Category: Literature

Monday Poem

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

I’ve mentioned the Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets before. Last week, I saw one by Mark Wunderlich that I liked. I didn’t know his work, so read further and found this one, my favorite of the ones on the site, which he graciously allowed me to reprint here:

The Son I’ll Never Have

The son I’ll never have is crossing the lawn. He is lying on an
imaginary bed,

the coverlet pulled up over his knees—knees I don’t dare describe.

I recoil from imagining him as meat and bone, as a mind

and hands stroking the fur of his pet rabbit.

I never gave him the accordion I used to play, my mother and I Continue reading “Monday Poem” →

Beauty

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

April is the cruelest month, but also, ironically?, poetry month. In any case every night this week has a poetry event I’m attending.

So far the highlight has been a spectacular reading at the North Berkeley Library by B.H. Fairchild. Fairchild has crafted narrative poems from his childhood in Texas and Kansas. He is the son of a machine shop owner, and the poems manage to capture and elevate the smoke and dust motes into light like grails of milk.

You missed the reading, but can hear a sample here. It’s a long poem; sit back and make yourself comfortable, it’s worth it! Such a treat. Continue reading “Beauty” →

About the hats, and more than the hats

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

If you don’t get enough poetry here, you can sign up with the Academy ofAmerican Poets (www.poets.org) and get a poem every day in your email. This is one that arrived a couple of weeks ago, for all those who knit and wear the pink pussy hats, for all of us, really.

As to Why We Will Not Stop (Making the Hats)

This time it does not begin with the beaver
Instead only halfway up the mountain
Where the sheep we keep each year come through

Winter enough to answer us, enough
For us to shear, deft before the coming storm,
To take away from the body what it did not know

It grew and then astonished each spring to feel
The quickening of the lamb, the heft of
Sudden weight crossing one more patch

Of snow. All with an eye out
For the cougar or some such animal
Of which the DNA is no longer

What it might have been, the coyote now
As part dog part wolf
Already commonplace. We have come to know the truth Continue reading “About the hats, and more than the hats” →

First night of Passover, 2017

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

A poem as relevant today as it was in 1999. It seems we are always bombing something.

during the bombing of Kosovo

Hevel may be translated vanity
or mist or vapor
the name of the first man
whose brother was not his keeper

It is evening it is morning one day
like mist from ten thousand feet
above the hills bombs fall
like vapor the thin air
is full of them
roads crawl with tanks soldiers
like mist tens of thousands
of refugees cross the border
like vapor from morning to dusk
unmanned families
like mist women in slippers
children in bare feet Continue reading “First night of Passover, 2017” →

Blossom foam

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

I’ve been traveling and seen fields of daffodils to the horizon, horses munching the greenest grass, trees in all phases of blossom.  Spring everywhere. It made me think of this poem by James Wright:

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

James Wright

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is 98 today

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

Here’s to him! A huge force, if only for City Lights Books.

Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15)

Constantly risking absurdity
                                             and death
            whenever he performs
                                        above the heads
                                                            of his audience
   the poet like an acrobat
                                 climbs on rime
                                          to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
                                     above a sea of faces
             paces his way
                               to the other side of day
    performing entrechats
                               and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
                               and all without mistaking
                     any thing
                               for what it may not be
       For he’s the super realist
                                     who must perforce perceive
                   taut truth
                                 before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
                                  toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
                                     with gravity
                                                to start her death-defying leap
      And he
             a little charleychaplin man
                                           who may or may not catch
               her fair eternal form
                                     spreadeagled in the empty air
                  of existence
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

An exemplary sentence

Posted on by Meryl in Prose

I just finished The Story of a Brief Marriage, by Anuk Arudpragasam. I can’t say I read the whole book–a painful though extraordinary tour de force that covers one day through the eyes and voice of a young man in a refugee camp in an unnamed country. I had to skim certain parts, despite the excellent writing.

This paragraph seems so true to me, so beautifully thought through!

“Conversation was a fragile thing after all, like a plant that grows only in rich, warm, nourishing soil. Just as the cells of the human body couldn’t survive above and below certain temperatures, just as human eyes couldn’t see above and below certain wavelengths of radiation, and human ears couldn’t hear above and below certain thresholds of frequency, perhaps there existed only a narrow range of conditions under which human conversation could flourish. It wasn’t that people in the camps didn’t want to talk, for human beings would always talk, if they had the opportunity. Continue reading “An exemplary sentence” →

After all this rain…

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

the green of the hills reminds me of Ireland, except they are so smooth here in Northern California. They make me think of this poem by Kay Ryan.

Green Hills

Their green flanks
and swells are not
flesh in any sense
matching ours,
we tell ourselves.
Nor their green
breast nor their
green shoulder nor
the languor of their
rolling over.

Kay Ryan

The exemplary sentence

Posted on by Meryl in Prose, Uncategorized

I’ve been reading Tim Gautreaux’s work for years now, and recently finished his latest book, Signals: New and Selected Stories. His books deal with the everyday travails of the lower or middle class. This excerpt is from a story about a junk yard operator whose life if altered by finding a stunning, jeweled demonstration sewing machine with a needle with the engraved message: ART STITCHES ALL. You can read that story here. This paragraph occurs before the transformation: Continue reading “The exemplary sentence” →

Valentine’s Day poem

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

I know I’ve posted several poems by Marie Howe before, but this seemed perfect for today. And if you can, there’s an event at Senator Feinstein’s San Francisco office today at noon–a rally of constituents requesting a town meeting.  Another good way to observe Valentine’s Day.

The Kiss

When he finally put
his mouth on me—on

my shoulder—the world
shifted a little on the tilted

axis of itself. The minutes
since my brother died

stopped marching ahead like
dumb soldiers and

the stars rested.
His mouth on my shoulder and

then on my throat
and the world started up again

for me,
some machine deep inside it

recalibrating,
all the little wheels

slowly reeling and speeding up,
the massive dawn lifting on the other

side of the turning world.
And when his mouth
Continue reading “Valentine’s Day poem” →

Poem for My Daughter

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

A friend mentioned that she loved Charles Bukowski’s poetry. I’ve never been that fond of him myself, but this is one poem of his I liked and saved:

Poem for My Daughter

My girl is 8
and that is old enough
to know better or worse
or anything.
so I relax around her
and hear various
astounding things
about sex
life in general
and life in particular.
mostly it’s very easy
except I became a father
when most men
became grandfathers. Continue reading “Poem for My Daughter” →