Poems for Poetry Journals - Kelley Miller's Educational Forum



Poems for Poetry Journals

1. “For the Sleepwalkers” Edward Hirsch

Tonight I want to say something wonderful

for the sleepwalkers who have so much faith

in their legs, so much faith in the invisible

arrow carved into the carpet, the worn path

that leads to the stairs instead of the window,

the gaping doorway instead of the seamless mirror.

I love the way that sleepwalkers are willing

to step out of their bodies into the night,

to raise their arms and welcome the darkness,

palming the blank spaces, touching everything.

Always they return home safely, like blind men

who know it is morning by feeling shadows.

And always they wake up as themselves again.

That's why I want to say something astonishing

like: Our hearts are leaving our bodies.

Our hearts are thirsty black handkerchiefs

flying through the trees at night, soaking up

the darkest beams of moonlight, the music

of owls, the motion of wind-torn branches.

And now our hearts are thick black fists

flying back to the glove of our chests.

We have to learn to trust our hearts like that.

We have to learn the desperate faith of sleep-

walkers who rise out of their calm beds

and walk through the skin of another life.

We have to drink the stupefying cup of darkness

and wake up to ourselves, nourished and surprised.

2. “Home Is So Sad” Philip Larkin

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,

Shaped in the comfort of the last to go

As if to win them back. Instead, bereft

Of anyone to please, it withers so,

Having no heart to put aside the theft.

And turn again to what it started as,

A joyous shot at how things ought to be,

Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:

Look at the pictures and the cutlery.

The music in the piano stool. That vase.

3. “A Work Of Artifice” Marge Piercy

The bonsai tree

in the attractive pot

could have grown eighty feet tall

on the side of a mountain

till split by lightning.

But a gardener

carefully pruned it.

It is nine inches high.

Every day as he

whittles back the branches

the gardener croons,

It is your nature

to be small and cozy,

domestic and weak;

how lucky, little tree,

to have a pot to grow in.

With living creatures

one must begin very early

to dwarf their growth:

the bound feet,

the crippled brain,

the hair in curlers,

the hands you

love to touch.

4. “The Secret” Denise Levertov

Two girls discover

the secret of life

in a sudden line of

poetry.

I who don't know the

secret wrote

the line. They

told me

(through a third person)

they had found it

but not what it was

not even

what line it was. No doubt

by now, more than a week

later, they have forgotten

the secret,

the line, the name of

the poem. I love them

for finding what

I can't find,

and for loving me

for the line I wrote,

and for forgetting it

so that

a thousand times, till death

finds them, they may

discover it again, in other

lines

in other

happenings. And for

wanting to know it,

for

assuming there is

such a secret, yes,

for that

most of all.

5. “Wood Sculpture” Linda Hogan (Chickasaw)

WHAT FELLED YOU is important

in some way. Not the thud

of the fall that broke up

your tender limbs. But the sound

of your longing for me

to find fissures and gouge

around in search of stronger

places in sturdy parts.

Something could be made out

of all this bulk. Prune off

fragile boughs, remove the bark,

soften the smooth of such pale

sub-skin that has hidden through

a thousand gales, and upright

until this last one. It is

not the last. But lie still

while I rub on tung oil, still

and I'll tatoo mine next

to old initials in deep

grain and story rings, rings

layer by layer smoothed

and oiled, now freshly marked

in bold, blonde letters surrounded

by a simple jackknifed heart.

6. “My Father’s Song” Simon Ortiz

Wanting to say things,

I miss my father tonight.

His voice, the slight catch,

the depth from his thin chest,

the tremble of emotion

in something he has just said

to his son, his song:

We planted corn one Spring at Acu—

we planted several times

But this one particular time

I remember the soft damp sand

in my hand.

My father had stopped at one point

to show me an overturned furrow;

the plowshare had unearthed

the burrow nest of a mouse

in the soft moist sand.

Very gently, he scooped tiny pink animals

into the palm of his hand

and told me to touch them.

We took them to the edge

of the field and put them in the shade

of a sand moist clod.

