Poem-A-Day April 30: The sound of quiet.

Hello Friends,

It’s the last day of April, and we’ve packed a lot into these 30 days: couplets, tercets, quatrains, a few sonnets, an ode, and plenty of free verse; poems from the 1600s, 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s; poems by Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian American, Arab American, and white poets; poems by transgender, queer, and straight poets; and more. Thank you so much for joining me in this month-long celebration of poetry.

If you had a favorite poem this month, I’d love to hear about it. Your replies all month long let me know someone out there is reading these poems I send out, so thank you.

I have one last poem for you from the Tunisian American poet Leila Chatti. This piece was originally published as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series on January 3, 2023.

Enjoy,
Ællen

I Went Out to Hear

The sound of quiet. The sky
indigo, steeping
deeper from the top, like tea.
In the absence
of anything else, my own
breathing became obscene.
I heard the beating
of bats’ wings before
the air troubled above
my head, turned to look
and saw them gone.
On the surface of the black
lake, a swan and the moon
stayed perfectly
still. I knew this was
a perfect moment.
Which would only hurt me
to remember and never
live again. My God. How lucky to have lived
a life I would die for.

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Poem-A-Day April 28: Praise the ear.

Isn’t Every Love Poem an Unfinished Love Poem?

Praise the ear.
Praise the hair curling
around the ear.

Praise the music
we never turn on,
only make.

Praise the caps
of your shoulders, my lips
pressed against them.

Praise the poem
I was trying to finish
when you showed up

at my door.

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Today’s poem can be found in poet Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s 2018 collection How to Love the Empty Air.

Poem-A-Day April 27: GREAT morning

Hello Friends,

Poet Eve L. Ewing writes about today’s poem: “This poem started out as being about the everyday moments that sustain us, born from an interaction with a bus driver. Due, probably, to both the times we live in and my generally apocalyptic character, it also became a poem about the end of the world. From the perspective of Western theology, eschatology often implies a straight line between the beginning of time and our inevitable doom. As an Afrofuturist, I have a less linear view of life and death. I think the links between ancestry and the future are blurry and cyclical. Anyway, we really are stardust.”

This poem was originally published as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series on February 6, 2024. Many of the lines in this poem are long and will wrap if you are reading this on a phone.

Enjoy,
Ællen

eschatology

i’m confident that the absolute dregs of possibility for this society,
the sugary coffee mound at the bottom of this cup,
our last best hope that when our little bit of assigned plasma implodes
it won’t go down as a green mark in the cosmic ledger,
lies in the moment when you say hello to a bus driver
and they say it back—

when someone holds the door open for you
and you do a little jog to meet them where they are—

walking my dog, i used to see this older man
and whenever i said good morning,
he replied ‘GREAT morning’—

in fact, all the creative ways our people greet each other
may be the icing on this flaming trash cake hurtling through the ether.

when the clerk says how are you
and i say ‘i’m blessed and highly favored’

i mean my toes have met sand, and wiggled in it, a lot.
i mean i have laughed until i choked and a friend slapped my back.
i mean my niece wrote me a note: ‘you are so smart + itellajet’

i mean when we do go careening into the sun,

i’ll miss crossing guards ushering the grown folks too, like ducklings
and the lifeguards at the community pool and
men who yelled out the window that they’d fix the dent in my car,
right now! it’d just take a second—

and actually everyone who tried to keep me alive, keep me afloat,
and if not unblemished, suitably repaired.

but i won’t feel too sad about it,
becoming a star

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Poem-A-Day April 26: After Language

Hello Friends,
Today is Lesbian Visibility Day! We’re celebrating the Sapphics with a poem by Chaia Heller, which can be found in the anthology My Lover is a Woman: Contemporary Lesbian Love Poems edited by Lesléa Newman and published in 1996. Unlike yesterday’s poem, which nearly avoided punctuation altogether, today’s poem relies heavily on the specific curves of parentheses.
Enjoy,
Ællen

After Language

When all the drowsy metaphors
about women and fruit
have been peeled
and devoured;

there’s just you, me
a bowl full of summer peaches,
two parentheses
with nothing in between
     (just space)
for the tongue’s imagination

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Poem-A-Day April 25: If you ever woke in your dress at 4am

Hello Friends,
One of the remarkable things I want you to notice about today’s poem from Kim Addonizio is how much can be said without punctuation.
Enjoy,
Ællen

To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall

If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever
closed your legs to someone you loved opened
them for someone you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming

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Poem-A-Day April 24: the only time I really prayed

Ode to Donor Gametes

I was not thinking of Russia
or the Holocaust or eugenics
when I picked the donor
from an online catalog like
I was ordering a new pair of shoes.
I don’t mean to sound blasé.
It was more complicated than that.
But by the time spring came
and the third failed IVF, I didn’t care
about SAT scores or eye color;
I wanted any embryo that latched
to my uterine wall and grew.
The German philosophy major,
the filmmaker from California, even
the one whose favorite food was pork.
What did genes matter? I already knew
I’d name my second child for dead relatives
from the old country, the ones
who made it out before the camps.
My uterus washed with grief, empty
kiddush cup after the seder.
That was the only time I really prayed.
That day when I paced outside,
waiting for a call from my doctor
with good news, eggs and sperm
married in a petri dish, an offering
from a Midwestern girl
with ovarian abundance and kind eyes
who knew to look away.

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Today’s poem by Robin Silbergleid was originally published as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series on August 14, 2023.

Poem-A-Day April 23: Doubt thou the stars are fire

Hello Friends,
Since it’s his birthday, today I’m sharing just a few lines by the Bard himself William Shakespeare, taken from Hamlet Act 2, scene 2. Polonius is reading aloud a letter Hamlet has written to Ophelia.
Enjoy,
Ællen

Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love.

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Poem-A-Day April 22: The “Change” in Climate Change

Hello Friends,
Today is Earth Day, so we’re going to read this poem by Jacob Shores-Argüello that first appeared in Poetry Magazine in June 2023. The poem is written in couplets, or groups of two lines, but because the lines are long they may wrap if you’re reading this on a phone.
Enjoy,
Ællen

The “Change” in Climate Change

My cousin WhatsApps me from Costa Rica, fits the family
into the rectangle of video as they wave from the balcony.

He turns the phone, shows me a swirl of birds in the hurting sky.
But they are not birds. They are neighbor Tinoco’s roof tiles

flying in a storm’s rotary energy. My family is calling because
I’m in Oklahoma, which, to them, is synonym for tornado.

Te amo, I say as my cousin lowers the phone for our grandmother
to hear. She’s scared because she’s lived in the town for 80 years

and can’t recognize all these new skies. Because a year before,
a hurricane reaved its way across this country for the first time

in recorded history. Tornado or torbellino or something else,
I ask her about the valley’s strange wind. And she laughs, says

that she was calling to ask me the same thing. I don’t know why
I keep forgetting the change in climate change. My grandmother

sighs as the sky darkens to the color of rum. Why I still think
that we’ll have names for all the things that will come.

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Poem-A-Day April 21: I got it.

Come. And Be My Baby

The highway is full of big cars
going nowhere fast
And folks is smoking anything that’ll burn
Some people wrap their lives around a cocktail glass
And you sit wondering
where you’re going to turn.
I got it.
Come. And be my baby.

Some prophets say the world is gonna end tomorrow
But others say we’ve got a week or two
The paper is full of every kind of blooming horror
And you sit wondering
What you’re gonna do.
I got it.
Come. And be my baby.

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Today’s poem can be found in Maya Angelou: Poems (1981) by Maya Angelou.