Tag: Rachel Zucker

Monday poem

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

This was one of the poetry selections by the American Academy of Poets for Mother’s Day–it seems to me a sort of love poem from a mother to a teenage child. I like its strange title.

Hours Days Years Unmoor Their Orbits

tonight I’m cleaning baby portobellos
for you, my young activist

wiping the dirty tops with a damp cloth
as carefully as I used to rinse raspberries

for you to adorn your fingertips
before eating each blood-red prize

these days you rarely look me in the eye
& your long shagged hair hides your smile Continue reading “Monday poem” →

Knucklebones

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

Here’s an odd little poem I came across:

Astragaloi

We know there must be consciousness in things,

In bits of gravel pecked up by a hen

To grind inside her crop, and spider silk

Just as it hardens stickily in air,

And even those things paralyzed in place,

The wall brick, the hat peg, the steel beam

Inside the skyscraper, and lost, forgotten,

And buried in ancient tombs, the toys and games,

Those starry jacks, those knucklebones of glass

Meant for the dead to play with, toss and catch

Back of the hand and read the patterns of,

Diversions to beguile the endless time,

Never to be picked up again…They’re thinking,

Surely, all of them. They are lost in thought.

 

Mark Jarman, from To The Green Man, Saraband Books

A morning in the room of available time

Posted on by Meryl in Philosophical

lilaThis morning, I open one of the four books on my desk, Mothers, by Rachel Zucker. I have to read it right away even though I only took it out on Wednesday, because someone at UC requested it and now it’s due Friday.

I drink my organic High Mountain Red Tea and read “I am lame in the memory,” quoted from Jorie Graham quoted from Sylvia Plath, and go downstairs and get Plath’s collected poems and find “Little Fugue,” the poem it was quoted from. Meanwhile, I text back and forth to my granddaughter about the cats. I find this strange photo she made of herself on my phone when I go to text her a picture of the cats eating.cats Continue reading “A morning in the room of available time” →