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what the birds say

Hello Friends,
C. Dale Young began yesterday’s poem-a-day “I love. Wouldn’t we all like to start / a poem with ‘I love…’?” A couple of centuries earlier, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834) proposed there are creatures who sing exactly that poem.
Enjoy.
Ellen

Answer to a Child’s Question

Do you ask what the birds say? The Sparrow, the Dove,
The Linnet and Thrush say, “I love and I love!”
In the winter they’re silent—the wind is so strong;
What it says, I don’t know, but it sings a loud song.
But green leaves, and blossoms, and sunny warm weather,
And singing, and loving—all come back together.
But the Lark is so brimful of gladness and love,
The green fields below him, the blue sky above,
That he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he—
“I love my Love, and my Love loves me!”

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bubbles, chandeliers, dandelions

The Bridge

I love. Wouldn’t we all like to start
a poem with “I love…”? I would.
I mean, I love the fact there are parallel lines
in the word “parallel,” love how

words sometimes mirror what they mean.
I love mirrors and that stupid tale
about Narcissus. I suppose
there is some Narcissism in that.

You know, Narcissism, what you
remind me to avoid almost all the time.
Yeah, I love Narcissism. I do.
But what I really love is ice cream.

Remember how I told you
no amount of ice cream can survive
a week in my freezer. You didn’t believe me,
did you? No, you didn’t. But you know now

how true that is. I love
that you know my Achilles heel
is none other than ice cream—
so chilly, so common.

And I love fountain pens. I mean
I just love them. Cleaning them,
filling them with ink, fills me
with a kind of joy, even if joy

is so 1950. I know, no one talks about
joy anymore. It is even more taboo
than love. And so, of course, I love joy.
I love the way joy sounds as it exits

your mouth. You know, the word joy.
How joyous is that. It makes me think
of bubbles, chandeliers, dandelions.
I love the way the mind runs

that pathway from bubbles to dandelions.
Yes, I love a lot. And right here,
walking down this street,
I love the way we make

a bridge, a suspension bridge
—almost as beautiful as the
Golden Gate Bridge—swaying
as we walk hand in hand.

■

— C. Dale Young, Torn (2011)

Nina’s Blues

Nina’s Blues

Your body, hard vowels
In a soft dress, is still.

What you can’t know
Is that after you died
All the black poets
In New York City
Took a deep breath,
And breathed you out;
Dark corners of small clubs,
The silence you left twitching

On the floors of the gigs
You turned your back on,
The balled-up fists of notes
Flung, angry from a keyboard.

You won’t be able to hear us
Try to etch what rose
Off your eyes, from your throat.

Out you bleed, not as sweet, or sweaty,
Through our dark fingertips.
We drum rest
We drum thank you
We drum stay.

■

Cornelius Eady’s eulogy for Nina Simone, who passed away in 2003, can be found in his 2008 collection Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems.

One twentieth of a mile an hour

Painted Turtle

Summer road the ring around the lake, we drove mostly in silence.

Why aren’t I your wife?

You swerved around a turtle sunning itself.

I wanted to go back. To hold the hot disc of it and place it in the grass.

We were late for dinner.

One twentieth of a mile an hour, I said. Claws in tar. You turned the car around.

Traffic from the direction of the turtle, and you saw before I did, the fifty bones of the carapace,

crushed roman dome, the surprise of red blood.

I couldn’t help crying, couldn’t keep anything from harm.

I’m sorry, you said, and let it hurt.

The relief, always, of you in the seat beside me, you’ll never know.

Driving the road next winter, you remembered that place in the road. Your turtle.

During hibernation, a turtle’s heart beats once for every ten minutes.

It cannot voluntarily open its eyes.

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— Gretchen Marquette, from the March 2016 issue of Poetry magazine

Pantoum

Station

Days you are sick, we get dressed slow,
find our hats, and ride the train.
We pass a junkyard and the bay,
then a dark tunnel, then a dark tunnel.