I remember the very softness

of cool and warm sand and tiny alive mice

and my father saying things.

7. “I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move” Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich

We watched from the house

as the river grew, helpless

and terrible in its unfamiliar body.   

Wrestling everything into it,

the water wrapped around trees

until their life-hold was broken.

They went down, one by one,

and the river dragged off their covering.

Nests of the herons, roots washed to bones,   

snags of soaked bark on the shoreline:   

a whole forest pulled through the teeth   

of the spillway. Trees surfacing

singly, where the river poured off

into arteries for fields below the reservation.

When at last it was over, the long removal,   

they had all become the same dry wood.   

We walked among them, the branches   

whitening in the raw sun.

Above us drifted herons,

alone, hoarse-voiced, broken,

settling their beaks among the hollows.

Grandpa said, These are the ghosts of the tree people   

moving among us, unable to take their rest.

Sometimes now, we dream our way back to the heron dance.   

Their long wings are bending the air   

into circles through which they fall.   

They rise again in shifting wheels.   

How long must we live in the broken figures   

their necks make, narrowing the sky.

8. “The Man from Washington” James Welch (Blackfeet)

The end came easy for most of us.

Packed away in our crude beginnings

in some far corner of a flat world,

we didn’t expect much more

than firewood and buffalo robes

to keep us warm. The man came down,

a slouching dwarf with rainwater eyes,

and spoke to us. He promised

that treaties would be signed, and

everyone –

man, woman and child – would be inoculated

against a world in which we had no part,

a world of money, promise and disease.

9. “The Possibility” James Fenton

The lizard on the wall, engrossed,

The sudden silence from the wood

Are telling me that I have lost

The possibility of good.

I know this flower is beautiful

And yesterday it seemed to be,

It opened like a crimson hand.

It was not beautiful to me.

I know that work is beautiful.

It is a boon. It is a good.

Unless my working were a way

Of squandering my solitude.

And solitude was beautiful

When i was sure that I was strong.

I thought it was a medium

In which to grow, but I was wrong.

The jays are swearing in the wood.

The lizard moves with ugly speed.

The flower closes like a fist.

The possibility recedes.

Rita Dove –

“Adolescence – I”

In water-heavy nights behind grandmother's porch

We knelt in the tickling grass and whispered:

Linda's face hung before us, pale as a pecan,

And it grew wise as she said:

     "A boy's lips are soft,

     As soft as baby's skin."

The air closed over her words.

A firefly whirred in the air, and in the distance

I could hear streetlamps ping

Into miniature suns

Against a feathery sky.

“Adolescence – II”

Although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting.

Sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert.

Venetian blinds slice up the moon; the tiles quiver in pale strips.

Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round

As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines.

They bring the scent of licorice. One sits in the washbowl,

One on the bathtub edge; one leans against the door.

"Can you feel it yet?" they whisper.

I don't know what to say, again. They chuckle,

Patting their sleek bodies with their hands.

"Well, maybe next time." And they rise,

Glittering like pools of ink under moonlight,

And vanish. I clutch at the ragged holes

They leave behind, here at the edge of darkness.

Night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue.

“Adolescence – III”

With Dad gone, Mom and I worked

The dusky rows of tomatoes.

As they glowed orange in sunlight

And rotted in shadows, I too

Grew orange and softer, swelling out

Starched cotton slips.

The texture of twilight made me think of

Lengths of Dotted Swiss.  In my room

I wrapped scarred knees in dresses

That once went to big-band dances;

I baptized my earlobes with rosewater.

Along the window-sill, the lipstick stubs

Glittered in their steel shells.

 

Looking out at the rows of clay

And chicken manure, I dreamed how it would happen;

He would meet me by the blue spruce,

A carnation over his heart, saying,

"I have come for you, Madam;

I have loved you in my dreams."

At his touch, the scabs would fall away.

Over his shoulder, I see my father coming toward us:

He carries his tears in a bowl,

And blood hangs in the pine-soaked air.

