back from work. Kal means she's
dancing at my wedding not-yet come.

Kal means she's oiling my hair
before the first day of school. Kal
means I wake to her strange voice

in the kitchen. Kal means
she's holding my unborn baby
in her arms, helping me pick a name.

[via Poets.org↱]​
 
Weary
by Rob Wynia, 1994

Watch me turn the stones,
that evil comes out.
Why would I set it free?​
It always comes back to me.​
That evil is the only thing
that always comes back to me.​

Sun, sky, stone,
black river water
washes over me;
it always touches me.​
It always touches me.​
River water is the only thing
that ever touches me.​

And if you weary of the pain
the pain will weary of you, too.​
And if you weary of the days,
the days will weary of you, too.​
And if you weary of me,
I will weary of you, too.​

I've seen the face of God,
and He hates me with disinterest,
just like all the rest,
that hateful face of God.​
Just like all the rest.​
That evil face of God
hates me like the rest.​

[via YouTube↱]​
 
Onomatopoeic owns:

A conspiracy of coincidence
A cacophony of caterwauls
A roomful of retards

A prattle of picayunes
A shitload of shine
A Dodge full of dipshits
 
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"We are all a sun-lit moment
come from a long darkness;
what moves us always
comes from what is hidden,
what seems to be said
so suddenly,
has lived in the body
for a long, long time."
…
Excerpt from
'A SEEMING STILLNESS'
In ‘David Whyte : Essentials’
Many Rivers Press. January 2020
 
MY FRIEND


My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear—a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence.

The "I" in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable.

I would not have thee believe in what I say nor trust in what I do—for my words are naught but thy own thoughts in sound and my deeds thy own hopes in action.

When thou sayest, "The wind bloweth eastward," I say, "Aye, it doth blow eastward"; for I would not have thee know that my mind doth not dwell upon the wind but upon the sea.

Thou canst not understand my seafaring thoughts, nor would I have thee understand. I would be at sea alone.

When it is day with thee, my friend, it is night with me; yet even then I speak of the noontide that dances upon the hills and of the purple shadow that steals its way across the valley; for thou canst not hear the songs of my darkness nor see my wings beating against the stars—and I fain would not have thee hear or see. I would be with night alone.

When thou ascendest to thy Heaven I descend to my Hell—even then thou callest to me across the unbridgeable gulf, "My companion, my comrade," and I call back to thee, "My comrade, my companion"—for I would not have thee see my Hell. The flame would burn thy eye sight and the smoke would crowd thy nostrils. And I love my Hell too well to have thee visit it. I would be in Hell alone.

Thou lovest Truth and Beauty and Righteousness; and I for thy sake say it is well and seemly to love these things. But in my heart I laugh at thy love. Yet I would not have thee see my laughter. I would laugh alone.

My friend, thou art good and cautious and wise; nay, thou art perfect—and I, too, speak with thee wisely and cautiously. And yet I am mad. But I mask my madness. I would be mad alone.

My friend, thou art not my friend, but how shall I make thee understand? My path is not thy path, yet together we walk, hand in hand.

--The Madman Kahlil Gibran
 
Verr
By Cesare Pavese
Issue no. 155 (Summer 2000)

"Death will come and have your eyes.
This one, the one who abides
morning to night, the deaf one,
the one who can't sleep, who sticks
like a stupid habit, an old regret.

Your eyes
will be an idle word,
a stifled cry, a silence—
just as you see them
every morning in the mirror
when you stand there alone
peering in.

And hope, dear hope,
we'll know on that day too
that you are life
and you are nothing.

For each of us
death has a certain look.

Death will come and have your eyes.

It will be like quitting
a silly habit,
like seeing in the mirror
a dead face
staring back,
like listening to shut lips.
Speechless,
we'll step into the pit."

—Translated by Eamon Grennan
 
by Jaz Sufi​
When My Classmates Ask Me If My Father Took Down the Towers

I realize the mirror was in on the joke, too. How had I not known before now?
Now we can all see my bones are the only white about me,
and my nose curves like the yaw of a plane, and my hair curling in the dust.

They ask if my father took down the towers, and,
as it was a lack of security leading to a loss of gravity, yes, in a way he did,
in that my mother starts smoking again and suddenly I become

fascinated with fire. I light candles with other candles, recycling light
until my room looks like I’m trying to summon something. Maybe
I’m trying to summon something ―​

into divinity, or out from the grave, or the attention of any god
who will teach me how to pray the right way. My father doesn’t
pray anymore, another quality he shares with the dead.

The sun glares down on the blacktop like fingers
digging into a bruise. Everyone crowds around me,
waiting for an answer, and sweat drips down my cheek.

Wax running from a flame. Ant under a telescope, I melt, I sizzle.
I feel so exposed for what I did not know I was
that surely someone is staring down at me from above,

a stranger with the face of someone else’s father.
Is He waiting for an answer, too? What language must I clasp between my hands
for Him to listen? O Father, who art in heaven, whose children surround me

on all sides like a flood, teach me how to float. Maybe it isn’t too late for any of us;
maybe no one ever needed to die to be forgiven. If I give them
the right answer. If I learn the right words.

Maybe God will tape the plane together and throw it back
into the sky, and we can be white again.

 
Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops - at all.

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the Little Bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land
And on the Strangest Sea
Yet - never - in Extremity
It asked a crumb - of me.

-- Emily Dickinson
 
I wish that I could fly
Up in the sky
So very high
Just like a dragonfly

I'd fly above the trees
Over the seas
. . .
Go anywhere I please

I want to get away
I want to fly away, yeah, yeah, yeah . . .

Lenny Kravitz
 
“Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.”

― Derek Walcott, Collected Poems, 1948-1984
 
What Comes
by Carolyn Forché (2020)

J’ai rapporté du désespoir un panier si petit mon amour, qu’on a pu le tresser en osier.

I brought from despair a basket so small, my love, that it might have been woven of willow.
—Rene Char​

to speak is not yet to have spoken.

the not-yet of a white realm of nothing left

neither for itself nor another

a no-longer already there, along with the arrival of what has been

light and the reverse of light

terror as walking blind along the breaking sea, body in whom I lived

the not-yet of death darkening what it briefly illuminates

an unknown place as between languages

back and forth, breath to breath as a calm

in the surround rises, fireflies in lindens, an ache of pine

you have yourself within you

yourself, you have her, and there is nothing

that cannot be seen

open then to the coming of what comes

[via Poets.org↱)​
 
The Healing Time

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin and bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them,
the old wounds,
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy.

~ Pesha Gertler
 
Sleeping in the Forest
By: Mary Oliver

I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
 
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