POETRY SWAP MEET: Poetry we don't usually know about, or?
Jade-Pandora
jade tiger
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jade tiger
Tyrant of Words
154
Joined 9th Nov 2015 Forum Posts: 5134
Judi K. Beach
(Poet & workshop teacher: b. November 26, 1947, Cincinnati, Ohio - d. April 21, 2008, Sedgwick, Maine)
TOMATO AND KNIFE
after the Expressionism Still-Life Painting by Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993)
How easily the tomato obeys the knife’s command,
falling into ripe halves, unequal to the whole,
and the knife, once it’s tasted red flesh, is willing
to slice again this tomato holding onto its seeds.
The knife bleeds in the glass of water
rinsing away its sharp act.
What blade cleaved my parents’ marriage?
The sum of the parts of their union fell
into negative numbers, or so my mother
grew to think. The knife, sharply pointed.
Her anger clung to the blade.
The knife in that glass never came clean.
My mother is half of me. My mother is half
of my sister. Yet when our mother dies,
the halves we are will never equal her.
No matter how close we might get, she
will stand between us like a knife blade cleaving
our closeness as we fall into unequal halves.
My sister’s half, the ability to talk back,
to be direct, to discount. Mine, the ability
to be hurt effectively and efficiently. At least
this is what my sister tells me as she slices
the tomatoes for the salad of Thanksgiving.
She smiles. The tomato releases its seeds.
Juice runs down the blade.
______________________________
Judi K. Beach: ”In the ’60s I fell in love with John Donne’s passion and Hopkins’ delight in language. In the ’70s I read Gibran for his spiritual wisdom and Piercy for her relevance to my life. In the ’80s I was dumbfounded by the honesty of Sharon Olds and the way Billy Collins found revelation in the ordinary. In the ’90s I opened myself to what the Universe would have me write. Somehow, I want all that to collide in a poem. I’ll keep writing until it does.”
Jade-Pandora
jade tiger
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jade tiger
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Mark C. Bruce
THE POMPEIIAN COUPLE
Two men are carrying a mattress
in the emergency lane of the 5 freeway.
The pale yellow light of a car’s
flashing blinkers catching them
in a bas-relief, faces upturned
arms around the bulky mattress
like Greek warriors embedded
on a vase, black and red-orange,
their arms stiffly raised,
Agamemnon and Odysseus
bringing a consolation prize
to Achilles, hoping its sagging pleasures
will sate his brooding need
to be attended to as if he were a god.
The woman in my passenger seat
has fallen asleep, her small lips
not curved in smile, her chin
low on her chest. It was our first date
and all of the walking through the gallery
of artifacts from Pompeii has worn her out.
I bought her a portrait
of a Pompeiian couple which had touched her,
a woman and her husband, holding pen and book
and gazing directly at the viewer
from two thousand years.
It had been found, a fresco
on the wall of a home buried
in volcanic ash. They seemed so content,
so sedate, that thin sense of longing
in their eyes not for a life they didn’t have
but for the moment they could stop posing
and turn again to each other.
The woman beside me sleeps
and dreams, no doubt, of a villa
in a Neapolitan port suburb,
children’s voices echoing against
the walls painted with gardens
and stiffly posed birds.
Somewhere in her dream is a husband
who doesn’t look like me.
I pass the men carrying the mattress
and take the woman back to her home,
knowing there are some burdens
whose ends I will never understand.
__________________________________
Mark C. Bruce: I work as an attorney with the public defender in Orange County. In the spare corners of my day—usually at lunch, waiting for a case to be called, in the quiet moments and after work when the office is deserted—he works on poems.”
THE POMPEIIAN COUPLE
Two men are carrying a mattress
in the emergency lane of the 5 freeway.
The pale yellow light of a car’s
flashing blinkers catching them
in a bas-relief, faces upturned
arms around the bulky mattress
like Greek warriors embedded
on a vase, black and red-orange,
their arms stiffly raised,
Agamemnon and Odysseus
bringing a consolation prize
to Achilles, hoping its sagging pleasures
will sate his brooding need
to be attended to as if he were a god.
