Author: newgreyhair

“Seawater Stiffens Cloth,” Jane Hirschfield

Seawater stiffens cloth long after it’s dried.
As pain after it’s ended stays in the body:
A woman moves her hands oddly
because her grandfather passed through
a place he never spoke of. Making
instead the old jokes with angled fingers.
Call one thing another’s name long enough,
it will answer. Call pain seawater, tree, it will answer.
Call it a tree whose shape of   branches happened.
Call what branching happened a man
whose job it was to break fingers or lose his own.
Call fingers angled like branches what peel and cut apples,
to give to a girl who eats them in silence, looking.
Call her afterward tree, call her seawater angled by silence.

“I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies,” June Jordan

Dedicated to the Poet Agostinho Neto,
President of The People’s Republic of Angola: 1976

1
I will no longer lightly walk behind
a one of you who fear me:
                                     Be afraid.
I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits
and facial tics
I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore
and this is dedicated in particular
to those who hear my footsteps
or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery
cart
then turn around
see me
and hurry on
away from this impressive terror I must be:
I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon
surrounded by my comrades singing
terrible revenge in merciless
accelerating
rhythms
But
I have watched a blind man studying his face.
I have set the table in the evening and sat down
to eat the news.
Regularly
I have gone to sleep.
There is no one to forgive me.
The dead do not give a damn.
I live like a lover
who drops her dime into the phone
just as the subway shakes into the station
wasting her message
canceling the question of her call:
fulminating or forgetful but late
and always after the fact that could save or 
condemn me

I must become the action of my fate.

2
How many of my brothers and my sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number? 
South Africa for instance:
do we agree that more than ten thousand
in less than a year but that less than
five thousand slaughtered in more than six
months will
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

I must become a menace to my enemies.

3
And if I 
if I ever let you slide
who should be extirpated from my universe
who should be cauterized from earth
completely
(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the
                   terrorist degree)
then let my body fail my soul
in its bedeviled lecheries

And if I 
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
                   wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies.

“I Am Asking You to Come Back Home,” Jo Carson

I am asking you to come back home
before you lose the chance of seein’ me alive.
You already missed your daddy.
You missed your uncle Howard.
You missed Luciel.
I kept them and I buried them.
You showed up for the funerals.
Funerals are the easy part.

You even missed that dog you left.
I dug him a hole and put him in it.
It was a Sunday morning, but dead animals

don’t wait no better than dead people.

My mamma used to say she could feel herself
runnin’ short of the breath of life. So can I.
And I am blessed tired of buryin’ things I love.
Somebody else can do that job to me.
You’ll be back here then; you come for funerals.

I’d rather you come back now and got my stories.
I’ve got whole lives of stories that belong to you.
I could fill you up with stories, stories I ain’t told nobody yet,
stories with your name, your blood in them.
Ain’t nobody gonna hear them if you don’t
and you ain’t gonna hear them unless you get back home.

When I am dead, it will not matter
how hard you press your ear to the ground.

“Acquainted With the Night,” Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain – and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

“Running Orders,” Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

They call us now.
Before they drop the bombs.
The phone rings
and someone who knows my first name
calls and says in perfect Arabic
“This is David.”
And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass shattering symphonies
still smashing around in my head
I think “Do I know any Davids in Gaza?”
They call us now to say
Run.
You have 58 seconds from the end of this message.
Your house is next.
They think of it as some kind of
war time courtesy.
It doesn’t matter that
there is nowhere to run to.
It means nothing that the borders are closed
and your papers are worthless
and mark you only for a life sentence
in this prison by the sea
and the alleyways are narrow
and there are more human lives
packed one against the other
more than any other place on earth
Just run.
We aren’t trying to kill you.
It doesn’t matter that
you can’t call us back to tell us
the people we claim to want aren’t in your house
that there’s no one here
except you and your children
who were cheering for Argentina
sharing the last loaf of bread for this week
counting candles left in case the power goes out.
It doesn’t matter that you have children.
You live in the wrong place
and now is your chance to run
to nowhere.
It doesn’t matter
that 58 seconds isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost completed college application
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.

