a work in progress

welcome to poems-daily! as long as the queue remains updated, this blog should post a poem a day. (currently, things are crazy at school, so the updates are a bit sporadic)

[poems-daily]

No Time

In a rush this weekday morning, I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetary where my parents are buried side by side under a smooth slab of granite.

Then, all day long, I think of him rising up to give me that look of knowing disapproval while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.

by Billy Collins

[poems-daily]

I Flew into Denver April

I flew into Denver April. Rock salt and sand peppered the asphalt reflecting myself on a downtown street where I'd paused on my route to smell lilacs. The wanton winds chortled wickedly over remnant snows in gray clumps of doom and my heart soared gladly at winter's death but an hour later I had whiskey breath at a dead end bar full of Indians. A Winnebago woman waltzed with me and told me how handsome I truly was so I brought her drinks and felt her hips and somewhere between the grinds and dips she lifted my wallet and split.

by Adrian C. Louis

[poems-daily]

Easter in Pittsburgh

Even on Easter Sunday when the church was a

jungle of lilies and ferns fat Uncle Paul

who loved his liquor so would pound away

with both fists on the stone pulpit shouting

sin sin sin and the fiery fires of hell

and I cried all after- noon the first time I

heard what they did to Jesus it was something

the children shouldn't know about till they

were older but the new maid told me and both

of us cried a lot and so mother got another one

right away & she sent away Miss Richardson

who came all the way from England because

she kept telling how her fiancé Mr. Bowles-

Lyon died suddenly of a heart attack he just

said one day at lunch I'm afraid I'm not well

and the next thing they knew he was sliding un-

der the table. Easter was nice the eggs were silly but the big lilies were wonderful & when

Uncle Paul got so fat from drinking that he

couldn't squeeze into the pulpit anymore &

had to preach from the floor there was an el-

der's meeting and they said they would have

the pulpit rebuilt but Uncle Paul said no it

was the Lord's manifest will and he would pass

his remaining years in sacred studies I liked

Thanksgiving better be- cause that was the day

father took us down to the mills but Easter I

liked next best and the rabbits died because we

fed them beet tops and the lamb pulled up the

grass by the roots and was sold to Mr. Page the

butcher I asked Uncle Robert what were sacred

studies he said he was not really sure but he

guessed they came in a bottle and mother sent

me away from the table when I wouldn't eat my

lamb chops that was ridiculous she said it

wasn't the lamb of God it was just Caesar An-

dromache Nibbles but I couldn't I just couldn't

& the year of the strike we didn't go to Church

at all on Easter because they said it wasn't safe

down town so instead we had prayers in the library

and then right in the mid- dle the telephone rang it

was Mr. Shupstead at the mill they had had to use

tear gas father made a special prayer right a-

way for God's protection & mercy and then he sent

us out to the farm with mother we stayed a week

and missed school but it rained a lot and I broke

the bathroom mirror and had to learn a long psalm.

by James Laughlin

[pigmenting]

In the silence after we finished fighting you grabbed your notebook and in an hour, drew a picture of a girl with a big black ball of scribbles for a head. You stabbed her with your finger and you said “Look, look, this is me. I am all tangled up. I am messy, I am a mess. I cannot sort myself out. I don’t know the way out of this labyrinth head,” and then you threw your notebook down and went to bed, you left me to flip through your sketches, trying to think of a way to tell you my poems are self-portraits with scribbles for heads, too.

Gabriel Gadfly, “Scrbbleheads”

[poems-daily]

Saltine

How well its square fit my palm, my mouth, a toasty wafer slipped onto the sick tongue or into chicken soup,

each crisp saltine a tile pierced with 13 holes in rows of 3 and 2, its edges perforated like a postage stamp,

one of a shifting stack sealed in wax paper whose noisy opening always signaled snack, peanut butter or cheese

thick inside Premiums, the closest we ever got to serving hors d'oeuvres: the redneck's hardtack, the cracker's cracker.

by Michael McFee

[poems-daily]

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black, bough.

by Ezra Pound

[poems-daily]

Penumbrae

The shadows have their seasons, too. The feathery web the budding maples cast down upon the sullen lawn

bears a faint relation to high summer's umbrageous weight and tunnellike continuum--

black leached from green, deep pools wherein a globe of gnats revolves as airy as an astrolabe.

