A Poem A Day

[BigBlot]

Oak trees, stark and gray

Beauty uncaptured by art

Aglow at sunset.

[brokenclay]

Lovely, @BigBlot, thank you!

 

 

Daily

by Naomi Shihab Nye

 

These shriveled seeds we plant,

corn kernel, dried bean,

poke into loosened soil,

cover over with measured fingertips

 

These T-shirts we fold into

perfect white squares

 

These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips

This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl

 

This bed whose covers I straighten

smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket

and nothing hangs out

 

This envelope I address

so the name balances like a cloud 

in the center of the sky

 

This page I type and retype

This table I dust till the scarred wood shines

This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again

like flags we share, a country so close

no one needs to name it

 

The days are nouns: touch them

The hands are churches that worship the world

[BigBlot]

The Pig and the Inebriate

Note: This is just one of many versions.

 

'Twas early last September

As near as I remember

As I was walking home in tipsy pride.

 

No one was I disturbing

When I fell down by the curbing

And a pig came up and lay down by my side.

 

There I sang "It's fair weather

When good friends can get together"

'Till a woman walking by perchanced to say,

 

"You can tell a man who boozes

By the company he chooses."

And the pig got up and slowly walked away.

 

Now lately I've been thinking,

That I will quit my drinking,

And leave off of the whiskey, beer, and grog.

 

For it's only aggravation

And there is no consolation

When you can't even find friendship with a hog.

 

[brokenclay]

 

The Passport Photo

by Naomi Shihab Nye

 

"The Passport Office welcomes photographs which depict the applicant as relaxed and smiling."

PASSPORT APPLICATION

 

Before they shoot, I think of where I am going,

Chile, the world's thinnest country,

the bright woven hats on the Indians of Peru.

 

I swallow the map of South America tacked to my kitchen door,

the swarm of strange names, blue rivers

like veins in an old woman's leg.

 

A continent I know little about, except what I have read

or my Bolivian neighbor's tales. "A School of Thieves,"

she tells me. "I'd stay home if I were you."

 

Trapped in front of the hot lights,

I try to forget distances,

how far I will be from the ones who loved me longest.

 

I do not think anything familiar or cozy.

I think coastlines, jagged edges, the roads ahead of me

cracking open like coconuts, and then I smile

 

Because this face you are snapping

is a map to another continent

I have barely begun to learn.

[inkstainedruth]

Oh, that's a nice one.  Especially since it makes me think of the trip my parents took to Machu Pichu in Peru. 

I'm DEFINITELY going to have to look for more of this poet's work.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[BigBlot]

  On 1/21/2021 at 9:54 AM, HogwldFLTR said:

 

Nice to see originals on here; thanks!!!

 

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Umm...thanks, but I can't claim authorship of that one. It's just one I saw and liked. Any differences from the one I saw is due to faulty memory, not inspiration.

[brokenclay]

 

From

In This Place (An American Lyric)

by Amanda Gorman

 

There’s a poem in this place—
a poem in America
a poet in every American
who rewrites this nation, who tells
a story worthy of being told on this minnow of an earth
to breathe hope into a palimpsest of time—
a poet in every American
who sees that our poem penned
doesn’t mean our poem’s end.

There’s a place where this poem dwells—
it is here, it is now, in the yellow song of dawn’s bell
where we write an American lyric
we are just beginning to tell.

 

Full poem: In This Place (An American Lyric)

[inkstainedruth]

A friend of mine reposted the video of Amanda Gorman reading "The Hill We Climb" at Wednesday's Inauguration ceremony.  So another poet I have to read more of now, besides Naomi Shihab Nye.... 