“Song,” JT Stewart

1.
fresh off the
boat
they break you
in barbados

they split for you
you tongue
they slice for you
you ear

they dig for you
a hole of dirt
for you big child
belly

they whip you
make you belly
lie down

they put on you
you neck
the ring of
iron

they say no
to no eat the
sugar cane

they put on you
you mouth
the mask of
tin

they tie you
man to
four green tree

they make you
man fly to
all four wind

they say you
you sing

2.
sing calypso sky
sing soka wind
they ship you
to they home

all ways
they break you
in barbados

3.
salt
all ways
salt

4.
our bones be
ocean floors

our bones be
masts of ships

our bones be
coral reefs

our bones sing
of salt

“Moon over,” Brad Leithauser

Scuba divers will sometimes drown
within a night sea
after confusing up and down.

It seems so basic — up/down — and yet,
immersed in a black neutral buoyancy,
the world’s boundaries all wet,

a person may mislay his only meaningful
compass — the heart in his head —
and mistake Earth’s centripetal pull

for that other mustering of gravity:
a firmament widespread
with stars, over a wind blowing free.

*

But the figure — the tiny figure floundering,
lost, in an unlit sea… He’s trapped
like a sleeper trapped in a raw, tightening

nightmare, who knows he knows a way out of here
though he keeps forgetting
the key.
How do we wake? How do we clear

the borne mind of its body and arrive —
gasping, half gone, not gone —
on the surface’s groundless shore, not just alive

but secure in the moon’s artful netting,
whose catch tonight may be one of those rapt
souls that thinks to see another dawn?

“Twelve Moons,” Bonnie Billet

I THE SNOW MOON

Another year disappears
like a flat stone skidding over ice.
There are things I don’t wish to look back on.
New year’s day lies in the fields
covered by snow. I have yellow boots
and thermal longjohns
for walking out the cold. My resolutions
are simple.

2 THE HUNGER MOON

I’m satisfied with nothing.
The cold continues today
and tomorrow. My resolutions fail
for reasons I don’t face
in a wind that runs through trees
like a comb. In the woods
the deer browse the red maple
and sweet-smelling cedar. In the village
they talk of snow.

3 THE WAKENING MOON

The earth is raw. The moon eats
the wet field. Crocus come, up like teeth
biting the wind. My brother’s death was an accident.
We’re forced to stop sleeping
and begin again.

4 THE GRASS MOON

Tulips weigh the air
with color. The magnolia uses the contrast.
We’ve lived together for years
from one place to another
learning compromise. This place is new.
Coming home, our steps
hard on the first green shoots
stumble in the same direction.

5 THE PLANTING MOON

I curled in the wet
until my mother gave me up
to the light. She had nervous hands
and lived in dark rooms.
I was fed pablum
until my legs were rolls of fat
and I cried until I spoke my first word:
more.

6 THE ROSE MOON

On my knees in the garden, I weed
and pick off the dead flowers.
With a pitch fork I turn
and turn the compost heap.
I walk everywhere with pruning shears
and can’t keep my hands out of the loam.
A flower is an event.
Friends fade.

7 THE THUNDER MOON

I rock to sleep
under the thunder. Wake me,
I can’t break the dream.
I lie between lighthouses
my lips tasting of fish.
I can’t move, but must listen to the gulls’
quick, cracking calls.

8 THE MAIZE MOON

We fight.
He wants to be alone and goes for a walk
by the river. I follow
and find asolitary hummingbird
nesting in the hemlocks.
I’m willing to leave
but it’s too hot to pack.
Sitting at home
I wait for one last word from him.

9 THE HUNTING MOON

The neighbors’ screaming starts.
Minutes later, I sit up at the sound
of fists. Men seem eager for blood
after Harvest. The windows are broken
from the inside. Yellow jackets
find their way into the kitchen.

10 THE LEAF-FALLING MOON

Tree by tree turns bright or dull
in the air, then strips to the twig.
What can be done with hard October fruit?
I hear the crack of the axe ripple
and the cold weather sending the sap
into the roots. Alone
I study the subtlety ofbark.

11 THE MAD MOON

My sister distrustshe moon,
she says, staring into its light
can make you blind, her sources
are scientific. When I climb into the sugar maple
for a better view
she worries. Fifty-five fet up
the moon is exactly the same.
I put my faith in the rope
and descend from the highest branch
burning my hands.

12 THE MOON OF THE LONG NIGHTS

A marathon of nights
races toward the winter solstice.
I burn brush in the hills,
the only woman on the crew.
With a pint of gasoline and dry kindling
I can burn anything.
After lunch we stop feeding the fires.
At 3 we cover the ashes and by 4:30
the ashes are cold.