The woman in my passenger seat
has fallen asleep, her small lips
not curved in smile, her chin
low on her chest. It was our first date
and all of the walking through the gallery
of artifacts from Pompeii has worn her out.
I bought her a portrait
of a Pompeiian couple which had touched her,
a woman and her husband, holding pen and book
and gazing directly at the viewer
from two thousand years.
It had been found, a fresco
on the wall of a home buried
in volcanic ash. They seemed so content,
so sedate, that thin sense of longing
in their eyes not for a life they didn’t have
but for the moment they could stop posing
and turn again to each other.
The woman beside me sleeps
and dreams, no doubt, of a villa
in a Neapolitan port suburb,
children’s voices echoing against
the walls painted with gardens
and stiffly posed birds.
Somewhere in her dream is a husband
who doesn’t look like me.
I pass the men carrying the mattress
and take the woman back to her home,
knowing there are some burdens
whose ends I will never understand.
__________________________________
Mark C. Bruce: I work as an attorney with the public defender in Orange County. In the spare corners of my day—usually at lunch, waiting for a case to be called, in the quiet moments and after work when the office is deserted—he works on poems.”
butters
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Fire of Insight
3
Joined 17th Sep 2019Forum Posts: 868
Jade-Pandora said:
Judi K. Beach
(Poet & workshop teacher: b. November 26, 1947, Cincinnati, Ohio - d. April 21, 2008, Sedgwick, Maine)
TOMATO AND KNIFE
after the Expressionism Still-Life Painting by Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993)
How easily the tomato obeys the knife’s command,
falling into ripe halves, unequal to the whole,
and the knife, once it’s tasted red flesh, is willing
to slice again this tomato holding onto its seeds.
The knife bleeds in the glass of water
rinsing away its sharp act.
What blade cleaved my parents’ marriage?
The sum of the parts of their union fell
into negative numbers, or so my mother
grew to think. The knife, sharply pointed.
Her anger clung to the blade.
The knife in that glass never came clean.
My mother is half of me. My mother is half
of my sister. Yet when our mother dies,
the halves we are will never equal her.
No matter how close we might get, she
will stand between us like a knife blade cleaving
our closeness as we fall into unequal halves.
My sister’s half, the ability to talk back,
to be direct, to discount. Mine, the ability
to be hurt effectively and efficiently. At least
this is what my sister tells me as she slices
the tomatoes for the salad of Thanksgiving.
She smiles. The tomato releases its seeds.
Juice runs down the blade.
______________________________
Judi K. Beach: ”In the ’60s I fell in love with John Donne’s passion and Hopkins’ delight in language. In the ’70s I read Gibran for his spiritual wisdom and Piercy for her relevance to my life. In the ’80s I was dumbfounded by the honesty of Sharon Olds and the way Billy Collins found revelation in the ordinary. In the ’90s I opened myself to what the Universe would have me write. Somehow, I want all that to collide in a poem. I’ll keep writing until it does.”
wowowowowowow
LOVE this
Judi K. Beach
(Poet & workshop teacher: b. November 26, 1947, Cincinnati, Ohio - d. April 21, 2008, Sedgwick, Maine)
TOMATO AND KNIFE
after the Expressionism Still-Life Painting by Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993)
How easily the tomato obeys the knife’s command,
falling into ripe halves, unequal to the whole,
and the knife, once it’s tasted red flesh, is willing
to slice again this tomato holding onto its seeds.
The knife bleeds in the glass of water
rinsing away its sharp act.
What blade cleaved my parents’ marriage?
The sum of the parts of their union fell
into negative numbers, or so my mother
grew to think. The knife, sharply pointed.
Her anger clung to the blade.
The knife in that glass never came clean.
My mother is half of me. My mother is half
of my sister. Yet when our mother dies,
the halves we are will never equal her.
