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Best Poems Written by Emanuel Carter

Below are the all-time best Emanuel Carter poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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Enchant Me

ENCHANT ME!
(A Contemporary Animist’s Prayer) 

To the shared breath of life:

Enchant me!
Whisper to me in the cadence and rhymes, 
the deeper susurrations of this tellurian realm
with its numinous places that already call out
my name!
Talk to me about my mother and father and
the wonderful moment that I came to be and
their scary audacious aspirations for me
Talk to me about my brothers and sisters, my
neighbors and friends, my mentors and guides
and the myriad ways they have helped me
to be
And when I waiver beneath the awesome
requirements of being a man in this precious
precarious era and place, speak softly to
my wife who knows all that I am and whose
daily decision to share and engage makes me
sacred and solid, a community elder whose
wisdom and hope, whose experience and love
might counter the insults, the violence and lies;
the revenge, the injustice and depth of despair
that passes for normal in the toxic discourse
of our once open and wonderful land!
Spare me the discourse of the liberal intellect, 
the conservative truth, the academic exploration,
the Anglo-German Protestant search for consensus
among key words and concepts and peer-reviewed
papers that garner our tenure at a safe enough
distance from the problems at hand! 
Walk away now from the carefully crafted and
cold equivocation, the intellectual ambivalence,
the postmodern preference for the appearance of
process even as the have-nots are hassled and
harried, held down and hammered in our poisonous
patterns of policies, procedures and participatory
practices which, guaranteed to fail, we visit 
on the poor - shameful behaviors revealing our
reluctance to do the right thing and to do the
right thing, right now! 
Remind me of a time when animal and plant,
wet earth and stone, the explosive attributes of 
water and fire and the breezes we breathe, were
souls intertwined, long before the concepts of
resource extraction, subsidized extinction, 
persecution of the other, and the profitable rituals
of slow suicide…… 

Help me return to the restless pulsations of an
earlier time when the jaguar and lion, as fierce as
they were, were no match for the spears, the
dark painted faces, the muscular commitment that
protected the fires of the community at night
but admitted any strangers in fear their lives
Help me return to my ancestral world of the drum
and the poem, of the dance and the hunt, the animistic
perspective of the human condition as a shared
breath of life among embodied souls in a
shimmering world! 

Then enchant me and make me complicit!
Help me sing and contribute to the generous rhythms
of fearless intent, where the tough and the confident 
make room once again for the tired, the poor, 
the different, the lost, the ambitious, the driven
and the irresistible evolution of the concept of “WE”,
not us and those others but me and another, and 
another, together, sacred and enduring like the
bright-burning lamp that our Lady in the Harbor
holds up to the world!
 
Let this come to pass, and ambivalent as I am
about the nature of God, the words on my lips
until the end of my days will be Hallelu Yah,
Hallelujah, Alleluia, Blessed Be and Amen!   


To enchant: To use a “rhythmed murmur”, an incantation,
to conjure an image, to cast a spell, to take one’s soul
to a spiritual place!

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Boxer

BOXER

The late October day
marked the last of the tragic
encounters framed by the ropes
he preferred to the streets where a 
journeyman boxer needs more than
taped hands for the troubles he sees

There had been no title shot, no top
ten ranking, just fifteen years of blows
to the body, to the head, to the soul - 
volcanic eruptions, fissures and 
earthquakes, myriad tremors in the
plate tectonics of the fist-pummeled
brain 
He needed sixty more seconds of glaring
bright lights and a bored, bloody crowd
in a small-time arena in a town far away

Sensing his moment, he slipped to the
right, flicked two stinging jabs, bobbing
and weaving, then three quick strikes and
a pivot to the left that put him flat on his
feet for a violent combination with a 
killing uppercut that soothed the roar in
his head, reduced the blur in his vision,
sent the menacing shadow to the canvas
for the count then left him out on the
sidewalks working, breathing hard,
dancing and pivoting like a big circus
bear, punching the air on a cold
afternoon before wary passing 
strangers who tried not to notice,
in a town far away!

