Category: Literature

Monday Villanelle

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

This French song form, made famous in English by Dylan Thomas and Elizabeth Bishop, is so tricky. The repeating first and third lines doubled at the end, is a form that it’s very hard to make sound natural. I think Tim Seibles achieved this by slightly altering the lines.  This arrived in my inbox today from the Academy of American Poets “poem-a-day” series.

All Time Blues Villanelle

Hard to watch somebody lose their mind
Maybe everybody    should just go get stoned
My father said it happens all the time

I knew a woman    lost her to soul to wine
But who doesn’t live with their life on loan?
Shame to watch somebody lose their mind

Don’tchu gotta wonder when people say they’re fine?
Given what we’re given, I guess they actin grown
I think I used to say that      all the time

When my parents died, I coined a little shrine
And thought about all the stuff they used to own
Felt like I was gonna lose my mind

Used to have a friend    who smiled all the time
Then he started sayin he could hear the devil moan
Hate to see a brotha lose his gotdam mind

Doesn’t matter how you pull, the hours break the line
Mirror, Mirror on the wall, how come nobody’s home?
Broke my soul for real, when my mother lost her mind

Tried to keep my head right, but sanity’s a climb
Been workin on the straight face—I guess my cover’s blown
My father tried to tell me     all the time

Had one last question, baby, but maybe never mind
After’while, even springtime starts to drone

Hard to see somebody lose their mind
My pop said, “Boy, it happens all the time”

Tim Seibles

Love poem for Valentine’s day

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

I have noticed over my association with many poets, that there were many times a male poet might write a stunning love poem to a woman that he treated pretty shabbily. Not always the case, but it made me less jealous that I wasn’t getting so many love poems.

I have a sense that E Ethelbert Miller treats Maria well:

Crossing the Line

.         for Maria

Sitting across the table from you
I think back to when our friendship
came down from the mountains.
It was a cold day and the miners
had not left for work.

You break a cookie in half like bread
and this sharing is what we both now need.
That which breaks into crumbs are memories.
Your gray hair cut short and you ask if I notice.

How can I tell you that Bolivia will always be
beautiful and everything I notice is you
and yes is you. Our napkins folded in our hands.
Folded as if our meeting now is prayer.

Did I ever tell you that your eyes are a map
and I would lose myself if you ever turned away
E. Ethelbert Miller

Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 14, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets. You can read his comments about this poem on their website.

A Political Poem?

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

This poem is simply one long impression of a part of Chicago. It offers no moral or solution. But it seems to me like a political poem because of the accuracy of the description.

The Bad Old Days

The summer of nineteen eighteen
I read The Jungle and The
Research Magnificent. That fall
My father died and my aunt
Took me to Chicago to live.
The first thing I did was to take
A streetcar to the stockyards.
In the winter afternoon,
Gritty and fetid, I walked
Through the filthy snow, through the
Squalid streets, looking shyly
Into the people’s faces,
Those who were home in the daytime.
Debauched and exhausted faces,
Starved and looted brains, faces
Like the faces in the senile
And insane wards of charity
Hospitals. Predatory
Faces of little children.
Then as the soiled twilight darkened,
Under the green gas lamps, and the
Sputtering purple arc lamps,
The faces of the men coming
Home from work, some still alive with
The last pulse of hope or courage,
Some sly and bitter, some smart and
Silly, most of them already
Broken and empty, no life,
Only blinding tiredness, worse
Than any tired animal.

Continue reading “A Political Poem?” →

Sinchronicity

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

This weekend I had my grandsons overnight and broke out the Puffin puzzle, which we had a lot of fun with, but didn’t finish.  Then the Sunday NY Times arrived, with a brochure for cruise ships. It had this image on the cover.

When I opened my email this morning, here was a Diane Seuss poem from Poetry Daily, not about puffins, but about one of those gorgeous, detailed dead game paintings from the 1800s.  Somehow, it seemed in sync with the theme.

Still Life with Turkey

The turkey’s strung up by one pronged foot,
the cord binding it just below the stiff trinity
of toes, each with its cold bent claw. My eyes

are in love with it as they are in love with all
dead things that cannot escape being looked at.
It is there to be seen if I want to see it, as my

father was there in his black casket and could not
elude our gaze. I was a child so they asked
if I wanted to see him. “Do you want to see him?”

someone asked. Was it my mother? Grandmother?
Some poor woman was stuck with the job.
“He doesn’t look like himself,” whoever-it-was

added. “They did something strange with his mouth.”
As I write this, a large moth flutters against
the window. It presses its fat thorax to the glass.