11. “The Pomegranate” Eavan Boland

The only legend I have ever loved is

The story of a daughter lost in hell.

And found and rescued there.

Love and blackmail are the gist of it.

Ceres and Persephone the names.

And the best thing about the legend is

I can enter it anywhere. And have.

As a child in exile in

A city of fogs and strange consonants,

I read it first and at first I was

An exiled child in the crackling dusk of

The underworld, the stars blighted. Later

I walked out in a summer twilight

Searching for my daughter at bed-time.

When she came running I was ready

To make any bargain to keep her.

I carried her back past whitebeams

And wasps and honey-scented buddleias.

But I was Ceres then and I knew

Winter was in store for every leaf

On every tree on that road.

Was inescapable for each one we passed.

And for me.

It is winter

and the stars are hidden.

I climb the stairs and stand where I can see

My child asleep beside her teen magazines,

Her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.

The pomegranate! How did I forget it?

She could have come home and been safe

And ended the story and all

Our heart-broken searching but she reached

Out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.

She put out her hand and pulled down

The French sound for apple and

The noise of stone and the proof

That even in the place of death,

At the heart of legend, in the midst

Of rocks full of unshed tears

Ready to be diamonds by the time

The story was told, a child can be

Hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.

The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.

The suburb has cars and cable television.

The veiled stars are above ground.

It is another world. But what else

Can a mother give her daughter but such

Beautiful rifts in time?

If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.

The legend will be hers as well as mine.

She will enter it. As I have.

She will wake up. She will hold

the papery flushed skin in her hand.

And to her lips. I will say nothing.

12. “The Gift” by Li-Young Lee

Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm

my father recited a story in a low voice.

I watched his lovely face and not the blade.

Before the story ended, he’d removed

the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,

but hear his voice still, a well

of dark water, a prayer.

And I recall his hands,

two measures of tenderness

he laid against my face,

the flames of discipline

he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon

you would have thought you saw a man

planting something in a boy’s palm,

a silver tear, a tiny flame.

Had you followed that boy

you would have arrived here,

where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down

so carefully she feels no pain.

Watch as I lift the splinter out.

I was seven when my father

took my hand like this,

and I did not hold that shard

between my fingers and think,

Metal that will bury me,

christen it Little Assassin,

Ore Going Deep for My Heart.

And I did not lift up my wound and cry,

Death visited here!

I did what a child does

when he’s given something to keep.

I kissed my father.

13. “The Garden of Love” William Blake

I laid me down upon a bank,

Where Love lay sleeping;

I heard among the rushes dank

Weeping, weeping.

Then I went to the heath and the wild,

To the thistles and thorns of the waste;

And they told me how they were beguiled,

Driven out, and compelled to the chaste.

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen;

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut

And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;

So I turned to the Garden of Love

That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tombstones where flowers should be;

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires.

14. "When I was one-and-twenty..." A. E. Housman (1859-1936)

When I was one-and-twenty

I heard a wise man say,

'Give crowns and pounds and guineas

But not your heart away;

Give pearls away and rubies

But keep your fancy free.'

But I was one-and-twenty,

No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty

I heard him say again,

'The heart out of the bosom

Was never given in vain;

'Tis paid with sighs a plenty

And sold for endless rue.'

And I am two-and-twenty,

And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.

15. “Incident” Countee Cullen

Once riding in old Baltimore,

Heart-filled, head-filled with glee;

I saw a Baltimorean

Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,

And he was no whit bigger,

And so I smiled, but he poked out

His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore

From May until December;

Of all the things that happened there

That's all that I remember.

16. “Gretel in Darkness” Louise Glück

Louise Gluck

This is the world we wanted.

All who would have seen us dead

are dead. I hear the witch’s cry

break in the moonlight through a sheet

of sugar: God rewards.

Her tongue shrivels into gas. . . .

             Now, far from women’s arms

and memory of women, in our father’s hut

we sleep, are never hungry.

Why do I not forget?

My father bars the door, bars harm

from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,

summer afternoons you look at me as though

you meant to leave,

as though it never happened.