No matter how close we might get, she
will stand between us like a knife blade cleaving
our closeness as we fall into unequal halves.
My sister’s half, the ability to talk back,
to be direct, to discount. Mine, the ability
to be hurt effectively and efficiently. At least
this is what my sister tells me as she slices
the tomatoes for the salad of Thanksgiving.
She smiles. The tomato releases its seeds.
Juice runs down the blade.
______________________________
Judi K. Beach: ”In the ’60s I fell in love with John Donne’s passion and Hopkins’ delight in language. In the ’70s I read Gibran for his spiritual wisdom and Piercy for her relevance to my life. In the ’80s I was dumbfounded by the honesty of Sharon Olds and the way Billy Collins found revelation in the ordinary. In the ’90s I opened myself to what the Universe would have me write. Somehow, I want all that to collide in a poem. I’ll keep writing until it does.”
wowowowowowow
LOVE this
Jade-Pandora
jade tiger
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jade tiger
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Joined 9th Nov 2015 Forum Posts: 5134
butters said:there's not a line i'd change or don't like, but that opening stanza? blew.me.away.
Thank you, Jan, those are the reasons I posted it here, and to bring the poet back to life. Thank you for helping make my day.
🐾
p.s. I’ve included an image for you, painted by the same artist (Richard Diebenkorn) as the knife and tomato (entitled “knife and glass”), written into the poem so effectively.
Jade-Pandora
jade tiger
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jade tiger
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Anna Delury
BREATHING LESSON
It is daybreak
and my husband’s asleep
in a bed next to the one I’ve shared
all night with my son.
My husband’s toes drip
over the end of his bed,
like ripe grapes on a vine.
The baby stirs, cries in his sleep.
I tuck him in close to me,
my breath against his face.
My joints creak like an old wood floor
My chest rises and falls
and my son settles into its steady rhythm
while I try to avoid the sounds
that come from being caught
in one place for too long.
I am desperate for a deep breath.
I want to walk alone
in the green hills behind us
unencumbered by the weight of a child
and a marriage that has already seen its best times.
But I stay here in this bed
with my son next to me
and my husband across from me
taking slow breaths, watching
elephants and monkeys parade around
the walls in the blue light of morning.
_____________________________
Anna Delury: ”I write poetry because it gives me a way into what I think and feel.”
BREATHING LESSON
It is daybreak
and my husband’s asleep
in a bed next to the one I’ve shared
all night with my son.
My husband’s toes drip
over the end of his bed,
like ripe grapes on a vine.
The baby stirs, cries in his sleep.
I tuck him in close to me,
my breath against his face.
My joints creak like an old wood floor
My chest rises and falls
and my son settles into its steady rhythm
while I try to avoid the sounds
that come from being caught
in one place for too long.
I am desperate for a deep breath.
I want to walk alone
in the green hills behind us
unencumbered by the weight of a child
and a marriage that has already seen its best times.
But I stay here in this bed
with my son next to me
and my husband across from me
taking slow breaths, watching
elephants and monkeys parade around
the walls in the blue light of morning.
_____________________________
Anna Delury: ”I write poetry because it gives me a way into what I think and feel.”
Jade-Pandora
jade tiger
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jade tiger
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Heather Bell
CRAYOLA HAS A CONTEST TO NAME ITS NEW COLOR BLUE
Varicose veins after birth. Your hands
during cancer. My unyielding legs
during the rape. The beer I dream of.
The joy I dream of. The sky when you
said yes, oh yes, I do have
cancer. And then you said please
leave me. Leave Me: a good name
for the color blue. Selling my handguns,
suicidal thoughts. Eating white rice,
too sad to make anything different.
Leave Me: a perfect name for the color
blue. Arrhythmia. Seizures. The long
slow terror of a heart rate monitor.
The way I casually whispered
Crayola has a contest about a new
color and you knew it was blue even
before I said it. You Knew It Was Blue:
a good name for a color. Because blue
is sadness but also the most relaxing
color to paint your walls. Research says.
