The Poetry Playground

I Dreamed Again

I dreamed again you were alive, and woke
certain it was your voice
love is whisky, it is milk,
it is water don’t ever, you said in the dream,
think I’ve gone

I woke a little more, a moment or two,
then remembered. Memory makes it so. Keeps you
under the trees.

So I did not turn on the lamp
but lay until I felt again your warmth with mine
heard your voice in my hair

I lay there a long time,
forgetting

~ Anne Michaels

The Blizzard

Now that the worst is over, they predict
Something messy and difficult, though not
Life-threatening. Clearly we needed

To stock up on water and candles, making
Tureens of soup and things that keep
When electricity fails and phone lines fail.

Igloos rise on air conditioners, gargoyles
Fly and icicles shatter. Frozen runways,
Lines in markets and paralyzed avenues

Verify every fear. But there is warmth
In the sudden desire to sleep,
To surrender to our common condition

With joy, watching hours of news
Devoted to weather. People finally stop
To talk to each other – the neighbors

We didn’t know were always here.
Today they are ready for business,
Armed with a new vocabulary,

Casting their saga in phrases as severe
As last night’s snow: damage assessment,
Evacuation, emergency management.

The shift of the wind matters again,
And we are so simple, so happy to hear
The scrape of a shovel next door.

~ Phillis Levin

Insomnia

It’s like waiting for someone to leave –
someone tedious, garrulous
and worryingly manic.
Someone full of reminiscences
which you don’t want to hear about.

It’s like waiting for something
to be taken away – something
with a buzz as maddening as tinnitus;
something you’ve grown tired of, which is
taking up space.

These things multiply, creak and throw shadows
round the room. They start asking
upsetting questions.
Lie doggo. This is not
an interrogation chamber.

The clock strikes again.
To pass the time,
you could try making up anagrams.
You could start with
ABSENCE and OBLIVION.

~ Connie Bensley

Waiting for Happiness

Dog knows when friend will come home
because each hour friend’s smell pales,
air paring down the good smell
with its little diamond. It means I miss you
O I miss you, how hard it is to wait
for my happiness, and how good when
it arrives. Here we are in our bodies,
ripe as avocados, softer, brightening
with latencies like a hot, blue core
of electricity: our ankles knotted to our
calves by a thread, womb sparking
with watermelon seeds we swallowed
as children, the heart again badly hurt, trying
and failing. But it almost five says the
the dog. It is almost five.

~ Nomi Stone

Adrift

A shipping container of rubber duckies made in China for the United States washed overboard in 1992, and some of them had traveled and washed ashore over 17.000 miles over 15 years.

Let’s go ahead and assume it’s yellow.
What little of science I know:
its plastic skin invincible against salt water,
but not the sun –
we can only ask so much.
Will it fade or brown?
What I mean to say is
I would want one of these for my daughter:
its internal clock set to the mercy of the currents
that have been predictable for centuries,
but mercy is not the word anyone
would choose.
Sometimes not making sense and floating
are the same.
Each wave is its own beginning and ending.
Through international waters,
you could have caused an incident:
no one knowing you,
never reaching the hands that hoped for you.
Rough immigrant, or
free refugee –
floating flagless,
fading border,
stamped with words but not your name.

~ Bao Phi

All Things Pass

All things pass
A sunrise does not last all morning
All things pass
A cloudburst does not last all day
All things pass
Nor a sunset all night
All things pass
What always changes?

Earth … sky … thunder …
mountain … water …
wind … fire … lake …

These change
And if these do not last

Do man’s visions last?
Do man’s illusions?

Take things as they come

All things pass

~ Lao-Tzu

Home

I didn’t know I was grateful
for such late-autumn
bent-up cornfields

yellow in the after-harvest
sun before the
cold plow turns it all over

into never.
I didn’t know
I would enter this music

that translates the world
back into dirt fields
that have always called to me

as if I were a thing
come from the dirt,
like a tuber,

or like a needful boy. End
Lonely days, I believe. End the exiled
and unraveling strangeness.
~ Bruce Weigl

A Piece of the Storm

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That’s all
There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
“It’s time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening.”

~ Mark Strand