Category: April 2017

POEM-A-DAY APRIL 2017


the last sweet bite

Perhaps the World Ends Here

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating the last sweet bite.

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Hello Friends,

Well, that's it: the last sweet bite of this year's poetry month, brought to you from Joy Harjo's collection The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (1994).

It's been quite a month! You have read poems from the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s. You have read poems by African American, Arab American, Asian American, Native American, Latin@, white, and gay, lesbian, and queer poets. You have read couplets, tercets, quatrains, spoken word, a sonnet, a prose poem, a villanelle, a pantoum, and more!

On the blog, I've included a handy re-cap of the month, which you can use to revisit a favorite poem from the month, or find the title of a collection to read more.

Thank you for spending this month with me and hopefully embracing a little bit of poetry!

Love,
Ellen

The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls


Hello Friends,

I hope that you can feel the rhythms of the ocean dissolving your footprints in today's 1879 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Although it's not as certain today as it was in Longfellow's time that the ocean will outlive us, one still gets the sense that Longfellow's sands are not just a beach but also the sands of time.

Enjoy.
Ellen

P.S. A curlew is a kind of shore bird you would probably recognize if you saw one but just didn't know the name of.

The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls

The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveler hastens toward the town,
          And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
          And the tide rises, the tide falls.

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveler to the shore,
          And the tide rises, the tide falls.

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Longfellow was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 7, 2014.

the mundane


Hello Friends,

Poet Al Zolynas is here to reassure you that you can write a good poem about absolutely anything, no matter how ordinary — including doing the dishes. I find it incredibly reassuring to think about this poem when sitting down myself to write.

Enjoy.
Ellen

The Zen of Housework

I look over my own shoulder
down my arms
to where they disappear under water
into hands inside pink rubber gloves
moiling among dinner dishes.

My hands lift a wine glass,
holding it by the stem and under the bowl.
It breaks the surface
like a chalice
rising from a medieval lake.

Full of the grey wine
of domesticity, the glass floats
to the level of my eyes.
Behind it, through the window
above the sink, the sun, among
a ceremony of sparrows and bare branches,
is setting in Western America.

I can see thousands of droplets
of steam—each a tiny spectrum—rising
from my goblet of grey wine.
They sway, changing directions
constantly—like a school of playful fish,
or like the sheer curtain
on the window to another world.

Ah, grey sacrament of the mundane!

■

young, lucky, and sad


Hello Friends,

I have to begin with a confession today: Since I started this poetry month email list ten years ago, I have never sent out a prose poem. I didn't want to confuse you all about what a poem is — and I think prose poems can be confusing in that regard. But the problem with this approach is that it means I've never sent you Claudia Rankine.

So today is a new day for poem-a-day. Today's prose poem by Claudia Rankine looks like prose, but it uses a lot of poetic techniques like repetition, metaphor, alliteration, assonance, and more. Notice also that Rankine conveys a Black person's experience of feeling so American in a third-world country that she feels white, and then just lines later manages to claim the seemingly universal word "sad" for a specifically Black experience.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Don't Let Me Be Lonely

Excerpt pp. 105-108

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked to drink from my water bottle.

          This water bottle?

          That's right. Open it and drink from it.

/

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked to take off my shoes.

          Take off my shoes?

          Yes. Both Please.

/

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked if I have a fever.

          A fever? Really?

          Yes. Really.

/

My grandmother is in a nursing home. It's not bad. It doesn't smell like pee. It doesn't smell like anything. When I go to see her, as I walk through the hall past the common room and the nurses' station, old person after old person puts out his or her hand to me. Steven, one says. Ann, another calls. It's like being in a third-world country, but instead of food or money you are what is wanted, your company. In third-world countries I have felt overwhelmingly American, calcium-rich, privileged, and white. Here, I feel young, lucky, and sad. Sad is one of those words that has given up its life for our country, it's been a martyr for the American dream, it's been neutralized, co-opted by our culture to suggest a tinge of discomfort that lasts the time it takes for this and then for that to happen, the time it takes to change a channel. But sadness is real because once it meant something real. It meant dignified, grave; it meant trustworthy; it meant exceptionally bad, deplorable, shameful; it meant massive, weighty, forming a compact body; it meant falling heavily; and it meant of a color: dark. It meant dark in color, to darken. It meant me. I felt sad.

death and fertility


Hello Friends,

The central character in today's poem by Rita Dove is arguably Persephone, though she is never mentioned by name. Persephone is out gathering flowers when she is abducted to the underworld and raped by Hades — who thinks that he loves her, but takes her by force. Persephone's mother is Demeter, the greek goddess of harvest and fertility, and she is so furious and distraught about her daughter that she causes all the crops to fail. Demeter regains hope and joy when Persephone returns to earth (on Zeus's order), and life springs anew and crops flourish. But before she returns, Hades tricks Persephone into eating some pomegranate seeds, and because she has tasted food in the underworld, she is required to spend a third of each year (the winter months) with Hades as his queen of the underworld. The myth of Persephone explains the cycle of seasons and crops, and embodies the close ties between death and fertility.

