Author: tgifreytag

Poem-A-Day April 10: Dusting

Dusting

Thank you for these tiny
particles of ocean salt,
pearl-necklace viruses,
winged protozoans:
for the infinite,
intricate shapes
of submicroscopic
living things.

For algae spores
and fungus spores,
bonded by vital
mutual genetic cooperation,
spreading their
inseparable lives
from equator to pole.

My hand, my arm,
make sweeping circles.
Dust climbs the ladder of light.
For this infernal, endless chore,
for these eternal seeds of rain:
Thank you. For dust.

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Hello Friends,
I like to view today’s 1994 poem by Marilyn Nelson as in conversation with another famous poem giving thanks to dust: “Dust of Snow” by Robert Frost. You’d be surprised at the number of poems written about a subject like dust — a couple other favorites are “How I Learned To Sweep” by Julia Alvarez and “Chalk-Dust” by Lillian Byrnes.
Love,
Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 9: Passive Voice

Hello Friends,
Laura Da’ is an Eastern Shawnee poet and teacher who lives near Seattle, Washington. Today’s poem can be found in her 2015 collection Tributaries.
Enjoy.
Ællen

Passive Voice

I use a trick to teach students
how to avoid passive voice.

Circle the verbs.
Imagine inserting “by zombies”
after each one.

Have the words been claimed
by the flesh-hungry undead?
If so, passive voice.

I wonder if these
six graders will recollect,
on summer vacation,
as they stretch their legs
on the way home
from Yellowstone or Yosemite
and the byway’s historic marker
beckons them to the
site of an Indian village—

Where trouble was brewing,
Where, after further hostilities, the army was directed to enter.
Where the village was razed after the skirmish occurred.
Where most were women and children.

Riveted bramble of passive verbs
etched in wood—
stripped hands
breaking up from the dry ground
to pinch the meat
of their young red tongues.

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Poem-A-Day April 8: Seeing the Eclipse

Hello Friends,
A number of poems have been written about eclipses, but what I like about today’s 1997 sonnet by Robert Bly is its emphasis on viewing the eclipse as a collective human activity, something you never do alone.
Enjoy.
Ællen

Seeing the Eclipse in Maine

It started about noon. On top of Mount Batte,
We were all exclaiming. Someone had a cardboard
And a pin, and we all cried out when the sun
Appeared in tiny form on the notebook cover.

It was hard to believe. The high school teacher
We’d met called it a pinhole camera,
People in the Renaissance loved to do that.
And when the moon had passed partly through

We saw on a rock underneath a fir tree,
Dozens of crescents — made the same way —
Thousands! Even our straw hats produced
A few as we moved them over the bare granite.

We shared chocolate, and one man from Maine
Told a joke. Suns were everywhere — at our feet.

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Poem-A-Day April 7: a little red dot is

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem by Shivram Gopinath was published as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series on August 15, 2023. Gopinath writes about this poem: “Singapore, my adopted home of more than two decades, is often called the ‘Little Red Dot’ — a reference to its appearance on maps as a tiny scarlet speck. A ‘pottu’ is also a little (often red) dot worn on a Tamil woman’s forehead. Connecting these dots gave rise to feelings of missing my home while being in one, imposter syndrome, hunger, nausea, performance anxiety, gratitude, and a kind of belonging to longing — a longing that I hope the reader feels for an object of their desire.”

Also for reference reading this poem: “makaan orredi?” is a Singaporean phrase for “eaten already?”, and angsana is a kind of tree native to Southeast Asia.

Enjoy.
Ællen

Pottu / Dot

a little red dot is
a laser pointer
a moving target
a danger button
a recorder button
a pottu
a pimple
a popstar
a rash
a makaan orredi?
a smile of a query unconcerned with whether
it was mealtime
a panic room
a piercing
pain
pinpointing
a period
of uncertainty asking
why can’t I question what I love?
why can’t I love what I question?
a third eye for an eye
on the prize
an accessory to murder
of crows on an angsana
a birdcall
flitting across
sky
catcalling worms
a discreet witness
to bargain basement love stories
screaming
onwards and up yours
a cockroach friend scurrying over unwashed masses
murmuring
this boy does not know anything
such as waste
thinks he is headlight
when he is just deer
a song that goes
this is
home?
is this
home?
is this
a home?
this is
a home?
what home
is this?

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Poem-A-Day April 6: Is mercury in retrograde?

