Category: Poetry

mine and others

In Costa Rica

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

I took this photo yesterday in Manuel Antonio National Park, and then found this poem by Yuseff Komunyakaa.

Sloth

If you’re one of seven
Downfalls, up in your kingdom
Of mulberry leaves, there are men
Betting you aren’t worth a bullet,

That your skin won’t tan into a good
Wallet. As if drugged in the womb
& limboed in a honeyed languor,
By the time you open your eyes

A thousand species have lived
& died. Born on a Sunday
Morning, with old-world algae
In your long hair, a goodness

Disguised your two-toed claws
Bright as flensing knives. In this
Upside-down haven, you’re reincarnated
As a fallen angel trying to go home.

 

All things Korean

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

I am a little embarrassed that I have discovered K-dramas, the vast output of Korean soap operas on Netflix. My favorite so far is Navillera (Butterfly) about a 70-year-old retired postman who has always wanted to study ballet. I like the glimpse into modern Korea they provide. I also have discovered a Korean poet whose sensibility appeals to me, Ko Un.  Here’s a sample of his work. I like how how he uses the gradual blossoming of spring flowers to knit his divided country together:

The News of Flowers

Spring. Everything’s liberated.
The news of flowers
eases the poverty of this world.
Throughout this fractured country
(some say it’s a pity,
others not so)
spring has come full force.
An azalea blooming at Cheju Island
in the very south,
after a few days
begins blossoming
across the sea
in Southern Cheolla
& Southern Kyeongsang.
A few days later
& it reaches the shore of the Han, mid-country,
& all along the Soyang River.
About a month later
around Hyesan
on the upper reaches of the Yalu, North Korea: blossoms.
At the end of May
about 2700 meters up
by a cold spring at the treeline
azaleas bloom in many colors.
This is enough.
One cannot wish for more.
Where could things be better than among the flowers of a spring day?
So with South & North: gradually, evenly.

Ko Un
translated by Young Moo Kim

Ukrainian Poets

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

This is from a book called Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. Of course, the poems here come from the 2014 war, not the current one. How sad for this poor, tattered country.

When a country of — overall — nice people
turns — slowly — fascist
nice people don’t notice this transformation all at once

As when a person we know intimately
goes, next to us, through
an imperceptible process of aging. Imperceptibly, new wrinkles
slice the skin, frightening, deep.

Nice people nod when they run into each other,
and try, more and more, to lower their eyes,

until finally, raising them becomes an inhuman gesture.

Lyudmyla Khersonska
translated by Valznya Mort

My Life

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

This is a daunting title for a poem, but Lynn Emanuel pulls it off:

My Life

Like Jonas by the fish I was received by it,
swung and sept in its dark waters,
driven to the deeps by it and beyond many rocks.
Without any touching of its teeth, I tumbled  into it
with no more struggle than a mote of dust
entering the door of a cathedral, so muckle were its jaws.
How heel over head I was hurled down
the broad road of its throat, stopped inside
its chest wide as a hall, and like Jonas I stood up
asking where the beast was and finding it nowhere,
there in grease and sorrow I built my bower.

Lynn Emanuel

from Noose and Hook

This appeared in the NY Times Magazine in 2015 with the illustration above.

Fragility

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

Watching news of the ongoing invasion of the Ukraine, where my father was born, reminds me of the fragility of the equilibrium we take for granted.

For today’s poem, I’ve selected a translation of a Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, who also lived in troubled times. It seems appropriate for all those who are standing their ground in the Ukraine. The Russian follows the English.

 

Lot’s Wife

And God’s luminous messenger, larger than life,
led the one righteous man along the black mountain.
But regret cried out to his wife:
“It’s not too late, you can still catch a glimpse
of Sodom, the red rooftops of home,
the square where you sang, the yard where you spun,
the tall house, its windows abandoned—
the house where your sons and daughters were born.”

She looked back—a sudden arc of pain stripped her eyes of sight,
fused her feet to the ground—
her flesh became transparent salt.

Who will mourn this nameless woman? She seems the least of all we lack.
Yet I, for one, can never forget
how she gave her life for one look back.

Anna Akhmatova, 1924

Лотова жена

И праведник шел за посланником бога, Огромный и светлый, по черной горе.
Но громко жене говорила тревога:
Не поздно, ты можешь еще посмотреть На красные башни родного Содома,
На площадь, где пела, на двор, где пряла, На окна пустые высокого дома,

Где милому мужу детей родила.

Взглянула – и, скованы смертною болью, Глаза ее больше смотреть не могли;
И сделалось тело прозрачною солью,
И быстрые ноги к земле приросли.

Кто женщину эту оплакивать будет?
Не меньшей ли мнится она из утрат?
Лишь сердце мое никогда не забудет
Отдавшую жизнь за единственный взгляд.

Translated by Meryl Natchez
Poems from the Stray Dog Cafe, 2013

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.