apoemaday

[apoemaday]

Everything Changes

by Bertolt Brecht tr. John Willett

Everything changes. You can make A fresh start with your final breath. But what has happened has happened. And the water You once poured into the wine cannot be Drained off again.

What has happened has happened. The water You once poured into the wine cannot be Drained off again, but Everything changes. You can make A fresh start with your final breath.

[apoemaday]

Speech to the Young, Speech to the Progress-Toward

by Gwendolyn Brooks

Say to them, say to the down-keepers, the sun-slappers, the self-soilers, the harmony-hushers, “Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.” You will be right. For that is the hard home-run. Live not for battles won. Live not for the-end-of-the-song. Live in the along.

[apoemaday]

Desert Places

by Robert Frost

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast In a field I looked into going past, And the ground almost covered smooth in snow, But a few weeds and stubble showing last. The woods around it have it – it is theirs. All animals are smothered in their lairs. I am too absent-spirited to count; The loneliness includes me unawares. And lonely as it is, that loneliness Will be more lonely ere it will be less -- A blanker whiteness of benighted snow With no expression, nothing to express. They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars -- on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places.

[apoemaday]

First Fig

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

My candle burns at both ends;       It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends --       It gives a lovely light!

[apoemaday]

To the Insurance Executive Who Denied My Heart Procedure

by Joseph Fasano

You may not think it is worth it but at night, in the dark before morning, my son lays his ear on my gnarled heart and tells me it is beautiful music. He doesn’t fathom what you did to me, that you’ve traded our days of playing for a few small pieces of silver. All he thinks is my father’s heart is music. I hear. I hear. I knew. Ruler, the children will outlive you. I wish you a long, long life of silences while dreamers hear the living world is singing. The one you have denied a life is you.

[apoemaday]

“She dealt her pretty words like Blades -- …”

by Emily Dickinson

She dealt her pretty words like Blades — How glittering they shone — And every One unbared a Nerve Or wantoned with a Bone —

She never deemed — she hurt — That — is not Steel’s Affair — A vulgar grimace in the Flesh — How ill the Creatures bear —

To Ache is human — not polite — The Film upon the eye Mortality’s old Custom — Just locking up — to Die.

[apoemaday]

To My Father

by Alice Notley

I’ve meant to tell you many things about my life, & every time the moment has conquered me. I’m strangely unhappy because the pattern of my life is complicated, because my nature is hopelessly complicated; & out of this, to my sorrow, pain to you must grow. The centre of me is always & eternally a terrible pain — a curious wild pain — a searching beyond what the world contains, something transfigured & infinite — I don’t find it, I don’t think it is to be found. It’s like passionate love for a ghost. At times it fills me with rage, at times with wild despair. It’s the source of gentleness & cruelty & work.

[apoemaday]

Blackberries

by Margaret Atwood

In the early morning an old woman is picking blackberries in the shade. It will be too hot later but right now there’s dew.

Some berries fall: those are for squirrels. Some are unripe, reserved for bears. Some go into the metal bowl. Those are for you, so you may taste them just for a moment. That’s good times: one little sweetness after another, then quickly gone.

Once, this old woman I’m conjuring up for you would have been my grandmother. Today it’s me. Years from now it might be you, if you’re quite lucky.

The hands reaching in among the leaves and spines were once my mother’s. I’ve passed them on. Decades ahead, you’ll study your own temporary hands, and you’ll remember. Don’t cry, this is what happens.

Look! The steel bowl is almost full. Enough for all of us. The blackberries gleam like glass, like the glass ornaments we hang on trees in December to remind ourselves to be grateful for snow.

Some berries occur in sun, but they are smaller. It’s as I always told you: the best ones grow in shadow.

[apoemaday]

poem on my fortieth birthday to my mother who died young

by Lucille Clifton

well i have almost come to the place where you fell tripping over a wire at the forty-fourth lap and i have decided to keep running, head up, body attentive, fingers aimed like darts at first prize, so i might not even watch out for the thin thing grabbing towards my ankles but i'm trying for the long one mama, running like hell and if i fall, i fall.

[apoemaday]

The Cinnamon Peeler’s Wife

by Michael Ondaatje

If I were a cinnamon peeler I would ride your bed and leave the yellow bark dust on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek you could never walk through markets without the profession of my fingers floating over you. The blind would stumble certain of whom they approached though you might bathe under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh at this smooth pasture neighbor to your hair or the crease that cuts your back. This ankle. You will be known among strangers as the cinnamon peeler’s wife.

I could hardly glance at you before marriage never touch you –your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers. I buried my hands in saffron, disguised them over smoking tar, helped the honey gatherers…

When we swam once I touched you in water and our bodies remained free, you could hold me and be blind of smell. You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women the grasscutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter. And you searched your arms for the missing perfume and knew what good is it to be the lime burner’s daughter left with no trace as if not spoken to in an act of love as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.

