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Say Yes

Hello Friends,


It's time for another spoken word piece — Please check out Andrea Gibson's "Say Yes" here. This piece also appears in Gibson's 2008 collection Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns.
Enjoy.

Ellen


Say Yes
excerpt
This is for the possibility that guides us

and for the possibilities still waiting to sing

and spread their wings inside us,

'cause tonight Saturn is on his knees

proposing with all of his ten thousand rings

that whatever song we've been singing we sing even more.

Pull all your strings.

Play every chord.
If you're writing letters to prisoners

start tearing down bars.

If you're handing out flashlights in the dark

start handing out stars.
This is only a brief excerpt. Watch the rest of Andrea Gibson's piece here.

Asleep You Become A Continent

Hello Friends,


I once wrote a poem that included one woman's hip fitting into another woman's side like the curve of South America returning to the crook of Africa — which I think is why I am a sucker for today's sonnet "Asleep You Become A Continent" by Queer Latino poet and San Francisco native Francisco Aragón. 
Many people learning to write get taught not to mix metaphors — but then sometimes you grow up and learn to break all the rules beautifully.
Enjoy.

Ellen


Asleep You Become A Continent
asleep you become a continent—

undiscovered, mysterious, long,

your legs mountain ranges

encircling valleys, ravines
night slips past your eyelids,

your breath the swaying of the sea,

sprawled across the bed like

a dolphin washed ashore, your mouth
is the mouth of a sated volcano,

O fragrant timber, how do you burn?

you are so near, and yet so far
as you doze like a lily at my side,

I undo myself and invoke the moon—

I'm a dog watching over your sleep
■

Help me to shatter this darkness

Hello Friends,


Two things Langston Hughes loved unabashedly, and that turn up in his poems again and again, are dreams and the sun. Both make an appearance in today's poem.
Enjoy.

Ellen


As I Grew Older
My hands!

My dark hands!

Break through the wall!

Find my dream!

Help me to shatter this darkness,

To smash this night,

To break this shadow

Into a thousand lights of sun,

Into a thousand whirling dreams

Of sun!
■

Poet Langston Hughes was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 10, 2016, Poem-a-Day April 30, 2012, Poem-a-Day April 10, 2011, Poem-a-Day April 18, 2009, and Poem-a-Day April 29, 2007.

The Founding Mother

Hello Friends,


In October/November of 1987, when today's poem was published in Poetry Magazine, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was still referring to the African National Congress as a terrorist organization — the same social democratic political party that would go on to elect Nelson Mandela in 1994 and that has continued to rule post-apartheid South Africa to this day. By this time in 1987, Winnie Mandela had survived imprisonment, solitary confinement, interrogations, police raids, house arrest, surveillance, and exile. Some consider her to have endured more suffering than her husband imprisoned for 27 years because she was much more exposed. She was targeted because of her political power, serving as her husband's public face and conveying his message to her nation and the world. 
Although her life is far from uncontroversial, especially in the years after this poem was written, Winnie Mandela was and is revered as the "Mother of the Nation." Gwendolyn Brooks holds Winnie's elevated position in world politics and in the Black cultural imagination in tension with her existence as just a woman with a childhood and everyday human feelings.
Notice also Brooks' unusual choice to give the poem a narrator in the very last line. Would this change how you hear the poem if you read it over again?
Enjoy.

Ellen


Winnie
Winnie Mandela, she

the non-fiction statement, the flight into resolving fiction,

vivid over the landscape, a sumptuous sun

for our warming, ointment at the gap of our wounding,

          sometimes

would like to be a little girl again.
Skipping down a country road, singing.
Or a young woman, flirting,

no cares beyond curl-braids and paint

and effecting no change, no swerve, no jangle.
But Winnie Mandela, she,

the She of our vision, the Code,

the articulate rehearsal, the founding mother, shall

direct our choir of makers and wide music.
Think of plants and beautiful weeds in the Wilderness.

They can't do a thing about it (they are told)

when trash is dumped at their roots.

Have no doubt they're indignant and daunted.

