apoemaday

[apoemaday]

Barking

by Jim Harrison

The moon comes up. The moon goes down. This is to inform you that I didn’t die young. Age swept past me but I caught up. Spring has begun here and each day brings new birds up from Mexico. Yesterday I got a call from the outside world but I said no in thunder. I was a dog on a short chain and now there’s no chain.

#poetry #jim harrison #barking

[apoemaday]

Daily

by Naomi Shihab Nye

These shriveled seeds we plant, corn kernel, dried bean, poke into loosened soil, cover over with measured fingertips

These T-shirts we fold into perfect white squares

These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl

This bed whose covers I straighten smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket and nothing hangs out

This envelope I address so the name balances like a cloud in the center of sky

This page I type and retype This table I dust till the scarred wood shines This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again like flags we share, a country so close no one needs to name it

The days are nouns: touch them The hands are churches that worship the world

#poetry #naomi shihab nye #daily

[apoemaday]

Mock Orange

by Louise Glück

It is not the moon, I tell you. It is these flowers lighting the yard. I hate them. I hate them as I hate sex, the man’s mouth sealing my mouth, the man’s paralyzing body — and the cry that always escapes, the low, humiliating premise of union — In my mind tonight I hear the question and pursuing answer fused in one sound that mounts and mounts and then is split into the old selves, the tired antagonisms. Do you see? We were made fools of. And the scent of mock orange drifts through the window. How can I rest? How can I be content when there is still that odor in the world?

#poetry #louise glück #mock orange

[apoemaday]

Poetic Subjects

by Rebecca Lindenberg

The capital city. Arrowroot. Water-bur. Colts. Hail. Bamboo grass. The round-leaved violet. Club moss. Water oats. Flat river-boats. The mandarin duck.                         — The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon

The sky. And the sky above that. The exchange of ice between mouths. Other people's poems. My friend says we never write about anything we can get to the bottom of. For him, this is a place arbored with locust trees. For me, it's a language for which I haven't quite found the language yet. The dewy smell of a new-cut pear. Bacon chowder flecked with thyme. Roasted duck skin ashine with plum jam. Scorpion peppers. Clothes on a line. A smell of rain battering the rosemary bush. The Book Cliffs. Most forms of banditry. Weathered barns. Dr. Peebles. The Woman's Tonic, it says on the side, in old white paint. The clink of someone putting away dishes in another room. The mechanical bull at the cowboy bar in West Salt Lake. The girls ride it wearing just bikinis and cowboy hats. I lean over to my friend and say, I would worry about catching something. And he leans back to say, That's really the thing you'd worry about? We knock the bottom of our bottles together. How they talk in old movies, like, Now listen here. Just because you can swing a bat doesn't mean you can play ball. Or, I'll be your hot cross if you'll be my bun. Well, anyway, you know what I mean. Somewhere between the sayable and the unsayable, poetry runs. Antidote to the river of forgetting. Like a rosary hung from a certain rearview mirror. Like the infinite rasp of gravel under the wheel of a departing car.  Gerard Manley Hopkins's last words were I'm so happy, I'm so happy. Oscar Wilde took one look at the crackling wallpaper in his Paris flat, then at his friends gathered around and said, One or the other of us has got to go. Wittgenstein said simply, Tell all my friends, I've had a wonderful life.

#poetry #rebecca lindenberg #poetic subjects #a personal favorite

[apoemaday]

My Name

by Mark Strand

One night when the lawn was a golden green and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered what I would become -- and where I would find myself -- and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard my name as if for the first time, heard it the way one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off as though it belonged not to me but to the silence from which it had come and to which it would go.

#poetry #mark strand #my name

[apoemaday]

Ever

by Meghan O'Rourke

Even now I can’t grasp “nothing” or “never.” They’re unholdable, unglobable, no map to nothing. Never? Never ever again to see you? An error, I aver. You’re never nothing, because nothing’s not a thing. I know death is absolute, forever, the guillotine — gutting — never to which we never say goodbye. But even as I think “forever” it goes “ever” and “ever” and “ever.” Ever after. I’m a thing that keeps on thinking. So I never see you is not a thing or think my mouth can ever. Aver: You’re not “nothing.” But neither are you something. Will I ever really get never? You’re gone. Nothing, never — ever.

#poetry #meghan o'rourke #ever

[apoemaday]

In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself

by Wislawa Szymborska tr. Stanislaw Baraczak and Clare Cavanagh

The buzzard never says it is to blame. The panther wouldn’t know what scruples mean. When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame. If snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn’t understand remorse. Lions and lice don’t waver in their course. Why should they, when they know they’re right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton, in every other way they’re light.

On this third planet of the sun among the signs of bestiality a clear conscience is Number One.