You touched your belly to my hands in the dry air and said I am the cinnamon peeler’s wife. Smell me.

[apoemaday]

Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant

by Billy Collins

I am glad I resisted the temptation, if it was a temptation when I was young, to write a poem about an old man eating alone at a corner table in a Chinese restaurant.

I would have gotten it all wrong thinking: the poor bastard, not a friend in the world and with only a book for a companion. He'll probably pay the bill out of a change purse.

So glad I waited all these decades to record how hot and sour the hot and sour soup is here at Chang's this afternoon and how cold the Chinese beer in a frosted glass.

And my book — José Saramago's Blindness as it turns out — is so absorbing that I look up from its escalating horrors only when I am stunned by one of his gleaming sentences.

And I should mention the light that falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches — the plates and teapots, the immaculate tablecloths,

as well as the soft brown hair of the waitress in the white blouse and short black skirt, the one who is smiling now as she bears a cup of rice and shredded beef with garlic to my favorite table in the corner.

[apoemaday]

Running Orders

by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

They call us now, before they drop the bombs. The phone rings and someone who knows my first name calls and says in perfect Arabic “This is David.” And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass-shattering symphonies still smashing around in my head I think, Do I know any Davids in Gaza? They call us now to say Run. You have 58 seconds from the end of this message. Your house is next. They think of it as some kind of war-time courtesy. It doesn’t matter that there is nowhere to run to. It means nothing that the borders are closed and your papers are worthless and mark you only for a life sentence in this prison by the sea and the alleyways are narrow and there are more human lives packed one against the other more than any other place on earth Just run. We aren’t trying to kill you. It doesn’t matter that you can’t call us back to tell us the people we claim to want aren’t in your house that there’s no one here except you and your children who were cheering for Argentina sharing the last loaf of bread for this week counting candles left in case the power goes out. It doesn’t matter that you have children. You live in the wrong place and now is your chance to run to nowhere. It doesn’t matter that 58 seconds isn’t long enough to find your wedding album or your son’s favorite blanket or your daughter’s almost completed college application or your shoes or to gather everyone in the house. It doesn’t matter what you had planned. It doesn’t matter who you are. Prove you’re human. Prove you stand on two legs. Run.

[apoemaday]

Kitchen Window

by Richard Siken

Several men were not my father. Some I avoided, some I wanted to impress. In high school, I tried to grow up at a friend's house. We studied the periodic table and listened to records. Sometimes they bought pizza or fried chicken and everyone was encouraged to eat at the table together. His stepfather always watched me closely. He saw the wariness one learns from being neglected — eating too fast, being overly grateful, always knowing who was in the house: their motivations, moods, and locations. With his stepson he was attentive. With me, on the occasions when our paths crossed privately, he spoke with the gentle unavailability one reserves for creatures that are wounded and backed into a corner. I radiated an inappropriate heat that I did my best to hide. Graciously, he ignored it. He was generous, vain, tall and almost handsome, beamed a certain nonchalance and didn't slouch in chairs. It registered. On Christmas morning, early, when I knocked on the glass of the kitchen window, he looked up and shook his head, mouthed Not today. I appreciated the clarity. It was his family, not mine.

[apoemaday]

Snowdrops

by Louise Glück

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body able to respond again, remembering after so long how to open again in the cold light of earliest spring --

afraid, yes, but among you again crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

[apoemaday]

Wanting to Die

by Anne Sexton

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember. I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.   Then the almost unnameable lust returns. Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention,   the furniture you have placed under the sun. But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself,   have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,   have taken on his craft, his magic. In this way, heavy and thoughtful,   warmer than oil or water, I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole. I did not think of my body at needle point. Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.   Suicides have already betrayed the body. Still-born, they don’t always die, but dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet   that even children would look on and smile. To thrust all that life under your tongue! — that, all by itself, becomes a passion.   Death’s a sad bone; bruised, you’d say, and yet she waits for me, year after year,   to so delicately undo an old wound,   to empty my breath from its bad prison. Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,   raging at the fruit a pumped-up moon,   leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss, leaving the page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook and the love whatever it was, an infection.

[apoemaday]

On Walking Backwards

by Anne Carson

My mother forbade us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

[apoemaday]

Not Horses

by Natalie Shapero

What I adore is not horses, with their modern domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore is a bug that lives only one day, especially if it’s a terrible day, a day of train derailment or chemical lake or cop admits to cover-up, a day when no one thinks of anything else, least of all that bug. I know how it feels, born as I’ve been into these rotting times, as into sin. Everybody’s busy, so distraught they forget to kill me, and even that won’t keep me alive. I share my home not with horses, but with a little dog who sees poorly at dusk and menaces stumps, makes her muscle known to every statue. I wish she could have a single day of   language, so that I might reassure her don’t be afraid — our whole world is dead and so can do you no harm.