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Ritual

RITUAL

The anthropology professor
said Iroquois ways were a fading reflection, 
a cultural trace of a poetic narrative of indigenous
wisdom, tribal traditions that marry the spirit of
a primitive people to enduring kinship with the
earth and the sky

The anthropology professor called the delicate
touch the definitive expression of intimate knowledge,
giving meaning and myth to mystical caprice in the
cardinal winds, to sustaining abundance in the deep gray
lakes of a primeval forest beneath the cyclical rhythms
of a lunar calendar that is daily affirmed
by the rising sun

The anthropology professor said the bloated
ambitions of mercantile man, the rapacious imperatives
of voracious desire, the arrogant corrective technology
of guilt which acknowledges nature as interchangeable 
scenery for the story of our lives, should become like the
methods and modes of harmony, that the way of 
Six Nations be the simple foundation for symbiotic 
behavior in the millennium to come

And the anthropology student was twenty
and tough, a perpetual hunter, a perennial warrior,
attuned to the season of bounty and challenge, alert to 
nuance of movement and sound, knew the intricate ways
of the Haudenosaunee and the signature rites that
prepared them for war

To honor the creator
he came through the mists of a cold spring morning
like wind in the trees without source or destination, 
embodied the essence of some terrible presence – 
an unexplained whisper in an isolated place, the feather of
a wing beyond peripheral vision, perhaps the shadow of
a serpent beyond the edge of the nerves, something too
close, something suddenly striking in the ghostly 
memories of ritual violence of “the danse lacrosse”,
“dehuntshigawa’es”, baaga’adowe, a game called
begadwe,  little brother of war!

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Be Careful

BE CAREFUL      

Be careful what you ask for
One day life is simple, you ask
a female colleague at a partnering
organization not to call you “doctor”,
“professor” and such, then she says 
your name the way a symphony orchestra
tears into the finale of a spirited overture
by Tchaikovsky or Rossini and suddenly
your feeling like the primus pilus, the 
first violin, the anchor baton, the broad-
shouldered stroke in an eight-oared shell
or the seminal man with genes of genius
in his jeans: powerful, confident, perhaps
dangerously exposed – a burden you
don’t need
If you’re only doing business,
let formality play its role!

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Taking the Oath

TAKING THE OATH
For those who are born again through the Oath of Citizenship	
at the Onondaga County Courthouse, Syracuse, New York!  

The morning prayers over
the neighbor’s car cold, the ride
to the court house quiet as snowfall,
the city enshrouded by a gradient of 
gray between the darkness of dawn
and a day without sun
The oath would be simple, something
sacred and short, syllables of English
welcome as the script that conveys the
Qur’an, once harsh-sounding words now
the potent poetics of opportunity
at hand
She will be Umm Almaliti, an American
name in a Dar-es-Salaam, as portable
as the infant asleep in her arms
She will work with her husband, send
her children to school, dark brown and
Berber, the mothers of their mother from
The Rif and The Atlas, the enduring
dynamics of water and stone and mountains
that murmur of hawks on the wind, the 
fathers of their father from Granada and
Sevilla through the dye-makers’ guilds
and the sinuous medinas of
Fez and Meknes 

Hand on her heart, she knows 
the gift in her life is not the promise
of eternity with a rough desert deity who
lets the nervous ulema be afraid of her                   
face and the lay of her hair, but the                        
courage to run quickly toward the
uncertain miracles of a precarious life
in a place with few rules on this scary blue
diamond in this corner of space

She is all the new people who come
to this land, the music of hope on the 
breezes of faith
She is all the new people who ever come
to this land; she is a needle of light, another
fragment of color in a reckless mosaic
unique on this earth 


Emanuel Carter

Details | Emanuel Carter Poem

Poem By Basho

POEM BY BASHO

We were quiet now,
still breathing deeply from
the sexual exertions of our
late middle age, guided by
the music, gliding toward a
landing through the ambient
haze of unconditional love

The Japanese singer with the
black eyes and hair and the
rising sun mouth, lived her 
rhythm and blues through the 
discipline of the koto, did a 
high soaring wail as the final
jetliner of the Syracuse evening
climbed toward the moon that 
was a cold silver smile above 
the snow-covered city where
we daily delight in the details 
of desire 

Our transition into clarity 
was the sonic antithesis of
a poem by Basho:

Seventeen seconds
of screaming haiku on a
February night!