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[brokenclay]

After 10 hours today sitting in on satellite testing, this resonated 🙂

 

 

Frequency Modulation

by Raymond McDaniel

 

you are listening to

 

the transmission via seed pearl, aural irritant

 

clockwork and sparkgap ultra high and superlow

 

precious black opal crystal and glass shudders and sings

 

broad cast scattered the seeds among the apocrypha

 

each agent at land or sea satellite or space

 

direct conversion of royal register and groove

 

high in fidelity to

 

our regenerative radio hisses and shouts

 

everything that cannot be owned belongs now to us

 

irradiant waves oscillate below visible light

 

to arrive and reside requires no medium but occupies vacuum

 

and air transformational emission

 

follow your radiotelegraph

 

we are your conductor our amplitude varies

 

we fluctuate the frequency

 

we are not subject to static interference

 

we embed the subcarrier

 

hush y’all

 

you need not know that language if you know this sound

[HogwldFLTR]

  On 1/22/2021 at 1:31 AM, BigBlot said:

 

Umm...thanks, but I can't claim authorship of that one. It's just one I saw and liked. Any differences from the one I saw is due to faulty memory, not inspiration.

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Easily mistaken as original due to lack or reference to the author. Sorry! As a writer I always give recognition to the author/writer for fear of being considered a plagiarist.

Edited January 23, 2021 by HogwldFLTR

[brokenclay]

 

Burning the Old Year

by Naomi Shihab Nye

 

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.

 

So much of any year is flammable,

lists of vegetables, partial poems.

Orange swirling flame of days,

so little is a stone.

 

Where there was something and suddenly isn't,

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.

I begin again with the smallest numbers.

 

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,

only the things I didn't do

crackle after the blazing dies.

 

[HogwldFLTR]

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 24, 2021 by HogwldFLTR

[hh1990]

 

[Persian Letters] - Solmaz Sharif

 

Dear Aleph,

 

Like Ovid: I’ll have no last words.

This is what it means to die among barbarians. Bar bar bar

was how the Greeks heard our speech —

sheep, beasts — and so we became

barbarians. We make them reveal

the brutes they are, Aleph, by the things

we make them name. David,

they tell me, is the one

one should aspire to, but ever since

I first heard them say Philistine

I’ve known I am Goliath

if I am anything.

[brokenclay]

Love Ferlinghetti, enjoyed the Sharif, thank you!

[HogwldFLTR]

  On 1/24/2021 at 9:02 PM, brokenclay said:

Love Ferlinghetti, enjoyed the Sharif, thank you!

Expand  

 

It's amazing he's still alive at 100+!!!

 

-Lee

[hh1990]

 

Dear Life - Maya C. Popa

 

I can’t undo all I have done unto myself,

what I have let an appetite for love do to me.

 

I have wanted all the world, its beauties

and its injuries; some days,

I think that is punishment enough.

 

Often, I received more than I’d asked,

 

which is how this works—you fish in open water

ready to be wounded on what you reel in.

 

Throwing it back was a nightmare.

Throwing it back and seeing my own face

 

as it disappeared into the dark water.

 

Catching my tongue suddenly on metal,

spitting the hook into my open palm.

 

Dear life: I feel that hook today most keenly.

 

Would you loosen the line—you’ll listen

 

if   I ask you,

 

if   you are the sort of  life I think you are.

[BigBlot]

I set out to pen a clean limerick,

But the verse was much too acerbic,

Although not obscene,

It was really quite mean,

And the result was downright acidic.

 

(I'll take the blame for this one)

 

 

[brokenclay]

 

Happy Endings?

by Shel Silverstein

 

There are no happy endings.

Endings are the saddest part,

So give me just a happy middle

And a very happy start.

[brokenclay]

 

Advice

by Naomi Shihab Nye

 

My great-great-aunt says to plant a tree.

Any nut, she says. She says and says it again.

She planted her tree in 1936.

 

Ahead of us the years loom, forests without histories.

Our hands want to plant something that will bloom tomorrow.

This is too vague, this deep root of ten thousand days.

 

Don't forget, she says, but we are driving away.

Behind us she brushes a leaf from her step,

sinks a little deeper into the soiled of sleep

that has been settling beneath her like a pillow since birth.

[hh1990]