Category: Poem

“Saddam Hussein Is Writing Poetry In Solitary Confinement,” Alison Luterman

1.
I laughed when I told my friend:
Saddam is writing poems!
No matter how down and out you are, there’s always
poetry! I snorted.
When the last rotten plank
in the basement of your mind has fallen through,
pray that a thin lifeline of words may sustain you.

I feel ashamed now, thinking about it,
and fascinated. Is Saddam writing in rhyme or blank verse?
Does he prefer narrative epics? And is he any good?

2.
I heard the mass graves, when dug up, were overrun
with relatives, searching among
ten-year-old decayed corpses
for an arm, a leg, a thumb —
something that had once been wife or brother or son.

I hear there are not enough guards to keep the families out,
the battalions of grief
with their numberless riders.

3.
Maybe Saddam really loves poetry.
Hitler loved music.
Nero probably loved something as well — elephants,
or dancing girls,
or boys.

4.
He lived in a cave for months.
That gives a man time
to get to know some ghosts.
Death must have smelled familiar
to him; he must have recognized and then ignored
its stench on his hair, his clothes.

5.
Large-scale killing numbs the mind.
Everything’s a question of scale.
For instance, I’ve heard that great blue whales can weigh
two hundred tons. Two hundred tons!
Hardly imaginable.
Our brains aren’t built
to think on that scale,
any more than one gnat
in a cloud of gnats
buzzing around a redwood
can comprehend the full dimensions of the giant tree.

6.
Forget Saddam. Imagine for one moment
all the work-roughened hands
that have picked your food and sewn your clothes
and kept you alive since day one.
When we die, will there be a reckoning
of what and whom we’ve used
to pay for our lives, and how,
and will lack of imagination be allowed as an excuse?

7.
On the one hand, poetry is entirely worthless when weighed
against the fact of dying oceans,
or hungry children.

On the other hand, who
actually travels to the bottom of the ocean with a scale
to weigh the great blue whale
if not some fool of a poet?

8.
I know, I know,
it’s all extrapolated from a jawbone.
And so are all the great stories, all the best poems.

9.
Most poetry is bullshit, of course.
But if a slender line of truth
could reach to the bottom of the ocean,
and snag a great blue whale in its delicate noose,
and haul her up so we could feel, just for a second, her smooth enormity —

could we understand it then? And would it change us?

“These poems,” June Jordan

These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?

These words
they are stones in the water
running away

These skeletal lines
they are desperate arms for my longing and love.

I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me

whoever you are
whoever I may become.

“Fracture,” Ellen Bass

When the grizzly cubs were caught, collared, and taken away—
relocated they call it—
their mother ran back and forth on the road screaming.
Brutal sound. Torn from her lungs. Her heart,
twisted knot, hot blood rivering
to the twenty-six pounding bones of her feet.
Just weeks before
I watched a bear and her cubs run down a mountain
in the twilight.
So buoyant, they seemed to be tumbling
to the meadow,
to the yarrow root they dug, rocking
to wrest it from the hard ground, fattening for winter.
They were breathing what looked like gladness.
But that other mother . . .
Her massive head raised, desperate to catch their scent.
Each footfall a fracture in the earth’s crust.

“If You Knew,” Ellen Bass

What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.

A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

“Revolutionary Letter #15,” Diane Di Prima”Revolutionary Letter #15,”

When you seize Columbia, when you
seize Paris, take
the media, tell the people what you’re doing
what you’re up to and why and how you mean
to do it, how they can help, keep the news
coming, steady, you have 70 years
of media conditioning to combat, it is a wall
you must get through, somehow, to reach
the instinctive man, who is struggling like a plant
for light, for air
//
when you seize a town, a campus, get hold of the power
stations, the water, the transportation,
forget to negotiate, forget how
to negotiate, don’t wait for De Gaulle or Kirk
to abdicate, they won’t, you are not
“demonstrating” you are fighting
a war, fight to win, don’t wait for Johnson or
Humphrey or Rockefeller, to agree to your terms
take what you need, “it’s free
because it’s yours”

