Tag: on poetry

“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.

“Spring comes to Mid-Ohio in a Holy Shower of Stars,” Terry Hummer

On the clearest night of the early spring of my life,
An Easter Sunday, come in March b the luck of the draw,
I saw a streak of light in the sky like the middle finger of God,
But it did not come down on me. It was the brightness
William James heard about
                                      from a housewife-turned-saintly spiritualist
That she said she always she always saw then the dead were about to touch her In that certain way the dead have. I saw it effloresce and vanish.
Standing there on the road next to the blacked-out body of an oak,
I wanted to trance myself into the past, to get in touch
With the ectoplasmic other side.
                                              I wanted some strangeness to speak
Out the unpragmatic crystal ball of my larynx and name itself,
In the timbre I whisper to lovers in, my life. But then another
Finger gestured godlike halfway down from the zenith, another, another,
And the sky burned with the print of a whole left hand.
That’s the way it works:
                                  brilliance, a slap in the face.
Years later now, in winter, when he rusted iron wheels
Of snowplows gave their spiritual groans in the heat-dead midnight streets,
I would dream God’s immaculate body could suddenly be struck
With a human palm the color of fever, and darken, and die
But that might in mid-Ohio
                                    I knew that housewife knew
When James sat in her dingy seance parlor with his notebook clumsy on his knee:
That nothing you have ever dreamed of saying comes of its own free will.
It has to be beaten out of you, word by impossible word, until the dead
Spread themselves in your flesh, like March dogwood spreads through the dark
And you speak,
                      and a stranger writes everything down.