A doctor walks in and we joke, blue jokes,
nothing off limits. The doctor says
a good name for the color blue
could be Flatline and I look at my shoes,
blue laces. It’s Not Funny: an interesting
name for the color blue. Please Don’t
Go: a terrible name for the color blue.
But that’s what you suggested
so we all laughed and I emailed
Crayola while crying and
I feel like there is lightning in my hands
to make a suggestion like that,
like the burning smell of death.
You said isn’t it funny how
veins look blue under your skin
but the blood is red when released
Isn’t It Funny: a name for the color blue.
The coldness of your feet
after you’re gone. Your eyelids.
The weird crust around your
mouth. The hospital bill, my pen,
throwing my purse at the doctor
saying why couldn’t you have
done anything more. All good names
for the color blue. A medium blue,
like Neptune, you said. Just look
up, it helps to look up. You Laughed:
a name for the color blue, a real
winner I think. The release of a heart
from another heart: just perfect.
__________________________________
Heather Bell: “Once upon a time there was a six-foot-tall woman with blue hair and a sense of smallness. In her house was a teacup saying ‘girl, you got this!’ and on her wall was a kitten hanging from a clothesline. The kitten’s word balloon said something like, ‘Hang in there!’ or ‘Don’t let go!’ Always something with an exclamation mark. Isn’t that the moral of the story, always? There is always a small woman, hiding her grandness, trying to fill up on uplifting wordplay. But today, this small woman sits down and writes a poem in which she details her smallness and why she came to be that way. Another small woman reads it, and from the tip of her hair a fire starts, but just as quickly dies. Isn’t that why we are here? To write another poem for a small woman to read, and then another. Until the amount of sparks are too much for the quick extinguishing, and she is a woman on fire, exploding into the world.”
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Abby Murray
ADVENT ON SOUTH HILL
When I can’t tell if the sun
is technically up or gone,
I walk the loop of my neighborhood,
embracing it with footprints.
We dread the dark here, though
there’s light from some lampposts
and maple leaves reminiscing
how brilliant they were before
they dried and thickened in our gutters.
I miss what is lit from within.
I wish I could say there are
goldfinches here even in winter
and maybe there are—
I haven’t seen one but the bird book
says they nest in Washington
year-round, molting from gilded
to woolly grey suits at the end of summer.
I wish I could find something weightless
or buoyant to hold. When it gets cold,
finches ditch what dazzles us
in favor of feathers grown solely
to keep them alive, a coat
the color of waiting, of slush,
of sleeping and waking and pacing.
My neighbors say little and close
their blinds so they don’t have to watch
the day end with me on the sidewalk,
nobody they know or want to see,
my hands empty, my face not quite
like one they’d remember.
Mornings, we glance at each other
the way I squint at sparrows,
as if to check the difference between
what I have and what I need to see,
something drab as getting by
or a gift in disguise, a song
about to burst from trampled weeds,
just one note brighter than yellow.
_______________________________
Abby E. Murray:
“Saturday marked the end of the first week of Advent. My favorite season, though every year it seems harder to remember what light everyone is waiting for and whether it will arrive in a way we can see and feel. Light, like poetry, is something we can carry and wear like armor. I like that idea, instead of armor as burden. In my meditations, I wondered how many people spend this time of year waiting, being twisted and pulled by need, and how many of us spend the day trying not to show it. So much of what I do in my neighborhood, in particular, feels like a performance of loneliness. My neighbors don’t talk much, or, more specifically, just not to me– I’m too political, too tall; my dog is too aggressive. I’ve been told a hundred times at least that I am intimidating. If I am, I have no plans to change, but I don’t think I am. I’m spending these weeks waiting for light.”
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jade tiger
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Al Ortolani
Kansas-born, resident, Poet & English Teacher
YELLOW BEES
I bring the second-grade baseball
team bubble gum, two bags of it.
I open the sacks and dump the pieces
into a single brown grocery sack.