It is not what they wanted.
Winnie Mandela, she

is there to be vivid: there

to assemble, to conduct the old magic,

the frightened beauty, the trapped wild loveliness, the

crippled reach,

interrupted order, the stalled clarity.
Listen, my Sisters, Brothers, all ye

that dance on the brink of Blackness,

never falling in:

your vision your Code your Winnie is woman grown.
I Nelson the Mandela tell you so.
■

Poet Gwendolyn Brooks was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 29, 2010.

bathroom telephones

Hello Friends,


I will never be able to look at a hotel room's bathroom telephone without thinking of Sherman Alexie and this poem. As indicated in the epigraph, this piece is a nod to Richard Wilbur's "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" — which you can read here if you like — but you do not need to read Wilbur to appreciate Alexie. 
Enjoy.

Ellen


Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World
          The morning air is all awash with angels...

          Richard Wilbur, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World"
The eyes open to a blue telephone

In the bathroom of this five-star hotel.
I wonder whom I should call? A plumber,

Proctologist, urologist, or priest?
Who is blessed among us and most deserves

The first call? I choose my father because
He's astounded by bathroom telephones.

I dial home. My mother answers. "Hey, Ma,"
I say, "Can I talk to Poppa?" She gasps,

And then I remember that my father
Has been dead for nearly a year. "Shit, Mom,"

I say. "I forgot he's dead. I'm sorry
How did I forget?" "It's okay," she says.

"I made him a cup of instant coffee
This morning and left it on the table

Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years
And I didn't realize my mistake

Until this afternoon." My mother laughs
At the angels who wait for us to pause

During the most ordinary of days
And sing our praise to forgetfulness

Before they slap our souls with their cold wings.
Those angels burden and unbalance us.

Those fucking angels ride us piggyback.
Those angels, forever falling, snare us

And haul us, prey and praying, into dust.
■

Poems by Sherman Alexie were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 24, 2014, Poem-a-Day April 17, 2010, Poem-a-Day April 27, 2009, and Poem-a-Day April 24, 2008.

The Unwritten

Hello Friends,


Do you have a hardest day? I don't know if there will ever come a time when April 13 isn't the hardest day of the year for me. It is a day when I am forced to face myself. I have known the greatest joys of my life on April 13ths — which I live in fear of never finding again — and April 13 has also been the worst day of my life. All these years later, there is still so much about this day I have not found the words or the courage to write about — and that is the topic of today's poem: the unwritten.
Notice that W.S. Merwin uses no punctuation. He's written entire books with no punctuation, and yet his meaning is still perfectly clear. I find that kind of craft remarkable — like the great Buddhist temples erected without using a single nail.
Enjoy.

Ellen


The Unwritten
Inside this pencil

crouch words that have never been written

never been spoken

never been taught
they're hiding
they're awake in there

dark in the dark

hearing us

but they won't come out

not for love not for time not for fire
even when the dark has worn away

they'll still be there

hiding in the air

multitudes in days to come may walk through them

breathe them

be none the wiser
what script can it be

that they won't unroll

in what language

would I recognize it

would I be able to follow it

to make out the real names

of everything
maybe there aren't

many

it could be that there's only one word

and it's all we need

it's here in this pencil

every pencil in the world

is like this
■

Poems by W.S. Merwin were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 4, 2016, Poem-a-Day April 16, 2010; Poem-a-Day April 9, 2009; Poem-a-Day April 17, 2008; and Poem-a-Day April 7, 2007.

under the bed

Hello Friends,


We're going to follow up yesterday's poem by Walt Whitman with a contemporary poem about Walt Whitman — written by my teacher, Rick Barot, and featured in Best American Poetry 2016. That same man who spread his arms wide to take in all the open road also cowered under a bed in fear for his life.
— Ellen


Whitman, 1841
I don't know if he did or did not touch the boy.

But that boy told a brother or a father or a friend,

who told someone in a tavern, or told someone
about it while the men hauled in the nets of fish

from the Sound. Or maybe it was told to someone

on the street, a group of men talking outside
the village schoolhouse, where he was the teacher.

What was whispered about him brought everyone

to church that Sunday, where the preacher roared
his name and the pews cleared out to find him.