But I killed for you. I see armed firs,

the spires of that gleaming kiln—

Nights I turn to you to hold me

but you are not there.

Am I alone? Spies

hiss in the stillness, Hansel,

we are there still and it is real, real,

that black forest and the fire in earnest.

17. “Mid-Term Break” Seamus Heaney

I sat all morning in the college sick bay

Counting bells knelling classes to a close.

At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying--

He had always taken funerals in his stride--

And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram

When I came in, and I was embarrassed

By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"

Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,

Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.

At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived

With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops

And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him

For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,

He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.

No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

18. “A Whispered Chant of Loneliness” Luci Tapahonso

I awaken at 1:20 then sit in the dark living room.

Numbers click time on silent machines.

Everyone sleeps.

Down the street, music hums, someone laughs,

It floats: an unseen breath through the window screen

My father uses a cane and each day

he walks outside to sit in the southern sunlight.

He reads the National Geographic, the Daily Times,

and the Gallup Independent.

He remembers all this and minute details of my life,

Sometimes he tells my children smiling.

His voice is an old rhythm of my childhood.

He reads us stories of Goldilocks and the Three Bears

and a pig named "Greased Lightning."

He held us close and sang throaty songs,

and danced Yei bicheii in the kitchen.

His voice is a steady presence in my mothering.

Some years ago, he handed me a cup of coffee

and told me that sometimes leaving a relationship

was an act of abiding strength.

He told me that my children would not be sad always.

Tonight I want to hear him speak to me.

He thinks I look like my mother did at 38.

Just last week, I heard her laughter in my own.

This winter, my life is a series of motions.

Each morning, I get up and shower,

have breakfast for my daughter,

drink a cup of coffee, then warm the car for five minutes.

I continue. My days: an undercurrent of fear,

an outpouring of love,

a whispered chant of loneliness.

19. “I Give You Back” Joy Harjo

I release you, my beautiful and terrible

fear. I release you. You were my beloved

and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you

as myself. I release you with all the

pain I would know at the death of

my daughters.

You are not my blood anymore.

I give you back to the white soldiers

who burned down my home, beheaded my children,

raped and sodomized my brothers and sisters.

I give you back to those who stole the

food from our plates when we were starving.

I release you, fear, because you hold

these scenes in front of me and I was born

with eyes that can never close.

I release you, fear, so you can no longer

keep me naked and frozen in the winter,

or smothered under blankets in the summer.

I release you

I release you

I release you

I release you

I am not afraid to be angry.

I am not afraid to rejoice.

I am not afraid to be black.

I am not afraid to be white.

I am not afraid to be hungry.

I am not afraid to be full.

I am not afraid to be hated.

I am not afraid to be loved.

to be loved, to be loved, fear.

Oh, you have choked me, but I gave you the leash.

You have gutted me but I gave you the knife.

You have devoured me, but I laid myself across the fire.

You held my mother down and raped her,

but I gave you the heated thing.

I take myself back, fear.

You are not my shadow any longer.

I won’t hold you in my hands.

You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice

my belly, or in my heart my heart

my heart my heart

But come here, fear

I am alive and you are so afraid

of dying.

20. “Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock” Wallace Stevens

The houses are haunted

By white night-gowns.

None are green,

Or purple with green rings,

Or green with yellow rings,

Or yellow with blue rings.

None of them are strange,

With socks of lace

And beaded ceintures.

People are not going

To dream of baboons and periwinkles.

Only, here and there, an old sailor,

Drunk and asleep in his boots,

Catches tigers

In red weather.

21. “The Writer” Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house

Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,

My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing

From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys

Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff

Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:

I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,

As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.

A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,

And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor

Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling

Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;

How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;

And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,

We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature

Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove

To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,

For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits

Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,

Beating a smooth course for the right window

And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,

Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish

What I wished you before, but harder.

22. “Toads” Philip Larkin

Why should I let the toad work

Squat on my life?

Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork

And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils

With its sickening poison -

Just for paying a few bills!

