A Poem A Day

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“As imperceptibly as Grief...”

by Emily Dickinson

As imperceptibly as Grief The Summer lapsed away — Too imperceptible at last, To seem like Perfidy — A Quietness distilled As Twilight long begun Or Nature spending with herself Sequestered Afternoon — The Dusk drew earlier in — The Morning foreign shone — A courteous, yet harrowing Grace, As Guest, that would be gone — And thus, without a Wing Or service of a Keel Our Summer made her light escape Into the Beautiful.

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Rain, New Year's Eve

by Maggie Smith

The rain is a broken piano, playing the same note over and over.

My five-year-old said that. Already she knows loving the world

means loving the wobbles you can’t shim, the creaks you can’t

oil silent — the jerry-rigged parts, MacGyvered with twine and chewing gum.

Let me love the cold rain’s plinking. Let me love the world the way I love

my young son, not only when he cups my face in his sticky hands,

but when, roughhousing, he accidentally splits my lip.

Let me love the world like a mother. Let me be tender when it lets me down.

Let me listen to the rain’s one note and hear a beginner’s song.

[apoemaday]

December, 1919

by Claude McKay

Last night I heard your voice, mother, The words you sang to me When I, a little barefoot boy, Knelt down against your knee. And tears gushed from my heart, mother, And passed beyond its wall, But though the fountain reached my throat The drops refused to fall. ‘Tis ten years since you died, mother, Just ten dark years of pain, And oh, I only wish that I Could weep just once again.

[apoemaday]

There Are Mornings

by Lisel Mueller

Even now, when the plot calls for me to turn to stone, the sun intervenes. Some mornings in summer I step outside and the sky opens and pours itself into me as if I were a saint about to die. But the plot calls for me to live, be ordinary, say nothing to anyone. Inside the house the mirrors burn when I pass.

[apoemaday]

The Myth of Innocence

by Louise Glück

One summer she goes into the field as usual stopping for a bit at the pool where she often looks at herself, to see if she detects any changes. She sees the same person, the horrible mantle of daughterliness still clinging to her.

The sun seems, in the water, very close. That’s my uncle spying again, she thinks — everything in nature is in some way her relative. I am never alone, she thinks, turning the thought into a prayer. Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer.

No one understands anymore how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers. Also that he embraced her, right there, with her uncle watching. She remembers sunlight flashing on his bare arms.

This is the last moment she remembers clearly. Then the dark god bore her away.

She also remembers, less clearly, the chilling insight that from this moment she couldn’t live without him again.

The girl who disappears from the pool will never return. A woman will return, looking for the girl she was.

She stands by the pool saying, from time to time, I was abducted, but it sounds wrong to her, nothing like what she felt. Then she says, I was not abducted. Then she says, I offered myself, I wanted to escape my body. Even, sometimes, I willed this. But ignorance

cannot will knowledge. Ignorance wills something imagined, which it believes exists.

All the different nouns — she says them in rotation. Death, husband, god, stranger. Everything sounds so simple, so conventional. I must have been, she thinks, a simple girl.

She can’t remember herself as that person but she keeps thinking the pool will remember and explain to her the meaning of her prayer so she can understand whether it was answered or not.

[apoemaday]

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

by Rainer Maria Rilke tr. Joanna Macy

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am.

[apoemaday]

Eve Argues Against Perfection

by Diane Lockward

And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. -- Genesis 3:13 Beguiled, my ass. I said no such thing. You say I lost the gift of Paradise. I couldn’t lose what I never had. You say the serpent tempted me to eat. You omit that he entered the Garden on two legs and walked like a man. And here’s what your story always ignores: I had pure gold, rare perfume, precious stones, but Adam hadn’t touched me all those years. Perfection in the Garden didn’t mean that way. Not having it and not wanting it was God’s idea of perfection, not mine. So when that serpent strolled up to the tree, all upright and fine, he threw off the balance, and I began to pray, Oh, let him be mine. When he held out the apple, so round and lush, when he stroked it to a keen red glow, I didn’t fall to temptation -- I rose to it. I ate that apple because I was hungry. I wanted what lay outside of Paradise, a world without the burden of perfection. Now you call all sinful women my sisters. I say, let them claim their own damn sins. The apple may not be perfect, but it’s mine.

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God

by Michael Bazzett

for Ada Limón

Look, it’s not that I believe in him. Nor he in me. We have moved beyond all that. I just like having someone there in the dark. Usually we sit in silence, waiting for passing headlights to glide across the ceiling and knock stray prayers loose from where they got stuck on their way out, so many years ago. It’s almost like finding old piñata candy, says God, picking one from the floorboards. He unwraps it, takes a quick taste. Winces. Nods like he’s just remembered something for the thousandth, thousandth time. What is it? I ask. It’s kind of like chewing tinfoil, he says. All that aching naked hope.

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Untitled

by Yosa Buson tr. Haruo Shirane

Piercingly cold Stepping on my dead wife’s comb In the bedroom

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Saint Judas

by James Wright

When I went out to to kill myself, I caught A pack of hoodlums beating up a man. Running to spare his suffering, I forgot My name, my number, how my day began, How soldiers milled around the garden stone And sang amusing songs; how I alone Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away.

Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten, Stripped, kneed, and left to cry. Dropping my rope Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms: Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten, The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope, I held the man for nothing in my arms.

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"Although the wind..."

by Izumi Shikibu tr. Jane Hirshfield

Although the wind blows terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the rook planks of this ruined house.

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“It dropped so low in my regard...”

by Emily Dickinson

It dropped so low in my regard I heard it hit the ground, And go to pieces on the stones At the bottom of my mind;

Yet blamed the fate that fractured, less Than I reviled myself For entertaining plated wares Upon my silver shelf.

[apoemaday]

By Small and Small: Midnight to Four A.M.

by Jack Gilbert

For eleven years I have regretted it, regretted that I did not do what I wanted to do as I sat there those four hours watching her die. I wanted to crawl in among the machinery and hold her in my arms, knowing the elementary, leftover bit of her mind would dimly recognize it was me carrying her to where she was going.

[apoemaday]

On Living

by Nâzim Hikmet tr. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk

I. Living is no laughing matter: you must live with great seriousness like a squirrel, for example — I mean without looking for something beyond and above living, I mean living must be your whole occupation. Living is no laughing matter: you must take it seriously, so much so and to such a degree that, for example, your hands tied behind your back, your back to the wall, or else in a laboratory in your white coat and safety glasses, you can die for people — even for people whose faces you’ve never seen, even though you know living is the most real, the most beautiful thing. I mean, you must take living so seriously that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees — and not for your children, either, but because although you fear death you don’t believe it, because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II. Let’s say we’re seriously ill, need surgery — which is to say we might not get up from the white table. Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad about going a little too soon, we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told, we’ll look out the window to see if it’s raining, or still wait anxiously for the latest newscast… Let’s say we’re at the front — for something worth fighting for, say. There, in the first offensive, on that very day, we might fall on our face, dead. We’ll know this with a curious anger, but we’ll still worry ourselves to death about the outcome of the war, which could last years. Let’s say we’re in prison and close to fifty, and we have eighteen more years, say, before the iron doors will open. We’ll still live with the outside, with its people and animals, struggle and wind — I mean with the outside beyond the walls. I mean, however and wherever we are, we must live as if we will never die.

III. This earth will grow cold, a star among stars and one of the smallest, a gilded mote on blue velvet — I mean this, our great earth. This earth will grow cold one day, not like a block of ice or a dead cloud even but like an empty walnut it will roll along in pitch-black space… You must grieve for this right now — you have to feel this sorrow now — for the world must be loved this much if you’re going to say “I lived”…

[apoemaday]

A New National Anthem

by Ada Limón

The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets red glare” and then there are the bombs. (Always, always, there is war and bombs.) Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw even the tenacious high school band off key. But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call to the field, something to get through before the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps, the truth is, every song of this country has an unsung third stanza, something brutal snaking underneath us as we blindly sing the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the flag, how it undulates in the wind like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled, brought to its knees, clung to by someone who has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon, when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can love it again, until the song in your mouth feels like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung by even the ageless woods, the short-grass plains, the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright, that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on, that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit in an endless cave, the song that says my bones are your bones, and your bones are my bones, and isn’t that enough?

[apoemaday]

Upon the Hearth the Fire Is Red

by J.R.R. Tolkien

Upon the hearth the fire is red, Beneath the roof there is a bed; But not yet weary are our feet, Still round the corner we may meet A sudden tree or standing stone That none have seen but we alone.

Tree and flower and leaf and grass, Let them pass! Let them pass! Hill and water under sky, Pass them by! Pass them by!

Still round the corner there may wait A new road or a secret gate, And though we pass them by today, Tomorrow we may come this way And take the hidden paths that run Towards the Moon or to the Sun.

Apple, thorn, and nut and sloe, Let them go! Let them go! Sand and stone and pool and dell, Fare you well! Fare you well!

Home is behind, the world ahead, And there are many paths to tread Through shadows to the edge of night, Until the stars are all alight. The world behind and home ahead, We’ll wander back to home and bed.

Mist and twilight, cloud and shade, Away shall fade! Away shall fade! Fire and lamp, and meat and bread, And then to bed! And then to bed!

[apoemaday]

Witness

by Crystal Wilkinson

I’m convinced that if you could have seen my grandmother standing in the doorway waiting for him to come home from the fields, if you’d smelled that spectacular evening thick with sweat & felt the pulsing of the stars, if you’d borne witness to the animals’ moans echoing in the holler that night, if you just could have seen the hair rise up on granddaddy’s arm like that, like offerings to god, when his elbow touched hers, if you could have seen her longing dissipate just a little as he came through the door smelling like a day’s work, you should have seen them close enough to breathe the same air while not even touching. (He smiled at her without smiling.) If you could have seen them watching me watch them, then you’d know how much i love you. If you could have heard her say, You want some supper? We got pie.