“We Made It,” Sunni Patterson

So I’m from a stock
that pitch cocktail bombs and hand grenades.
We pour cayenne pepper around the perimeter of a building
to keep the police dogs at bay.
I’m the Panther Party
in the Desire Housing Projects in New Orleans.
I’m nigga turning the gun on the National Guards.
Take a long, long look.
I’m a cook in the kitchen
asking the missus to taste the dinner
take a long, long sip,
‘cuz death ain’t always this good.
It’s eyes popping out they sockets.
It’s a lifeless body rocking backwards and forwards.
It’s a boy stabbed forty-seven times
in front the church house.
It’s a man forty-three years old,
stuffing his penis in a nine-year-old girl’s mouth,
naw, death don’t always taste good
just don’t sound like something I want to eat often.
I hear them say
it was like a train came through the room
left mama so depressed she was unable to move
until this one day.
It was like a few months after the hurricane.
Husband and child found the trinity bloody in bed.
His wife, his son, his other daughter was dead,
and on the end table there was a letter that read,
it said, “I couldn’t stay here,
not for one minute longer,
and it made no sense for me to leave here alone,
’cause who would take care of my babies
with they mama gone?”
I’m telling you, death ain’t always good.
It’ll leave you fending for water and food.
It’ll riddle up your body in the Audubon Ballroom
They’ll El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz you,
crown you king, then dethrone you in a Lorraine Hotel.
They’ll disfigure your body to where folks can’t tell
if you Emmett Till or not,
tell the mama, “Keep that casket open,
let all the world see it ain’t just burning in Mississippi.”
Hell, it’s hot wherever you be,
from the rooftop to the cell block,
step on up to the auction block,
and bend over,
touch your toes,
son, show your teeth,
lift her titties,
examine his balls,
now, this damn near sound like a hip-hop song,
but it’s slavery at its peak,
a circus for all the freaks.
They’ll warn you, “Caution when you speak,”
can’t afford the truth to leak,
but will say “Blessed are the meek
and are the ones who make peace
and are the ones who are persecuted
for the sake of righteousness,”
for we say theirs is the kingdom,
earth is their inheritance.
So no matter how treacherous,
they’ll try to trap us in them trenches,
and they’ll dig deeper ditches,
but all that matters is this.
Which side will we pick,
which path will we choose.
either win or lose,
‘cuz death don’t come in vain,
not for us to remain enslaved
or our spirits to remain in cages.
It comes so we might be courageous
to fulfill our obligation to our God and all creation,
and stand in determination,
able to look death right in the face
and say we made it,
we made it,
we made it,
we made it.

“In Winter,” Michael Ryan

At four o’clock it’s dark.
Today, looking out through dusk
at three gray women in stretch slacks
chatting in front of the post office,
their steps left and right and back
like some quick folk dance of kindness,
I remembered the winter we spent
crying in each other’s laps.
What could you be thinking at this moment?
How lovely and strange the gangly spines
of trees against a thickening sky
as you drive from the library
humming off-key? Or are you smiling
at an idea met in a book
the way you smiled with your whole body
the first night we talked?
I was so sure my love of you was perfect,
and the light today
reminded me of the winter you drove home
each day in the dark at four o’clock
and would come into my study to kiss me
despite mistake after mistake after mistake.

“I Want to Eat Bugs with You Underground,” Julie Danho

The scientist on the radio said that humans
will survive, and, at first, I was buoyed,
but she meant only some of us, the ones
living in tunnels, eating crickets to survive
when the rest had died from mass starvation
after droughts lasted longer and seas rose faster
and wars killed bigger because everyone
wanted what little was left. I’d be fine
with being one of the billions dead unless
you were still alive. Under a down comforter
or by a trash fire, I want to be where
you are. You know how poorly I dig holes,
how angry I get when I’m cold, how twice
I’ve accidentally maced myself and still
you’d take me with you down into the earth,
give me more than my fair share of caterpillar.
Few believe we’re in the middle of the end
because ruin can happen as slowly as plaque
blocking arteries, and only later feels as true
as your hand resting on my hip, both of us
quiet as roses waiting for the bees to arrive.

“Choices,” Tess Gallagher

I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.

–for Drago Štambuk

Tess Gallagher, "Choices" from Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2011 by Tess Gallagher.