“No,” I said, I don’t want to see him.” I don’t recall
if I secretly wanted them to open the box for me
but thought that “no” was the correct response,

or if I believed I should want to see him but was
too afraid of what they’d done with his mouth.
I think I assumed that my seeing him would

make things worse for my mother, and she was allI had.
Now I can’t get enough of seeing, as if I’m paying
a sort of penance for not seeing then, and so

this turkey, hanged, its small, raw-looking head,
which reminds me of the first fully naked man
I ever saw, when I was a candy striper

at a sort of nursing home, he was a war veteran,
young, burbling crazily, his face and body red
as something scalded. I didn’t want to see,

and yet I saw. But the turkey, I am in love with it,
its saggy neck folds, the rippling, variegated
feathers, the crook of its unbound foot,

and the glorious wings, archangelic, spread
as if it could take flight, but down,
downward, into the earth.

Diane Seuss
from the book STILL LIFE WITH TWO DEAD PEACOCKS AND A GIRL / Graywolf Press
I reviewed her more recent book, frank: sonnets, for Rain Taxi.

 

From the Portuguese

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry
This came from the Academy of American Poets. I know it’s not May, but it seemed appropriate anyway.

Previsão do Tempo

O espírito de rebelião

também chamado de tristeza e desânimo

começou de novo sua ronda sinistra.

Sua treva e seu frio são de inferno.

Por causa de maio, esperava dias felizes;

e ensolarado até agora só o recado de Albertina,

escolhido pra cantar Jesus é o pão do céu.

Pão sem manteiga, Albertina,

é bom que o saiba.

É com ervas amargas que o come.

Weather Report

The spirit of rebellion

also called hopelessness

has begun another sinister round.

His dark and cold come straight from hell.

I was expecting happy days from May,

but so far the only sunny thing was Albertina’s news

that she was chosen to sing “Jesus is the bread of heaven.”

That’s bread without butter, Albertina,

just so you know.

We eat it with bitter herbs.

Adélia Prado
translated by Ellen Doré Watson

From Women’s Voices for Change

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

Among the poems I receive is this one, from Women’s Voices for Change which posts a poem with commentary every Sunday. This seemed like a good one to start 2022:

Even Now

we are permitted to celebrate.
even now. “not like it was
so great in the middle ages,”
says my son, the new father.
true it is, especially for those
of peasant stock, like us.

in the ravine, small clusters of
people in masks step aside
as I push Emma in her stroller.
light falls through the leaves
like confetti over Emma.
she is perfect, though born
under the flag of Covid.

by ancient law it is said:
if a bridal party meets
a funeral party in the path,
the funeral party
must step aside.
Emma smiles
as if she knows.

Susan Zimmerman

Chi Po & the Sorcerer

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

This book, for “children and philosophers” has been a staple in our house for years. It’s the tale of a young painter in China and his relationship to the local sorcerer.  In one chapter, the sorcerer, teaching the painter to focus, asks him to imagine everything he wants, and the boy thinks of toys and bicycles and a dozen other material things. Then the sorcerer says he needs to banish all those thoughts if he wants to paint.

During the days leading up to Christmas, the streets and stores and online sources are full of anything we might imagine we or someone else could want, and there are plenty of terrible holiday poems to go with it. So here is a little thought from William Stafford to balance things out:

Note

straw, feathers, dust–
little things

but if they all go one way
that’s the way the wind goes

William Stafford (courtesy of Sean the Sharpener)

And of course, you can buy Chi Po & the Sorcerer or William Stafford’s poems online!

Hard to beat

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

I was reading through a volume of contemporary poetry this morning and came across an old favorite. It’s been awhile since I published a Dream Song, so here goes:

Dream Song #1

Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,—a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry’s side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don’t see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.

What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.

John Berryman,

Love poem for Monday

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

This one, by Li Young-Lee is one of my favorites:

from Living with Her

She opens her eyes
and I see.
She counts the birds and I hear
the names of the months and days.
A girl, one of her names
is Change. And my childhood
lasted all of an evening.
Called light, she breathes, my living share
of every moment emerging.
Called life, she is a pomegranate
pecked clean by birds to entirely
become a part of their flying.
Do you love me? she asks.
I love you,
she answers, and the world keeps beginning.

Li-Young Lee

from Behind My Eyes, Norton, 2008