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A Kind Reconsideration of the Abrahamic Faiths In a Difficult Time

A KIND RECONSIDERATION 
OF THE ABRAHAMIC FAITHS
IN A DIFFICULT TIME
I
I am interested in Moses,
the baby in the bulrushes
who eventually was able
to speak truth to power and
delivered his people to a
promised land
I am interested in Saul and
David and Solomon and a just
administration of a precarious
culture under Yahweh or El
in a dangerous location in the
antiquarian world
I understand (intellectually) the
desperate need during Babylonian
captivity for bringing folk tale and myth
and political history into a culture-specific
definition of law for the wandering
shepherd, the tiller of land, and  the
unyielding monotheist whose Covenant
with God made some people right and
other people wrong!
II
I am interested, too
in a brown-skinned man of fiery
intelligence from the City of Nazareth who,
though an ordinary Jew, managed eloquently
to speak truth to power about spirit
and duty, about service to all, and unconditional
love, and shattered the framework of codified law, 
be it Jewish or Roman, in a dangerous location in
the antiquarian world
I am sorry for the way that his messages
were gathered, re-worked and distorted, codified
and written as an alarming New Testament with
an unfathomable trinity and the adornments
of empire making some people righteous and
other folks wrong and trapping so many souls
between heaven and hell!

III
I am also interested
in the merchant of Mecca who saw in his
people the uplifting potential of a civilization
grounded deeply in the guidance of a merciful
God in a dangerous place in the antiquarian world
The impetus to “recite” led to unity of tribes
through the codification of “final” revelations 
from the “seal of the prophets” that made some
people right and other folks wrong as the good
word of Allah was spread from the Atlantic to
the borders of China, from the savannahs of 
Africa to the steep southern slopes of the
mountains of Europe
IV
The powerfully seductive
Abrahamic religions, bound by
“The Book” of Tenakh and New  Testament
“sealed” by Quran, have comforted many
since their explosive beginnings in the Sinai,
the Judean, the Arabian deserts that were 
dangerous locations in the antequarian world
But the codification that renders the law
understandable to the many, but makes some
people right and so many people wrong can easily
lead us to isolation and conflict, to conquest and 
oppression, an uncomfortable confinement in 
doctrine and ritual that splinters humankind into
the spiritual antithesis of the one shared breath our
animistic ancestors thought united all life!
Perhaps the global transmission of folk tales
and myth and political history about spirit and
duty, about service to all and unconditional love
can be available to all without the codification
of doctrine and ritual that make us righteous
and isolated soldiers of god when all of us could
be such determined disseminators of kindness,
cooperation and love for one another and stewards 
of the life giving forces at hand
V
The entirety of this planet is a dangerous
place in contemporary times when
a capricious, arrogant and dangerous presence
patrols the streets of my beloved community with
its vicious attack dogs Carbon, Climate-Change
and Covid, who menace my neighbors without
mercy or constraint
But the human condition is a slowly evolving
divine work of art, a sacred creation, a spiritual
journey in a numinous place, and its cumulative
voice is a gospel ensemble assuring ourselves that,
Abrahamic or not, our good stewardship is gonna
 rise up and shine,  gonna do the right thing,
gonna make it alright on this contentious blue
sphere where we thrive and survive!  
If there is a creator and benevolent mentor
even half as engaged as these well-meaning
religions vehemently and desperately proclaim,
may it respond to our prayers and offer
us guidance in these difficult times
on how to do better than we do!

Details | Emanuel Carter Poem

Window Seat

WINDOW SEAT

Sitting beside him in the window seat as they
taxied for take-off at the end of the day, she was
nubile and pretty, as young as his daughter, nearly
perfect in the way of a late-autumn sunset distributing
itself over olive-brown skin, coffee-colored eyes, an
unmistakable aura of the concept of duende that interpreted
the mysteries of twilight and flight and the challenges of
life through the lyrical cadences of Andalucia,
Castilla-La Mancha, and Castilla-Leon
 
He remembered the first time that his
beautiful wife, the renegade rose in a botanical garden,
kept company with him on a visit to Spain:
She was apprehensive on the plane, excited in Madrid, 
underneath him in Sevilla; she misbehaved in Barcelona,
and was full of questions in Granada that he answered in
Toledo while she replaced her scarlet lipstick standing
naked in the mirror