#poetry #wislawa szymborska #in praise of feeling bad about yourself #tr. stanislaw baraczak and clare cavanagh

[apoemaday]

The Sun Is Still a Part of Me

by Jennifer Willoughby

More than ever shy is why I am inside with the sun as my more popular roommate. The sun illuminates my uniform of silence. The sun knows how love is just the distance between unlovable objects. My phone is lying over there. My phone is close to solving the mystery of why I don't answer the phone. I am so busy. I am practicing my new hobby of watching me become someone else. There is so much violence in reconstruction. Each minute is grisly, but I have to participate. I am building what I cannot break.

#poetry #jennifer willoughby #the sun is still a part of me

[apoemaday]

We Who Are Your Closest Friends

by Phillip Lopate

we who are your closest friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting as a group to devise ways to keep you in perpetual uncertainty frustration discontent and torture by neither loving you as much as you want nor cutting you adrift your analyst is in on it plus your boyfriend and your ex-husband and we have pledged to disappoint you as long as you need us in announcing our association we realize we have placed in your hands a possible antidote against uncertainty indeed against ourselves but since our Thursday nights have brought us to a community of purpose rare in itself with you as the natural center we feel hopeful you will continue to make unreasonable demands for affection if not as a consequence of your disastrous personality then for the good of the collective

#poetry #phillip lopate #we who are your closest friends #a personal favorite

[apoemaday]

A Country Called Song

by Najwan Darwish tr. Kareem James Abu-Zeid

I lived in a country called Song: Countless singing women made me a citizen, and musicians from the four corners composed cities for me with mornings and nights, and I roamed through my country like a man roams through the world.

My country is a song, and as soon as it ends, I go back to being a refugee.

#poetry #najwan darwish #a country called song #tr. kareen james abu-zeid

[apoemaday]

West Virginia Nocturne

by Geffrey Davis

One grief, all evening —: I’ve stumbled upon another animal merely being itself and still cuffing me to grace.

This time a bumblebee, black and staggered above some wet sidewalk litter. When I stop at what I think is dying

to deny loneliness one more triumph, I see instead a thing drunk with discovery — the bee entangled

with blossom after pale, rain-dropped blossom gathered beneath a dogwood. And suddenly I receive the cold curves and severe angles

from this morning’s difficult dreams about faith: — certain as light, arriving; certain as light, dimming to another shadowed wait.

How many strokes of undivided wonder will have me cross the next border, my hands emptied of questions?

#poetry #geffrey davis #west virginia nocturne

[apoemaday]

Softest of Mornings

by Mary Oliver

Softest of mornings, hello. And what will you do today, I wonder, to my heart? And how much honey can the heart stand, I wonder, before it must break? This is trivial, or nothing: a snail climbing a trellis of leaves and the blue trumpets of flowers. No doubt clocks are ticking loudly all over the world. I don’t hear them. The snail’s pale horns extend and wave this way and that as her fingers-body shuffles forward, leaving behind the silvery path of her slime. Oh, softest of mornings, how shall I break this? How shall I move away from the snail, and the flowers? How shall I go on, with my introspective and ambitious life?

#poetry #mary oliver #softest of mornings

[apoemaday]

When Great Trees Fall

by Maya Angelou

When great trees fall,
 rocks on distant hills shudder,
 lions hunker down
 in tall grasses,
 and even elephants
 lumber after safety.



When great trees fall
 in forests,
 small things recoil into silence,
 their senses
 eroded beyond fear.



When great souls die,
 the air around us becomes
 light, rare, sterile.
 We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly,
 see with
 a hurtful clarity.
 Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
 examines,
 gnaws on kind words
 unsaid,
 promised walks
 never taken.


Great souls die and
 our reality, bound to
 them, takes leave of us.
 Our souls,
 dependent upon their
 nurture,
 now shrink, wizened.
 Our minds, formed
 and informed by their
 radiance, 
fall away.
 We are not so much maddened
 as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
 of dark, cold
 caves.



And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us: They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.

#poetry #maya angelou #when great trees fall

[apoemaday]

The Hunter

by Ogden Nash

The hunter crouches in his blind ‘Neath camouflage of every kind. This grown-up man, with luck and pluck, Is hoping to outwit a duck.

#poetry #ogden nash #the hunter

[apoemaday]

"That it will never come again"

by Emily Dickinson

That it will never come again Is what makes life so sweet. Believing what we don’t believe Does not exhilarate.

That if it be, it be at best An ablative estate -- This instigates an appetite Precisely opposite.

#poetry #emily dickinson #that it will never come again

[apoemaday]

This for That

by Ron Padgett

What will I have for breakfast? I wish I had some plums like the ones in Williams’s poem. He apologized to his wife for eating them but what he did not do was apologize to those who would read his poem and also not be able to eat them. That is why I like his poem when I am not hungry. Right now I do not like him or his poem. This is just to say that.

#poetry #ron padgett #this for that

[apoemaday]

April

by Mary Oliver

I wanted to speak at length about the happiness of my body and the delight of my mind for it was April, a night, a full moon and --

but something in myself or maybe from somewhere other said: not too many words, please, in the muddy shallows the

Frogs are singing.

#poetry #mary oliver #april