The Poetry Playground

Too Young to Know

One day, my father chopped down
The old apricot tree
Which used to live in my parents backyard.
My father deflected my anger at him
With a look I heard Muddy Waters sing:
Y’all too young to know.

When I went to my mother
For the truth,
I only heard
What he must have told her:
A vague story about roots
and basement pipes,
A vague story about branches
and kitchen windows,
Punctuated by a shrug which meant:
He just does what he does.

The blues don’t know nothing about trees
Unless, of course,
It’s enlisted the moon
To drag some shadows around,
Unless, of course,
Something jumps up
Out of a hollow log,
A worry you didn’t need
To cross your path.

My father’s gone,
The tree’s a stump,
And I’m still too young to know
If one day, I’ll glance
out my window
At the sycamore,
And cluck my teeth.

~ Cornelius Eady

Wish

In my dream, my car is an aquarium.
I’m on the hood, prone, looking in,
wondering how I could ever drive again.

It’s evening, my interior lit with tropical fish
& desire for a new life. I didn’t know
I was this tired. I place my forehead

against the windshield, close my eyes, & wish
for you know what. In the beginning, friend,
every word was a dreaming plant or animal

until our traffic changed everything, but something
seems to be happening for the better, now,
if only it’s not too late. I fall asleep

against this glass until I wake, a few
guppies & angels convulsing in the drying soul
of the world until our ecstasy, &/or our end.

~ William Heyen

The New Moon

Hold on to me.
We will slip carefully carefully
don’t tip it over
into this canoe
pale as birch bark

and with the stars
over our shoulders
paddle
down the dark river
of the sky.

Do not delay.
By next week
the canoe will be bulging with cargo,
there will be no room
inside for us.

Tonight is the time.
Step carefully.
Hold on to me.

~ Eve Merriam

Family Portrait

Before the picture man comes
Mama and I spend the morning
cleaning the family room. She hums
Motown, doles out chores, a warning –

He has no legs, she says. Don’t stare.
I’m the first to the door when he rings.
My father and uncle lift his chair
onto the porch, arrange his things

near the place his feet would be.
He poses our only portrait – my father
sitting, Mama beside him, and me
in between. I watch him bother

the space for knees, shins, scratching air
as – years later – I’d itch for what’s not there.

~ Natasha Trethewey

A Meeting

In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead or changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: “How you been?”
He grins and looks at me.
“I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.”

~ Wendell Berry

Morning on the Island

The lights across the water are the waking city.
The water shimmers with imaginary fish.
Not far from here lie the bones of conifers
washed from the sea and piled by wind.
Some mornings I walk upon them,
bone to bone, as far as the lighthouse.
A strange beetle has eaten most of the trees.
It may have come here on the ships playing
music in the harbor, or it was always here, a winged
jewel, but in the past was kept still by the cold
of a winter that no longer comes.
There is an owl living in the firs behind us but he is white,
meant to be mistaken for snow burdening a bough.
They say he is the only owl remaining. I hear him at night
listening for the last of the mice and asking who of no other owl.

~ Carolyn Forche’

After Whistler

There are girls who should have been swans.
At birth their feathers are burned;
their human skins never fit.
When the other children
line up on the side of the sun,
they will choose the moon,
that precious aberration.
They are the daughters mothers
worry about. All summer,
dressed in gauze, they flicker
inside the shaded house,
drawn to the mirror, where their eyes,
two languid moths, hang dreaming.
It’s winter they wait for, the first snowfall
with the steady interior hum
only they can hear;
they stretch their arms, as if they were wounded,
toward the bandages of snow.
Briefly, the world is theirs
in its perfect frailty.

~ Lisel Mueller

Anchored

Our anchor’s too big for our ship,
So we’re sittin’ here tryin’ to think.
If we leave it behind we’ll be lost.
If we haul it on board, we will sink.
If we sit and keep talkin’ about it,
It will soon be too late for our trip.
It sure can be rough on a sailor
When the anchor’s too big for the ship.

~ Shel Silverstein