The Poetry Playground

Days

Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in you waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.

Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.

Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow

on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.

No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday,

you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday’s saucer
without the slightest clink.

~ Billy Collins

Emergence

It’s midsummer night. The light is skinny;
a thin skirt of desire skims the earth.
Dogs bark at the musk of other dogs
and the urge to go wild.
I am lingering on the edge
of a broken heart, striking relentlessly
against the flint of hard will.
It’s coming apart.
And everyone knows it.
So do squash erupting in flowers
the color of the sun.
So does the momentum of grace
gathering allies
in the partying mob.
The heart knows everything.
I remember when there was no urge
to cut the land or each other into pieces,
when we knew how to think
in beautiful.
There is no world like the one surfacing.
I can smell it as I pace in my square room,
the neighbor’s television
entering my house by waves of sound
makes me think about buying
a new car; another kind of cigarette
when I don’t need another car
and I don’t smoke cigarettes.
A human mind is small when thinking
of small things.
It is large when embracing the maker
of walking, thinking, and flying.
If I can locate the sense beyond desire,
I will not eat or drink
until I stagger into the earth
with grief.
I will locate the point of dawning
and awaken
with the longest day in the world.

~ Joy Harjo

A Portable Paradise

And if I speak of Paradise,
then I’m speaking of my grandmother
who told me to carry it always
on my person, concealed, so
no one else would know but me.
That way they can’t steal it, she’d say.
And if life puts you under pressure,
trace its ridges in your pocket,
smell its piney scent on your handkerchief,
hum its anthem under your breath.
And if your stresses are sustained and daily,
get yourself an empty room – be it hotel,
hostel or hovel – find a lamp
and empty your paradise onto a desk:
your white sands, green hills and fresh fish.
Shine the lamp on it like the fresh hope
of morning, and keep staring at it till you sleep.

~ Roger Robinson

You Can’t

They will fall in the end,
those who say you can’t.
It’ll be age or boredom that overtakes them,
or lack of imagination.
Sooner or later, all leaves fall to the ground.
You can be the last leaf.
You can convince the universe
that you pose no threat
to the tree’s life.

~ Maya Abu Al-Hayyat
(translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah)

Midnight

 
The spirits are not fooled
by my faked sleep, my regular breathing;
the magic animations
do not take place. I wait
for the window to tear off its bandages,
cured of its blindness,
the tape recorder to fall in love
with its new blue voice,
the leggy shadows on the floor
to pick each other up and start dancing.
But only the photographs in my head
relent: tonight it is
my grandfather’s small-boned figure
with its white mustache
standing on a boardwalk
in Europe, calling me back.
He waves as if it were easy,
as if it were now or never
that the sea between us
would part for my long walk home.

~ Lisel Mueller

Home

Homes have no walls
No rooms, no furniture, no thresholds
Nothing through which you might enter
And nothing from which you might want to exit
Because homes are not houses
Homes are built in the eyes
Erected by naked, hungry hearts
In skies, in dew drops, lichen, mosses,
Sometimes on parched, parted lips
Sometimes inside the darkening irises of your eyes
Homes are tender assemblies of empty air
Sorted by the linear breaths you lend to me;
Built for unborn little feet to run
And for smiles to sun themselves on broad porticos
My home is in the centre of your palms
Sunk in the wells of your destiny
That you carry like a liquid in your eyes
Or like an abode in your hand, my very own delta
Between the nine mounds of the universe

~ Vinita Agrawal

Housekeeping

We mourn the broken things, chair legs
wrenched from the seats, chipped plates,
the threadbare clothes. We work the magic
of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes.
We save what we can, melt small pieces
of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones
for soup. Beating rugs against the house,
we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading
across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw
the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs
out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie.
I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,
listen for passing cars. All day we watch
for the mail, some news from a distant place.

~ Natasha Trethewey

Consider the Hands that Write this Letter

Consider the hands
that write this letter.
Left palm pressed flat against paper,
as we have done before, over my heart,
in peace or reverence to the sea,
some beautiful thing
I saw once, felt once: snow falling
like rice flung from the giants’ wedding,
or strangest of strange birds. & consider, then,
the right hand, & how it is a fist,
within which a sharpened utensil,
similar to the way I’ve held a spade,
the horse’s reins, loping, the very fists
I’ve seen from roads through Limay & Esteli.
For years I have come to sit this way:
one hand open, one hand closed,
like a farmer who puts down seeds & gathers up;
food will come from that farming.
Or, yes, it is like the way I’ve danced
with my left hand opened around a shoulder,
my right hand closed inside
of another hand. & how I pray,
I pray for this to be my way: sweet
work alluded to in the body’s position to its paper:
left hand, right hand
like an open eye, an eye closed:
one hand flat against the trapdoor,
the other hand knocking, knocking.

~ Aracelis Girmay
after Marina Wilson

Goodbye, Lebanon

Goodbye, Lebanese mountains.

I’m going far
from your pink rose garlands,
your bright red satin strawberries.

Egypt called in a serious voice,
and already my rocking boat
bears new fruit –

But sea, whisper your lullabies
please, because I hurt so much.
Soft waves of home, sob for me.

Don’t go away so quickly, my love.
Leaving you, my chest is all wound,
wholly tender.

Lebanon,

you made me. Your moody nights
put the darkness in my eyes
and laid a vein of lightning in my soul.

Your white lace waterfalls wove
jasmine vines and oud serenades
all through me,

and my speech is the Spirit
murmuring in your woods.
My capricious seasons are yours:

my soul is sometimes wild,
an egret flying far
beyond the ocean’s edge,

and sometimes I curl up,
tender as an anemone when touched,
damp with seafoam tears.

Fading from sight, you’re a dream
that ends. But grief goes on.
Goodbye my nest.

I love you, Lebanon. I adore you.

Lebanon, goodbye.
My heart –

pink roses,
red strawberries

– turns to vapor with the word:

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

~ May Ziadeh

(translated from the French by Rose DeMaris)