The thinning shade of autumn is an inherited Oriental, red worn to pink, nap worn to thread.

Shadows on snow look blue. The skier, exultant at the summit, sees his poles elongate toward the valley: thus

each blade of grass projects another opposite the sun, and in marshes the mesh is infinite,

as the winged eclipse an eagle in flight drags across the desert floor is infinitesimal.

And shadows on water!-- the beech bough bent to the speckled lake where silt motes flicker gold,

or the steel dock underslung with a submarine that trembles, its ladder stiffened by air.

And loveliest, because least looked-for, gray on gray, the stripes the pearl-white winter sun

hung low beneath the leafless wood draws out from trunk to trunk across the road like a stairway that does not rise.

by John Updike

[poems-daily]

Conuropsis Carolinesis

A small green parakeet named Incas, the last of its kind, died in the Cincinnati Zoo a week after Valentine's Day, 1918, barely surviving Lady Jane, his mate of thirty-two years. The only parrots to adapt to unkind North American winters, hundreds would consume entire fruit farms. The birds were shot to protect such crops as well for sport and for their sultry feathers suitable for ladies' hats. Hovering and squawking-- rather than abandon the dead--they made an easy target: how hunters care less, and oh, how one falls extinct for love! I recall my mother's untold affection.

by Kimiko Hahn

[poems-daily]

Warning to the Reader

Sometimes farm granaries become especially beautiful when all the oats or wheat are gone, and the wind has swept the rough floor clean. Standing inside, we see around us, coming in through the cracks between shrunken wall boards, bands or strips of sunlight. So in a poem about imprisonment, one sees a little light.

But how many birds have died trapped in these granaries. The bird, seeing freedom in the light, flutters up the walls and falls back again and again. The way out is where the rats enter and leave; but the rat's hole is low to the floor. Writers, be careful then by showing the sun-light on the walls not to promise the anxious and panicky blackbirds a way out!

I say to the reader, beware. Readers who love poems of light may sit hunched in the corner with nothing in their gizzards for four days, light failing, the eyes glazed...

They may end as a mound of feathers and a skull on the open boardwood floor...

by Robert Bly

[poems-daily]

In Perpetual Spring

Gardens are also good places to sulk. You pass beds of spiky voodoo lilies and trip over the roots of a sweet gum tree, in search of medieval plants whose leaves, when they drop off turn into birds if they fall on land, and colored carp if they plop into water.

Suddenly the archetypal human desire for peace with every other species wells up in you. The lion and the lamb cuddling up. The snake and the snail kissing. Even the prick of the thistle, queen of the weeds, revives your secret belief in perpetual spring, your faith that for every hurt there is a leaf to cure it.

by Amy Gerstler

[poems-daily]

Funerals are like birthday parties

Miriam sings sticky under the sheets and stares up through the ceiling. We sit in an empty neon hospital like an aborted Easter egg forgotten long past April.

she says that funerals are like birthday parties except better. No one wastes money on presents, and everyone dresses up for the theme.

Miriam has been waiting to go for eight months now. Today she stands tall on the dock, her bags neatly packed.

Smile, she says. Lives are meant to be spent, now I am in debt, and I am tired of borrowing from the people I love.

For my party, put me in a nice dress, no straps. I have very nice shoulders. She laughs.

No Priest. No Roses. No Guns.

She wants everyone to bring a bouquet of sunflowers and then find someone else to give them to.

For a band, She wants every secret shower singer, every three-chord bedroom rock star, every sore-thigh drummer-- a light bulb symphony.

She sighs and lets go of my hand. As she walks up to the boat she smiles back and waves to us as if to say, Don't worry, I will write.

