Limón

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?

■

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

Poem-A-Day April 21: Yellow on yellow

Hello Friends,
Today’s poem comes with thanks to Amber and Jeremy, who gave me my copy of The Hurting Kind, Ada Limón’s 2022 collection in which this poem appears.
Enjoy.
Ællen

Invasive

What’s the thin break
inescapable, a sudden thud
on the porch, a phone
vibrating with panic on the night
stand? Bury the broken thinking
in the backyard with the herbs. One
last time, I attempt to snuff out
the fig buttercup, the lesser celandine,
invasive and spreading down
the drainage ditch I call a creek
for a minor pleasure. I can
do nothing. I take the soil in
my clean fingers and to say
I weep is untrue, weep is too
musical a word. I heave
into the soil. You cannot die.
I just came to this life
again, alive in my silent way.
Last night I dreamt I could
only save one person by saying
their name and the exact
time and date. I choose you.
I am trying to kill the fig buttercup
the way I’m supposed to according
to the government website,
but right now there’s a bee on it.
Yellow on yellow, two things
radiating life. I need them both
to go on living.

■

Poem-A-Day April 12: Bilingual is best.

The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual

When you come, bring your brown-
ness so we can be sure to please

the funders. Will you check this
box; we’re applying for a grant.

Do you have any poems that speak
to troubled teens? Bilingual is best.

Would you like to come to dinner
with the patrons and sip Patrón?

Will you tell us the stories that make
us uncomfortable, but not complicit?

Don’t read the ones where you
are just like us. Born to a green house,

garden, don’t tell us how you picked
tomatoes and ate them in the dirt

watching vultures pick apart another
bird’s bones in the road. Tell us the one

about your father stealing hubcaps
after a colleague said that’s what his

kind did. Tell us how he came
to the meeting wearing a poncho

and tried to sell the man his hubcaps
back. Don’t mention your father

was a teacher, spoke English, loved
making beer, loved baseball, tell us

again about the poncho, the hubcaps,
how he stole them, how he did the thing

he was trying to prove he didn’t do.

■

“The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual” appears in poet Ada Limón’s 2018 collection The Carrying. Ada Limón has also been featured for Poem-A-Day April 10, 2020: lady horse swagger and Poem-A-Day April 2, 2018: Instructions on Not Giving Up.

Poem-A-Day April 10: lady horse swagger

How to Triumph Like a Girl

I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
But mainly, let’s be honest, I like
that they’re ladies. As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.

■

“How to Triumph Like a Girl” appears in the beautiful collection Bright Dead Things (2015) by poet Ada Limón.

Poet Ada Limón was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 2, 2018, Poem-a-Day April 2, 2017, and Poem-a-Day April 7, 2016.

Instructions on Not Giving Up

Hello Friends,


I got dumped this week, and Poetry Month was briefly in danger of becoming a bunch of angsty breakup poems. But lucky for you! I think I've come to my senses enough to feature a more optimistic take today.
Sometimes when you're a poet and it's spring (and maybe particularly if you are in DC), you see something poetic like the cherry blossoms, and you think you should write a sonnet about them. But then sometimes the sonnet you end up writing isn't about the cherry blossoms at all — it's about the leaves.
Enjoy.

Ellen


Instructions on Not Giving Up
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out

of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor's

almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving

their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate

sky of Spring rains, it's the greening of the trees

that really gets to me. When all the shock of white

and taffy, the world's baubles and trinkets, leave

the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,

the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin

growing over whatever winter did to us, a return

to the strange idea of continuous living despite

the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,

I'll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf

unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I'll take it all.
■

Ada Limón's "Instructions on Not Giving Up" was featured for Poets.org Poem-a-Day series on May 15, 2017. Ada Limón was also featured for Meet Me in 811's Poem-A-Day April 2, 2017 and Poem-A-Day April 7, 2016.

what’s underneath

Hello Friends,


If when you go caving, you start to wonder what it is like to be a cave, and then you put it into words, then you are probably a poet.
One of the things I love best about today's poem from Ada Limón is that it ends with a beginning that could be the beginning of so many things — a cave, a mountain, a journey, a game, a test, a poetry month.
I hope you enjoy.

Ellen


Notes on the Below
—For Mammoth Cave National Park
Humongous cavern, tell me, wet limestone, sandstone caprock,

          bat-wing, sightless translucent cave shrimp,
this endless plummet into more of the unknown,

                    how one keeps secrets for so long.
All my life, I've lived above the ground,

          car wheels over paved roads, roots breaking through concrete,

and still I've not understood the reel of this life's purpose.
Not so much living, but hovering without sense.
What's it like to be always night? No moon, but a few lit up

          circles at your many openings. Endless dark, still time

must enter you. Like a train, like a green river?
Tell me what it is to be the thing rooted in shadow.

          To be the thing not touched by light (no that's not it)

to not even need the light? I envy; I envy that.
Desire is a tricky thing, the boiling of the body's wants,

          more praise, more hands holding the knives away.
I've been the one who has craved and craved until I could not see

          beyond my own greed. There's a whole nation of us.
To forgive myself, I point to the earth as witness.
To you, your Frozen Niagara, your Fat Man's Misery,

          you with your 400 miles of interlocking caves that lead

only to more of you, tell me,
what it is to be quiet, and yet still breathing.
          Ruler of the Underlying, let me

speak to both the dead and the living as you do. Speak

to the ruined earth, the stalactites, the eastern small-footed bat,
to honor this: the length of days. To speak to the core

          that creates and swallows, to speak not always to what's

shouting, but to what's underneath asking for nothing.
I am at the mouth of the cave. I am willing to crawl.
■

Ada Limón's "Notes on the Below" was featured for Poets.org Poem-a-Day series on November 29, 2016. Ada Limón was also featured for Meet Me in 811's Poem-A-Day April 7, 2016.

hurtling towards

The Leash

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say, Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps, we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

■

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem by Ada Limón was originally published as the Academy of American Poets poem-a-day on January 1, 2016. For another great dog moment in poetry, see Mark Doty’s “Golden Retrievals” (1998).

I hope you’re enjoying poetry month!
Ellen