That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:

Lecturers, lispers,

Losels, loblolly-men, louts-

They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes

With fires in a bucket,

Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-

they seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,

Their unspeakable wives

Are skinny as whippets - and yet

No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough

To shout Stuff your pension!

But I know, all too well, that's the stuff

That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like

Squats in me, too;

Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,

And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney

My way of getting

The fame and the girl and the money

All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other

One's spiritual truth;

But I do say it's hard to lose either,

When you have both.

23. “Moira” Phillis Levin

A day comes when nothing matters

And nothing will suffice.

The heart say: I cannot.

The soul say: I am not.

The window whose frame

Once held dawn

Gleams all night in desolation,

And one tree

Untouched by blight

Offers a fruit you do not refuse,

An anguish impossible to conceive

Until this lucky day.

Weigh it in your hands, so heavy,

So light: is there more to wish for?

24. “Unveiling” Linda Pastan

In the cemetery

a mile away

from where we used to live

my aunts and mother,

my father and uncles lie

in two long rows,

almost the way

they used to sit around

the long planked table

at family dinners.

And walking beside

the graves today, down

one straight path

and up the next,

I don’t feel sad

for them, just left out a bit,

as if they kept

from me the kind

of grown-up secret

they used to share

back then, something

I’m not quite ready yet

to learn.

25. “Barbie Doll” Marge Piercy

This girlchild was born as usual

and presented dolls that did pee-pee

and miniature GE stoves and irons

and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy.

Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said:

You have a great big nose and fat legs.

She was healthy, tested intelligent,

possessed strong arms and back,

abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity.

She went to and fro apologizing.

Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs.

She was advised to play coy,

exhorted to come on hearty,

exercise, diet, smile and wheedle.

Her good nature wore out

like a fan belt.

So she cut off her nose and her legs

and offered them up.

In the casket displayed on satin she lay

with the undertaker's cosmetics painted on,

a turned-up putty nose,

dressed in a pink and white nightie.

Doesn't she look pretty? everyone said.

Consummation at last.

To every woman a happy ending.

26. “For De Lawd” Lucille Clifton

people say they have a hard time

understanding how I

go on about my business

playing my Ray Charles

hollering at the kids—

seem like my Afro

cut off in some old image

would show I got a long memory

and I come from a line

of black and going on women

who got used to making it through murdered sons

and who grief kept on pushing

who fried chicken

ironed

swept off the back steps

who grief kept

for their still alive sons

for their sons coming

for their sons gone

just pushing

in the inner city

or

like we call it

home

we think a lot about uptown

and the silent nights

and the houses straight as

dead men

and the pastel lights

and we hang on to our no place

happy to be alive

and in the inner city

or

like we call it

home

27. “Poetics” A. R. Ammons

I look for the way

things will turn

out spiralling from a center,

the shape

things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white

touched black at branches

will stand out

wind-glittering

totally its apparent self:

I look for the forms

things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,

how a thing will

unfold:

not the shape on paper -- though

that, too -- but the

uninterfering means on paper:

not so much looking for the shape

as being available

to any shape that may be

summoning itself

through me

from the self not mine but ours.

28. “Blackberrying” Sylvia Plath

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,

Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,

A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea

Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries

Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes

Ebon in the hedges, fat

With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.

I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.

They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks ---

Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.

Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.

I do not think the sea will appear at all.

The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.

I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,

Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.

The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.

One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

The only thing to come now is the sea.

From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,

Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.

These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.

I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me

To the hills' northern face, and the face is orange rock

That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space

Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths

Beating and beating at an intractable metal.

29. “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” Walt Whitman

[pic]HEN I heard the learn'd astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

30. “in time of daffodils” E. E. Cummings

in time of daffodils(who know

the goal of living is to grow)

forgetting why,remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim

the aim of waking is to dream,

remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze

our now and here with paradise)

forgetting if,remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond

whatever mind may comprehend,

remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be

(when time from time shall set us free)

forgetting me,remember me

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download