And carefully, so as to not ruin her hair, Miriam places the elastic strap of her birthday hat around her chin. And disappears through the doorway.

by Phil Kaye

[poems-daily]

here’s to opening and upward, to leaf and to sap and to your(in my arms flowering so new) self whose eyes smell of the sound of rain

and here’s to silent certainly mountains;and to a disappearing poet of always,snow and to morning;and to morning’s beautiful friend twilight(and a first dream called ocean)and

let must or if be damned with whomever’s afraid down with ought with because with every brain which thinks it thinks,nor dares to feel(but up with joy;and up with laughing and drunkenness)

here’s to one undiscoverable guess of whose mad skill each world of blood is made (whose fatal songs are moving in the moon

e.e. cummings

[poems-daily]

A collector of clocks, Mr. Reiking, Had a wife very much to my liking. "I'll come again soon," I informed him at noon; "Everything that you have here is striking."

by Laurence Perrine

[poems-daily]

Night Letter to the Reader

I get up from the tangled bed and go outside, a bird leaving its nest, a snail taking a holiday from its shell,

but only to stand on the lawn, an ordinary insomniac amid the growth systems of garden and woods.

If I were younger, I might be thinking about something I heard at a party, about an unusual car,

or the press of Saturday night, but as it is, I am simply conscious, an animal in pajamas,

sensing only the pale humidity of the night and the slight zephyrs that stir the tops of the trees.

The dog has followed me out and stands a little ahead, her nose lifted as if she were inhaling

the tall white flowers, visible tonight in the darkened garden, and there was something else I wanted to tell you,

something about the warm orange light in the windows of the house, but now I am wondering if you are even listening

and why I bother to tell you these things that will never make a difference, flecks of ash, tiny chips of ice.

But this is all I want do-- tell you that up in the woods, looking like the top of Shakespeare's

famous forehead, appeared, quite unexpectedly, illuminating a band of moving clouds.

by Billy Collins

[poems-daily]

Ebb

I know what my heart is like      Since your love died: It is like a hollow ledge Holding a little pool      Left there by the tide,      A little tepid pool, Drying inward from the edge.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

[poems-daily]

The Blue Scarf

Pale, with the blue of high zeniths, shimmered over with silver, brocaded In smooth, running patterns, a soft stuff, with dark knotted fringes, it lies there,Warm from a woman's soft shoulders, and my fingers close on it, caressing. Where is she, the woman who wore it? The scent of her lingers and drugs me. A languor, fire-shotted, runs through me, and I crush the scarf down on my face, And gulp in the warmth and the blueness, and my eyes swim in the cool-tinted heavens. Around me are columns of marble, and a diapered, sun-flicked pavement Rose-leaves blow and patter against it. Below the stone steps a lute tinkles. A jar of green jade throws its shadow half over the floor. A big-bellied Frog hops through the sunlight, and plops in the gold-bubbled water of a basin, Sunk in the black and white marble. The west wind has lifted a scarf On the seat close beside me; the blue of it is a violent outrage of colour. She draws it more closely bout her, and it ripples beneath her slight stirring. Her kisses are sharp buds of fire; and I burn back against her, a jewel Hard and white, a stalked, flaming flower; till I break to a handful of cinders, And open my eyes to the scarf, shining blue in the afternoon sunshine.

How loud clocks can tick when a room is empty, and one is alone!

by Amy Lowell

[poems-daily]

A Fixed Idea

What torture lurks within a single thought When grown too constant; and however kind, However welcome still, the weary mind Aches with its presence. Dull remembrance taught Remembers on unceasingly; unsought The old delight is with us but to find That all recurring joy is pain refined, Become a habit, and we struggle, caught. You lie upon my heart as on a nest, Folded in peace, for you can never know How crushed I am with having you at rest Heavy upon my life. I love you so You bind my freedom from its rightful quest. In mercy lift your drooping wings and go.

by Amy Lowell