You lose your hat. I find it. The train
sighs open at Burlingame,
past dark tons of scrap and water.
I carry you down the black steps.

Burlingame is the size of joy:
a race past bakeries, gold rings
in open black cases. I don’t care
who sees my crooked smile

or what erases it, past the bakery,
when you tire. We ride the blades again
beside the crooked bay. You smile.
I hold you like a hole holds light.

We wear our hats and ride the knives.
They cannot fix you. They try and try.
Tunnel! Into the dark open we go.
Days you are sick, we get dressed slow.

■

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem by Maria Hummel is an example of a pantoum, a poetic form of Malaysian origin in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the next stanza. As in this example, the last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first.

I hope you’re enjoying poetry month!

— Ellen

Take over the drone

Twelve-Hour Shifts

A drone pilot works a twelve-hour shift, then goes home
to real life. Showers, eats supper, plays video games.
Twelve hours later he comes back, high-fives, takes over the drone

from other pilots, who watch Homeland, do dishes, hope they don’t
dream in all screens, bad kills, all slo-mo freeze-frame.
A drone pilot works a twelve-hour shift, then goes home.

A small room, a pilot’s chair, the mic and headphones
crowd his mind, take him somewhere else. Another day
another dollar: hover and shift, twelve hours over strangers’ homes.

Stop by the store, its Muzak, pick up the Cheerios,
get to the gym if you’re lucky. Get back to your babies, play
Barbies, play blocks. Twelve hours later, come back. Take over the drone.

Smell of burned coffee in the lounge, the shifting kill zone.
Last-minute abort mission, and the major who forgets your name.
A drone pilot works a twelve-hour shift, then goes home.

It’s done in our names, but we don’t have to know. Our own
lives, shifts, hours, bounced off screens all day.
A drone pilot works a twelve-hour shift, then goes home;
fresh from twelve hours off, another comes in, takes over our drone.

■

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem by Jill McDonough is the best example of a villanelle I’ve seen in years. The villanelle’s repetitive nature perfectly suits the subject matter of a drone pilot’s routine; and the restraint of such strict form, the understatement of it, perfectly captures the gravity of “It’s done in our names, but we don’t have to know.” You can read more about villanelles here.

I hope you’re enjoying poetry month!

— Ellen

Failing and Flying

Hello Friends,
More than any other poem this month, if I could just believe in this one poem by Jack Gilbert, I think I would be better off. Maybe you would be too.
— Ellen

Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

■

We give because

Hello Friends,

Below is my favorite fundraising-related poem. Notice that the inaugural state poet laureate of Arizona, Alberto Ríos, uses couplets throughout this piece but ends with a single line — making today’s poem-a-day similar to yesterday’s poem-a-day in terms of form.

Enjoy.
Ellen

When Giving Is All We Have

One river gives
Its journey to the next.

We give because somebody gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.

We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.

You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me

What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made

Something greater from the difference.

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Poet Alberto Ríos was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 22, 2014.

Poetry Month is here!

Hello Friends!

Each April, I celebrate National Poetry Month by sharing with you all some of what I love about poetry — through 30 poems from 30 poets delivered to your inboxes over 30 days.

As you may recall, 811 is the Dewey Decimal System call number for American Poetry, and that’s the section of my personal library where I’ll be asking you to meet me once a day (mostly, with a few dabblings in international work).

No prior poetry experience is required to enjoy this poem-a-day list! So feel free to invite friends and family to join you in this little poetry month celebration. Just send me an email, or sign up through this blog meetmein811.org — where you can also find an archive of the past eight years of poem-a-days.

Without further ado, here is your first poem! In this translation by Robert Bly, Rilke uses the sunset to embody multiple types of transitions, in-between spaces. He also reminds us that all life, all of the matter that makes us up, all energy, can be traced back to (and may return to) suns.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Sunset

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you,
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,

leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs—

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

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