Hello Friends,
Today’s poem by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, a trans woman poet who lives in California, was originally published as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series on December 11, 2018. Espinoza has also been featured previously on my poem-a-day list for “The Moon is Trans.”
Enjoy.
Ællen

Things Haunt

California is a desert and I am a woman inside it.
The road ahead bends sideways and I lurch within myself.
I’m full of ugly feelings, awful thoughts, bad dreams
of doom, and so much love left unspoken.

Is mercury in retrograde? someone asks.
Someone answers, No, it’s something else
like that though. Something else like that.
That should be my name.

When you ask me am I really a woman, a human being,
a coherent identity, I’ll say, No, I’m something else
like that though.

A true citizen of planet earth closes their eyes
and says what they are before the mirror.
A good person gives and asks for nothing in return.
I give and I ask for only one thing—

Hear me. Hear me. Hear me. Hear me.
Hear me. Bear the weight of my voice and don’t forget—
things haunt. Things exist long after they are killed.

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Poem-A-Day April 5: I would like to be the one

Hello Friends,
Sometimes a love poem is found in the smallest gestures, as poet Victoria Adukwei Bulley shows us in today’s poem from her 2022 collection Quiet. You can also watch a video of Bulley reading this poem here.
Enjoy.
Ællen

Whose Name Means Honey

You are beautiful to me.
You are beautiful to me
across the table we have arrived at,
in from the rain; no make-up on your face
but for the small frail thread
of something on your right cheek
that I would like to remove for you,
you whose name
means honey. Every time
you look up
& still it is there, I would like
to be the one who says hold on,
come here, let me, one minute, stay there,
almost, there we go, all done, perfect. & when
you look up & now it is gone, swept
absent-mindedly off the face of the earth
by your dark hair, oh I am sad
to have missed my chance

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Poem-A-Day April 4: every song of this country has an unsung third stanza

New National Anthem

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?

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Today’s poem can be found in U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s 2018 collection The Carrying.

Poem-A-Day April 2: to the patron saint of bingo

Hello Friends,
I collect poems year-round to share with you in April, and over the past year I found that I had accumulated quite a number of poems about grief and death. I lost my grandmother and my uncle a year ago, and it showed in the poems I had saved. I won’t subject you to all of them, but we will read a select few scattered throughout the month, including today’s selection: poet Craig Santos Perez’s tribute to his grandmother. This poem comes from a beautiful new collection about life in Guam and as part of a diaspora, from unincorporated territory [åmot] (2023).
Enjoy.
Ællen

ginen achiote

bingo is not indigenous to guam
yet here [we] are

in the air-conditioned community center
next to the village catholic church

i help set the bingo cards
& ink daubers on the cafeteria table

you sit in a wheelchair
like an ancient sea turtle

this has been your daily ritual
but the last time i played bingo with you

was 25 years ago when i was a teenager
& still lived on-island

hasso’ when you won you never shouted
“bingo” too boastfully

when you lost you simply said
“agupa’ tomorrow we’ll be lucky”

here no one punishes you
for speaking chamoru

here no war invades & occupies life
no soldiers force you to bow

to a distant emperor or pledge
allegiance to a violent flag

bingo balls turn in the wire cage
like large beads from broken rosaries

i no longer attend mass
yet here i am praying

to the patron saint of bingo
please call your fateful combination

of letters & numbers
i pray for you to win not for money

but because you carry
so much loss

having outlived grandpa
& all your childhood friends

suddenly someone shouts “bingo”
you put down think ink dauber

sink into the shell of your wheelchair
“when’s your flight” you ask me

“agupa’ grandma tomorrow”
but today i feel so lucky

for this chance
to play bingo with you

one
last time

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Poem-A-Day April 1: Happy National Poetry Month!

Hello Friends, and Happy National Poetry Month 2024!

In celebration, I will be sending you one poem per day just for the month of April: 30 days, 30 poems, 30 poets.

For those of you new to the list: No prior poetry experience is required to enjoy this poem-a-day list! I’m not going to send you some obtuse obscure long ode that’s impossible to understand (hopefully). My selections do skew heavily, but not exclusively, to American poets writing in English — hence the name “Meet Me in 811,” the Dewey Decimal Code for American Poetry (and my favorite part of the library to wander around picking random books off the shelves).

This poem-a-day series is strictly for personal use only; in almost all cases, I do not have poets’ nor poetry publishers’ permission to reproduce their work. For a more official poem-a-day email list, please visit the Academy of American Poets (poets.org), the creators and sponsors of National Poetry Month.

And now for today’s poem: Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian American poet who I have featured many times before over the years but perhaps never as urgently as today. What is your most sensitive cargo?

Thanks,
Ællen

Shoulders

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

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