I leave it on the dugout bench
and get out of the way, back to the
lawn chair under the single elm.
moments later, when the first batter
comes up to the plate, I notice
his jaws, opening and closing
on the sweet pulp, chomping at the
plate before the whirring wheel
of the pitching machine. each boy
is given five strikes before the coach
sets the T on the plate. eventually,
when the bases are filled, double
Bubble gum wrappers blow across
the infield with the dust and the
small yellow bees. No one loses
in second grade, not even miller,
who, as a dyslexic, can’t read,
stammers through the week,
but never needs the T. He can
drive a long shot 50 feet
over the shortstop’s.
_______________________________
Al Ortolani: “These poems represent connections to others, sometimes dark, sometimes light, often quirky. A fellow teacher, and mentor to the poet, once said that one of the most difficult measures of the career public school teacher is their ability to stay positive and elevated by interest, if not always in the subject matter, then in the hand raised outside of the T zone.”
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Craig van Rooyen
(b. Chattanooga, Tennessee — see more at the end)
WAITING IN VAIN
When my daughter asked if it was God
on my T-shirt, I lied and said yes,
though it was really Bob Marley. So what?
He could pass. The natty halo. The prophetic eyes.
The righteous look of someone who might be
crucified or go into exile at any time.
And who can blame her for wanting
a picture of God? We all crave one.
Just a snapshot to keep in the wallet
next to the kids: Yep, this is my Big Guy.
See his burning bush of dreads,
the smoldering spliff between his fingers?
He’s quite a footballer, but his biggest talent
is saving the world. Instead, all we get
are glimpses. Like that night in the VW
with Marley in the cassette deck and Mimi
in my lap, wiggling to the walking bass;
double skank guitar stroking up the goosebump
back-beat, open hi-hat off-beat underneath
the choppy organ shuffle, call and response,
call and response, the lub dub one-drop
liturgy, riddim, riddim, all about
da pulsing riddim pushin’ in on quarter
note four four like that, like that, baby
like that. Moonlight pouring
through the open window and the smell
of milkweed on her breath. Now that
was a look across the river Jordan,
as the prophets would say.
I could tell my daughter that was the night
she got her start. Then I’d have to tell her
the minor chord stuff—the weeping and
the wailing stuff. How we didn’t want
her. How we stayed awake plotting
her demise. How we sat in a clinic waiting
room hiding our young faces in old magazines,
the purgatory of Fox News on the overhead TV.
How we couldn’t get our feet to move
when the nurse called Mimi’s name.
How Mantovani’s Orchestra mutilated
“Let It Be” as the elevator descended
like the angel Gabriel, moving us
from one life to another while we looked
away from each other’s eyes.
I’d have to tell her about the time spent
walking circles in the desert, trying to build
an altar at every godforsaken turn in the marriage,
looking for a sign from God in every date night
fortune cookie. How we waited in line
at the liquor store for cigarettes and lotto tickets;
waited in line at church for a cracker on the tongue;
waited in line at the movies to find a story
in the dark. But then I’d get to the part about her.
How she arrived like a familiar four on the floor
bass line—a remembered backbeat in our chests.
The same cross stick snare. The dominant chord
in minor form. How her hunger and wailing
woke us up. How our hunger and wailing
led us back. How the same voice keeps calling
from the wilderness, calling, Idowanna, idowanna
idowanna, idowanna, idowanna wait in vain.
______________________________
Craig van Rooyen: “I write poetry for the same reason a frog croaks—I want to be a rock star, but I can’t sing. It’s an uncomfortable situation. ‘Waiting in Vain’ is about redemption. It wasn’t until I fully committed to Marley as Word-become-flesh that the sound of the poem began to emerge. That’s when the speaker finds his voice and tries to follow it to the meaning beneath the music. Religious people may find this blasphemous, but for a frog or a poet the process feels very sacred. In fact, it feels downright redemptive.”