In today's poem, Rita Dove imagines the voice of the mother Demeter addressing her daughter's rapist and husband Hades. In some sense, in can be read as a mother's address to all males about their responsibility for the male-dominated nature of the world that she must send her daughter out into.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Demeter's Prayer to Hades

This alone is what I wish for you: knowledge.
To understand each desire and its edge,
to know we are responsible for the lives
we change. No faith comes without cost,
no one believes without dying.
Now for the first time
I see clearly the trail you planted,
what ground opened to waste,
though you dreamed a wealth
of flowers.
                    There are no curses, only mirrors
held up to the souls of gods and mortals.
And so I give up this fate, too.
Believe in yourself,
go ahead—see where it gets you.

■

forsaken city

Wife's Disaster Manual

When the forsaken city starts to burn,
after the men and children have fled,
stand still, silent as prey, and slowly turn

back. Behold the curse. Stay and mourn
the collapsing doorways, the unbroken bread
in the forsaken city starting to burn.

Don't flinch. Don't join in.
Resist the righteous scurry and instead
stand still, silent as prey. Slowly turn

your thoughts away from escape: the iron
gates unlatched, the responsibilities shed.
When the forsaken city starts to burn,

surrender to your calling, show concern
for those who remain. Come to a dead
standstill. Silent as prey, slowly turn

into something essential. Learn
the names of the fallen. Refuse to run ahead
when the forsaken city starts to burn.
Stand still and silent. Pray. Return.

■

Hello Friends,

One of the hardest poetic forms to write is the villanelle, and today's poem by Deborah Paredez is an absolute mastery of that form. Notice that the entire poem uses only two rhyme sounds, and that the first and third lines of the first stanza are refrains that repeat as the last lines of alternating stanzas throughout the poem. But a really good villanelle like Paredez's doesn't give you a hint of just how hard it is to write; it flows effortlessly.

Paredez certainly invokes the biblical character identified only as Lot's wife, who turns into a pillar of salt when she ignores an angel's command not to look back over her shoulder at the city they are leaving behind as they flee. However, what I love about this poem is that its female gaze on disaster could as easily be about a woman fleeing Aleppo in 2016 as it is about a woman fleeing Sodom in biblical times — it has that level of timeless quality about it.

"Wife's Disaster Manual" appeared in the September 2012 issue of Poetry Magazine. Villanelles have also been featured for Poem-A-Day April 14, 2016 and Poem-A-Day April 6, 2008. You can read more about the villanelle form here.

Enjoy.
Ellen

the amount of wonder


Hello Friends,

There is a special little group of poems that are about a slip between words, misreading or miswriting, and today's poem-a-day by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello belongs to that group. See also Natasha Trethewey's "Letter" or Sherman Alexie's "Psalm Like It Hot."

Enjoy.
Ellen

Above the Thin Shell of the World

I fell in love with a North Korean

by falling asleep on his shoulder

in a South Korean subway.

Later, perhaps because of that,

I misread the Arabic word gurfa,

not as the amount of water

that can be held in one hand,

but the amount of wonder.

As if one's entire history could be

measured one handful at a time.

As if we knew another way.

■

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello's "Above the Thin Shell of the World" can be found in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, maintained by the DC-based poetry organization Split This Rock.

hey nonny, nonny


Hello Friends,

Since it is the Bard's birthday, we're featuring a little ditty from Much Ado About Nothing. While there is no exact translation for "hey nonny, nonny," one interpretation is that this is Shakespeare's recruitment song for some kind of lesbian separatist utopia.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.
          Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
          To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
          And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
          Into hey nonny, nonny.

Sing no more ditties, sing no more
          Of dumps so dull and heavy.
The fraud of men was ever so
          Since summer first was leafy.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
          And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
          Into hey nonny, nonny.

■

Track Shoe


Hello Friends,

It's Earth Day, and I'm still in San Francisco, so it seems natural today's poem-a-day should by "Earth Day on the Bay" by Gary Soto.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Earth Day on the Bay

Curled like a genie's lamp,
A track shoe from the 1970s among seaweed,
The race long over, the blue ribbons faded,
The trophies deep in pink insulation in the rafters.
Perhaps the former distant runner sits in his recliner.

The other shoe? Along this shore,
It could have ridden the waves back to Mother Korea,
Where it was molded from plastic,
Fitted with cloth, shoelaces poked through the eyelets,
Squeezed for inspection.

I remember that style of shoe.
Never owned a pair myself.
With my skinny legs I could go side-to-side like a crab,
But never run the distance with a number on my back,
Never the winner or runner up heaving at the end.

I bag that shoe, now litter, and nearly slip on the rocks.
Gulls scream above, a single kite goes crazy,
A cargo ship in the distance carrying more
Of the same.

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