Philadelphia to Madrid takes six-and-a-half hours
at six-hundred miles per hour, the big Airbus jetliner navigating
the darkness beneath the fingernail crescent of a waxing
harvest moon, yet its running lights flashing and its reassuring
roar, were simply dissipating signatures like the fragrances and
curves of the sleeping girl beside him, swallowed along the
route by altitude and distance, by the perpetual fluctuations
of the unruly sea below, by the unexpected pleasures
of a marriage that really matters – like with that red rose
renegade who’s often naked in the mirror, always present
in their bed, and every day a guiding essence for
his aging, restless soul!

 
Duende (Spanish): (1) in flamenco - a spiritual or emotional
bond between performer and audience created by the performer’s
intense concentration and passion; (2) in general – authenticity of
emotion and expression – soul!

Details | Emanuel Carter Poem

Garden

GARDEN

She smelled like the colors
of an intricate garden in which
every geometry and every dimension,
every expression of soft composition,
had the dominant splash, the pervasive
aura, the relentlessly visible subtext
of red

Centered and rooted in the soil
of tradition, North African shawl
over white silk blouse and long black
skirt, the high Cuban heels and the sheer
black stockings, the curly black hair over
dark honey skin all smelled like the gurgling
of cold running water through the granite 
canals that sparkled like sunlight broken
by motion in the highest-walled gardens
of Al-Andalus

“I’m getting older” she said
clicking her heels as they walked
toward coffee at theater intermission
where women of high fashion and girls
without clue set an aesthetic standard that
smelled like the storms at the end of October
that dislodge the leaves, the petals, the last
fruits, and render the garden a study of lost
order overwhelmed by forces without
purpose or merit

“I want you” he said,
sure that every person on the 
atrium floor was fully aware that
the finest theater in the darkening shadows
was she in the red shawl and the gentleman
beside her, that she smelled like the languages
of medinas and plazas, of harems and courtyards
and the pervasive odors of espresso and wine,
perfume and tobacco, lipstick and roses, that 
the breeze of her breath made him sway
with the scents of the colors of night

Shall we?” he said 
and she turned, saying nothing,
began walking slowly through the
flowers and vines with the soft sexy
rhythm that only high heels can offer 
And reaching their seats, this alluring 
composition of red breezes and smells
and Mediterranean gardens of poetry and
song, mother of his children and the 
personification of all he know about plants,
kissed him lightly on the lips and looked
toward the stage “Yes we shall” she softly
whispered like a nocturnal breeze
in a garden where the walls smell like
oranges and jasmine and the
color of red

Details | Emanuel Carter Poem

Drum Circle - February 16, 2018

DRUM CIRCLE
FEBRUARY 16, 2018

Tonight we talked to the earth
with our drums, our pulsating prayers
a rhythm and blues, a galloping growl,
an angry lament, a wretched outpouring
at the new Hunger Moon, at the latest mass
shooting, at a winter of despair in an amoral
era of high-tech and hate!
The Yoruba wail and the Lakota chant,
the bells on the drums and the tattooed dancer
joined with the chorus of tired social workers
and special-ed teachers, jet engine mechanics,
and the mysterious ascetic in the black turtle
neck whose shock of white hair was a bright
moral beacon in a room of the sad, of the
angry, and the mad seeking forgiveness and shelter
in the Gaian Intelligence that is host to our
souls and mothers our wounds when our arts and
our sciences can no longer explain the meaningless
violence, the one-upmanship, and the perpetually
disagreeable political declarations at the center of 
our lives!
“Call Me!” She said, and the drummers grew
louder! “I said CALL ME!” she said, and we all
realized that she didn’t want praise or some fervent
demonstration through a ritual of worship, but the
heart of our hearts, the essence of our lives,
perhaps a promise to our mother to stop behaving
this way and to bathe in her waters, build circles of
stone, light our fires in the middle, and then…..
drum softly with conviction and dance with our
neighbors, reveling in the knowledge that
all we can discern is a gift from beyond,
a pulsating, breathing, nurturing anomaly
sacred, somehow, created only for us!