_________________________________
Craig van Rooyen received his MFA in poetry from Pacific University. He lives and works in San Luis Obispo, California. His father, the son of a gold miner, grew up in apartheid-era South Africa before immigrating to the United States. Craig’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Narrative, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2014 Rattle Poetry Prize.
Jade-Pandora
jade tiger
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Ruth Cassel Hoffman
VOICE
The violinist gives the tuning peg a twist.
Wound up too tight, the string will stretch and curl and break.
The fiddler learns to play without the string she’s missed.
A man may grab and hold a woman by the wrist.
He’s learned to think a woman lives for him to take.
He pushes, pulls her clothes, and gives her arm a twist.
She buckles, falls. She fears the hand that turns to fist.
The night becomes nightmare from which she’ll never wake.
The fiddler learns to play without the string she’s missed.
She learns to live: her past has formed a hard-shelled cyst.
She speaks of everything except the inner ache.
And each time he denies, he gives the knife a twist.
His story: it was just a silly teenage tryst.
Hers is a muted instrument, she cannot speak.
The fiddler learns to play without the string she’s missed.
And then she speaks of everything. She will insist
that she is whole, she speaks for her and others’ sake.
The violinist gives the tuning peg a twist.
The fiddler learns to play without the string she’s missed.
_______________________________
Ruth Cassel Hoffman: “Poets like to talk about how there must be tension in a poem—thus the central image in this poem. This one had been cooking for some time, but the catalyst was, of course, the testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh. I have been angry, anxious, sad, and finally galvanized into my best form of action by the #MeToo movement. As a woman, I have had sometimes to fight to be heard. I’m one of the lucky ones, so this poem is not for me but for Dr. Blasey Ford and all the others.”
Ruth Cassel Hoffman, PhD, has been a lover of languages since childhood. She first experienced the power of speaking another’s language as hospitality on a UMC youth mission trip to Vieques, PR. She earned her doctorate in Romance Languages from the University of Chicago and taught French at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, IN. Ruth founded Language Resources Ltd. in 1983, providing corporate foreign language training, translation, and interpretation, and has developed active curricula in French and Spanish for students from preschoolers to adults. She is an active member and a former Lay Leader of Kingswood United Methodist Church in Buffalo Grove, IL.
She lives in Lake Zurich, Illinois with her husband Miles and their dog Isabella.
Jade-Pandora
jade tiger
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Peter E. Murphy
GRAND FUGUE
After the hospital released me with a warning,
I walked around this busy city that hadn’t noticed
I’d been missing, me and my reconstructed heart,
so full of gratitude I wanted to kiss every light
that flashed GO, forgive the ones that said STOP.
And when I felt the earth throb under my feet
I remembered the subway below where commuters
were training themselves to work and what it felt
like to be that useful, which I will never be again
until my living will kicks in and a young doctor-to-be
pulls out my organs, examines them, and puts them back,
leaving one out to see if anyone notices, the way I did
in boot camp after taking an ancient carbine apart,
getting busted, threatened with court martial and firing
squad and Vietnam. The sun is working overtime,
shimmying its vitamin D all over the city. Its light
reflects off the granite walls of a magnificent building
whose cornerstone says it was born in 1844,
the year nitrous oxide was first used to sweeten pain,
though too late for Beethoven, who, enraged after
becoming deaf, drove the audience mad when he came
up with his fifteen minute car crash, the “Grosse Fugue,”
where the violin and the two violas and the cello
rip their bows across the screaming catgut
so atonally, no one wanted to listen to it.
Wouldn’t his heart break from joy if a patron set him up
at Weeki Wachee to watch through the great glass wall,
mermaids breathing underwater from air hoses so obvious
you can’t see them? His whole universe would shimmer
as waterproof women swirl through the bubbles
of the sunlit spring, smiling at him, waving their colorful
spandex tails like batons. In my anesthetic dreams,
I too breathe underwater without drowning.
I flap my arms, kick my feet, try not to remember
how blood spilling out of the body congeals
on the hospital sheets so a minimum wage worker
in the basement laundry can put a whopper and fries
on her kid’s dinner plate. There are a million birds
in this city I hadn’t heard till now, each of them tuning
their instruments, each of them singing, I am alive.
