Category: Poetry

Ephemeral Stream by Elizabeth Willis

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This is the way water
thinks about the desert.
The way the thought of water
gives you something
to stumble on. A ghost river.
A sentence trailing off
toward lower ground.
A finger pointing
at the rest of the show.

I wanted to read it.
I wanted to write a poem
and call it “Ephemeral Stream”
because you made of this
imaginary creek
a hole so deep
it looked like a green eye
taking in the storm,
a poem interrupted
by forgiveness.

It’s not over yet.
A dream can spend
all night fighting off
the morning. Let me
start again. A stream
may be a branch or a beck,
a crick or kill or lick,
a syke, a runnel. It pours
through a corridor. The door
is open. The keys
are on the dashboard.

A Journey Nikki Giovanni

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It’s a journey…that I propose…I am not the guide…nor
technical assistant…I will be your fellow passenger…

Though the rail has been ridden…winter clouds cover…
autumn’s exuberant quilt…we must provide our own guide-
posts…

I have heard…from previous visitors…the road washes out
sometimes…and passengers are compelled…to continue
groping…or turn back…I am not afraid…

I am not afraid…of rough spots…or lonely times…I don’t
fear…the success of this endeavor…I am Ra…in a space…
not to be discovered…but invented…

I promise you nothing…I accept your promise…of the same
we are simply riding …a wave…that may carry…or crash…

It’s a journey…and I want…to go…

So early in the morning by Charles Simic

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It pains me to see an old woman fret over
A few small coins outside a grocery store —
How swiftly I forget her as my own grief
Finds me again — a friend at death’s door
And the memory of the night we spent together.

I had so much love in my heart afterward,
I could have run into the street naked
Confident anyone I met would understand
My madness and my need to tell them
About life being both cruel and beautiful,

But I did not — despite the overwhelming evidence:
A crow bent over a dead squirrel in the road,
The lilac bushes flowering in some yard,
And the sight of a dog free from his chain
Searching through a neighbor’s trash can.

The Right Way by Nikki Giovanni

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My grandmother’s grits
Are so much better than mine

Mine tend to be lumpy
And a bit disorientated
Though that is probably
My fault

I always want
To put 1 cup grits
Into 4 cups cold
Water with 1 teaspoon
Salt
And start them all together

Grandmother did it
The Right Way

She started with cold water
That she brought
To a boil

Shifted the grits slowly
Into the bubbles
Then added her salt

She also hummed
While she stirred
With her wooden spoon

I wonder if I
Should learn
To sing

View with a grain of sand by Wislawa Szymborska Translated by Magnus Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

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We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing, incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn’t view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake’s floor exits floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular or plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they’re three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.
But that’s just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.

Atlantis A Lost Sonnet by Eavan Boland

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How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city — arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals — had all
one fine day gone under?

I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city —

white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is

this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of

where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.

Dante’s Inferno Canto I Translated by Seamus Heaney

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In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself astray in a dark wood
where the straight road had been lost sight of.

How hard it is to say what it was like
in the thick of thickets, in a wood so dense
and gnarled the very thought of it renews my panic.

It is bitter almost as death itself is bitter.
But to rehearse the good it also brought me
I will speak about the other things I saw there

How I got into it I cannot clearly say
for I was moving like a sleepwalker
the moment I stepped out of the right way,

But when I came to the bottom of a hill
standing off at the far end of that valley
where a great terror had disheartened me

I looked up, and saw how its shoulders glowed
already in the rays of the planet
which leads and keeps men straight on every road.

Then I sensed a quiet influence settling
into those depths in me that had been rocked
and pitifully troubled all night long

And as a survivor gasping on the sand
turns his head back to study in a daze
the dangerous combers, so my mind

Turned back, although it was reeling forward,
back to inspect a pass that had proved fatal
heretofore to everyone who entered.

A Distant Relation by John Cooper Clarke

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A family affair.
We get the picture,
We’re in it somewhere.
Permanent fixtures.
People who care.
Stranger beware,
This is a family affair

All of our yesterday’s.
Familiar rings,
I have to get away,
Its breaking my heart strings.
We have a drink,
On special occasions,
It makes me think,
About distant relations,

A family affair.
Always a mixture.
Of people in chairs,
Permanent fixtures,
With pressure to bear.
People who care.
This is a family affair.

Holiday snapshots.
Of you and myself.
Acting the crackpot,
Like everyone else.

The Bermuda shorts,
and the summer creations,
Bringing thoughts,
of those distant relations.

A family affair.

We brake ornaments, and get them repaired,
We bring up past events that hang in the air.

This is a family affair.

All our yesterdays.
Familiar rings.
I have to get away, from some surroundings.
Weddings and funerals, special occasions,
And all the usual distant relations.

A family affair.

Look at this picture.
We’re in there, look there.
Permanent fixtures.
People who care,
Whisper who dares,
This is a family affair.

The Journey By Alan King

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Each day is a little life: every waking and rising
a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth,
every going to rest and sleep a little death.
       -Arthur Schopenhauer
The diner’s nearly empty
when you both arrive – except for
the six or so other patrons and
a waitress who calls everyone “Hun”.

The fluorescent lights lick the Formica bar
and chrome stools, the black and purple beaten
booths and a straw-headed boy staring at you
over cold chicken strips, the ketchup
a sticky scab on his plate.

He reminds you of the little girls
the night before, running through a restaurant
in Berlin, Maryland, where you stayed at a hotel
known to be an antique –

its hardwood bathroom floors, the claw-
footed tub with its wraparound shower curtain,
the portraits of hoop-skirted women
twirling parasols, the prairie-style
wooden armoire closet.

The two girls, laughing as they ran through
the Drummers Cafe, stopped at the sight
of you and your wife, the only black people
in the restaurant that night.

When you remember the patrons’ darting
eyes at your wife’s dreadlocks, the way
the hostess smiled past you to the white family
she sat, while you waited,

when all around you the consensus
seemed to echo the nursery rhyme:
How did it get so late so soon?

It’s night before it’s afternoon,

you remember the loneliness
of feeling like the only one fighting for sanity
when the world makes you someone else.

You watch your wife rub her full moon
and talk to your daughter 27 weeks alive
inside her, knowing that each day is a little life,
each step towards progress a little birth,

even if the journey is full of off ramps,
like the one that brought you both
to a bright diner on your way home,

to the slurping straw that says
the blond boy’s savoring what’s left
of his chocolate shake before he sacks out
on the plush seat – his mom flipping through
a magazine, picking at her fries.

You watch him wrapped in his blue blanket –
as if sleep weren’t a little death; as if the world
weren’t a dark dream, haunted by a boogeyman’s
appetite for innocent things.”