He was twenty-one, thought of himself as an exile.

He was boarding with the boy and his family.
The boy was a boy in that schoolroom he hated.

Not finding him in the first house, they found him

in another and dragged him from under the bed
where he had been hiding. He was led outside.

And they took the tar they used for their boats,

and they broke some pillows for their feathers,
and the biography talks about those winter months

when there was not a trace of him, until the trail

of letters, articles, stories, and poems started
up again, showing he was back in the big city.

He was done teaching. That was one part

of himself completed, though the self would never
be final, the way his one book of poems would

never stop taking everything into itself. The look

of the streets and the buildings. The look of men
and women. The names of ferry boats and trains.

The name of the village, which was Southold.

The name of the preacher, which was Smith.
■

Poet Rick Barot was also featured for Poem-A-Day April 11, 2016, Poem-A-Day April 9, 2015, Poem-A-Day April 7, 2008, and Poem-A-Day April 19, 2007.

O Public Road

Hello Friends,


Walt Whitman's "Song of the Open Road, IV" just oozes optimism — and a vastness, absorbing everything into its happiness that it can reach. It is an unmistakably American and unmistakably Whitman poem.
I hope you enjoy.

Ellen


Song of the Open Road, IV
The earth expanding right hand and left hand,

The picture alive, every part in its best light,

The music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where it is not wanted,

The cheerful voice of the public road, the gay fresh sentiment of the road.
O highway I travel, do you say to me Do not leave me?

Do you say Venture not—if you leave me you are lost?

Do you say I am already prepared, I am well-beaten and undenied, adhere to me?
O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you,

You express me better than I can express myself,

You shall be more to me than my poem.
I think heroic deeds were all conceiv'd in the open air, and all free poems also,

I think I could stop here myself and do miracles,

I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever beholds me shall like me,

I think whoever I see must be happy.
■

Walt Whitman was also featured for Poem-A-Day April 21, 2014.

Favorite Daughter

Hello Friends,


Today's poem is a spoken word piece by Imani Cezanne entitled "Flowers." I have included a transcript of the first lines below, but the piece is only properly taken in as an oral performance — so please watch it here.
The very origins of poetry are oral. Back before we wrote anything down, humans invented rhyme and meter for the purposes of making their words, their stories, easier to memorize, repeat, and pass from one person to another. In this sense, today's spoken word and rap are truer to poetry's origins than the written word.
Just some food for thought.

Ellen


Flowers
My mother tells me

I'm her favorite daughter.

Granted, I'm the only one.

But it makes me smile anyway.

The other day I

asked her what kind of flowers

she wants to be buried with.

Gardenias, she said.

White ones.

She isn't dying.

But I've spent my whole life

watching her eat herself

into the earliest grave

she can fit into.

This is only a brief excerpt. Please watch the rest of Imani Cezanne's piece here.

Feared Drowned



Feared Drowned
Suddenly nobody knows where you are,

your suit black as seaweed, your bearded

head slick as a seal's.
Somebody watches the kids. I walk down the

edge of the water, clutching the towel

like a widow's shawl around me.
None of the swimmers is just right.

Too short, too heavy, clean-shaven,

they rise out of the surf, the water

rushing down their shoulders.
Rocks stick out near shore like heads.

Kelp snakes in like a shed black suit

and I cannot find you.
My stomach begins to contract as if to

vomit salt water
when up the sand toward me comes

a man who looks very much like you,

his beard matted like beach grass, his suit

dark as a wet shell against his body.
Coming closer, he turns out

to be you — or nearly.

Once you lose someone it is never exactly

the same person who comes back. 
■


Hello Friends,
Today's poem is by Sharon Olds, from her collection Satan Says (1980). Olds is a master of similes — those "like" or "as" comparisons you learned about in grade school. Olds has a seemingly endless supply of them — "slick as a seal's", "like a widow's shawl", "like heads", "like a shed black suit", "matted like beach grass", "dark as a wet shell." I love the universal experience Olds taps into in this poem — nearly everyone has experienced fearing they lost someone — and the bit of truth she reveals to us about those experiences, that our relationships are never quite the same afterward.

— Ellen