Elegy

The elegy is a form that has been around a long time, and can be so moving. I’ve written a few myself. I particularly love the ending of this one.

Elegy, Surrounded by Seven Trees

         All Saints Cemetery, Wilmington, Delaware

Ordinary days deliver joy easily
again & I can’t take it. If I could tell you
how her eyes laughed or describe
the rage of her suffering, I must
admit that lately my memories
are sometimes like a color
warping in my blue mind.

Metal abandoned in rain. My mother
will not move. Which is to say that
sometimes the true color o
fher casket jumps from my head
like something burnt down
in the genesis of a struck flame. Continue reading “Elegy”

Tired of yourself?

As Berryman famously said, “ever to confess you are bored / means you have no / Inner Resources.”  This period is stretching all of our inner resources, as it goes on and on. Here’s a short, powerful poem by Tracy K. Smith that should resonate.

The Everlasting Self

Comes in from a downpour
Shaking water in every direction —
A collaborative condition:
Gathered, shed, spread, then
Forgotten, reabsorbed. Like love
From a lifetime ago, and mud
A dog has tracked across the floor.

Tracy K. Smith
Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018)

Protest poems

Protest poems abound right now, but the genre is not new.  Here’s one  from Adrienne Rich that is almost 50 years old.

Trying to Talk with a Man

Out in this desert we are testing bombs,

that’s why we came here.Sometimes I feel an underground river
forcing its way between deformed cliffs
an acute angle of understanding
moving itself like a locus of the sun
into this condemned scenery.

What we’ve had to give up to get here –
whole LP collections, films we starred in
playing in the neighborhoods, bakery windows
full of dry, chocolate-filled Jewish cookies,
the language of love-letters, of suicide notes,
afternoons on the riverbank
pretending to be children

Coming out to this desert
we meant to change the face of
driving among dull green succulents
walking at noon in the ghost town
surrounded by a silence

that sounds like the silence of the place
except that it came with us
and is familiar
and everything we were saying until now
was an effort to blot it out –
coming out here we are up against it

Out here I feel more helpless
with you than without you
You mention the danger
and list the equipment
we talk of people caring for each other
in emergencies – laceration, thirst –
but you look at me like an emergency

Your dry heat feels like power
your eyes are stars of a different magnitude
they reflect lights that spell out: EXIT
when you get up and pace the floor

talking of the danger
as if it were not ourselves
as if we were testing anything else.

Adrienne Rich
from Diving into the Wreck