—from
Tribute to Poets of Faith
_________________________________
Peter E. Murphy:
“December, 1971, a month before Bloody Sunday, I was hitchhiking through Londonderry, too drunk to realize it was a war zone. When my ride ran a barricade, soldiers lifted their automatic weapons and opened fire. A week later in Limerick, I met Bahá’ís. They said it was a new religion. I said they should disband before they start another holy war. They said they were building a social order centered around world unity. I said if you believed in alcohol instead of God, I might be interested. Four months later I woke up in a gutter in Cardiff, Wales. Later that day, I attended a Bahá’í meeting in Newport, the city where I was born 21 years earlier, and enrolled. Call me corny, but it was a second birth. My experience with the Bahá’í Faith has been one of transformation, which I hope is reflected in my poems.”
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John Hodgen
A Writer in Residence at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts.
HEARING
We divorced during the impeachment proceedings,
each of us calling for points of order, grudgingly ceding
ground when we had to, glad to strike the last word,
or enter into the record some conspiracy theory we’d heard,
calling it all a sham, a scam, denying witnesses, crying no
to every allegation of tit for tat, or quid pro quo,
proposing subsidiary motions to postpone to a certain time,
or indefinitely, to amend, commit, or refer to a crime,
to raise a previous question, lay on the table, cite or attest,
to object to further consideration, make a final request
to extend the limits of debate, to uphold a vow, an oath,
to second that emotion, raise a question of privilege, both
of us appealing for a recess, a suspension of the rules,
both of us out of order, both of us fools.
__________
John Hodgen: “With pundits and commentators describing this impeachment vote as a signature day in our collective history, I think of that history as both macrocosm and microcosm, that for every weighty political moment for our leaders and representatives, there are millions of people going through their own history, living through their own landmark days, including those spent in civic halls testifying to oaths and vows.”
Jade-Pandora
jade tiger
Forum Posts: 5134
jade tiger
Tyrant of Words
154
Joined 9th Nov 2015 Forum Posts: 5134
Anoushka Narendra
THE ANATOMY OF ENDINGS
Even tender mornings are labor here,
something to be fought for. Light must erode
itself through a membrane of smog, thick
and silent as blood. The newspaper once called
this sheet of pollution soup and I imagined
us all broiled and begging in a great vat of the city,
our tongues shrinking into white onions and vermicelli.
Still, in the sharp glaze of summer, we will learn
to stand outside ourselves. To measure distance
with past-tenses: this was once the video rental store,
some long-haired banyan trees, a boy. My country
is dressed as a body-sized nothing. Can one know
crevices, interludes, before any language or name?
The dark eyes of potholes. Urine-streaked alleys.
I’ve forgiven the stench, the sting of it all—
it as much mine as anyone else’s. Stray dogs whip
like ribbed arrows through metal carcasses, make feasts
from boiled peanuts wrapped in damp tissue.
We’ve all fed ourselves with the spill of something
and called it enough. Yesterday it was the smoke
I rinsed out from my hair. Tomorrow it will be a stranger
with a face like an oil lamp—so burnished and flickering
that I’ll mistake him for a fallen sun. It’s a dull hurt,
to keep walking against such ordinary beauty. But
there are sleepless borders to outrun, stubs of grief
to be plucked from the dirt. My country is dressed
as a tumor of cement and glass, multiplying lifelessly.
All you can count on is the low whisper of passing limbs,
fraught with warning: remember, these scaffoldings were planted
on someone’s chest.
__________
Comment from the artist, Alice Pettway: “‘The Anatomy of Endings’ doesn’t seek to duplicate the photo but instead builds its own city of imperfections: a dog shot through a metal carcass, a stranger with an oil-lamp face, stubs of grief plucked from dirt. The poem captures the unease of street photography, which is so often the ‘dull hurt’ of ‘walking against such ordinary beauty.’”