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Written by Fleda Brown | Create an image from this poem

I Write My Mother a Poem

Sometimes I feel her easing further into her grave, 
resigned, as always, and I have to come to her rescue. 
Like now, when I have so much else to do. Not that 

she'd want a poem. She would have been proud, of course, 
of all its mystery, involving her, but scared a little. 
Her eyes would have filled with tears. It always comes 

to that, I don't know why I bother. One gesture 
and she's gone down a well of raw feeling, and I'm left 
alone again. I avert my eyes, to keep from scaring her. 

On her dresser is one of those old glass bottles 
of Jergen's Lotion with the black label, a little round 
bottle of Mum deodorant, a white plastic tray 

with Avon necklaces and earrings, pennies, paper clips, 
and a large black coat button. I appear to be very 
interested in these objects, even interested in the sun 

through the blinds. It falls across her face, and not, 
as she changes the bed. She would rather have clean sheets 
than my poem, but as long as I don't bother her, she's glad 

to know I care. She's talked my father into taking 
a drive later, stopping for an A & W root beer. 
She is dreaming of foam on the glass, the tray propped 

on the car window. And trees, farmhouses, the expanse 
of the world as seen from inside the car. It is no 
use to try to get her out to watch airplanes 

take off, or walk a trail, or hear this poem 
and offer anything more than "Isn't that sweet!" 
Right now bombs are exploding in Kosovo, students 

shot in Colorado, and my mother is wearing a root beer 
mustache. Her eyes are unfocused, everything's root beer. 
I write root beer, root beer, to make her happy.

from Breathing In, Breathing Out, Anhinga Press, 2002
© 2000, Fleda Brown
(first published in The Southern Review, 36 [2000])


Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

My Perfect Rose

 At ten she came to me, three years ago,

There was ‘something between us’ even then;

Watching her write like Eliot every day,

Turn prose into haiku in ten minutes flat,

Write a poem in Greek three weeks from learning the alphabet;

Then translate it as ‘Sun on a tomb, gold place, small sacred horse’.

I never got over having her in the room, though

Every day she was impossible in a new way,

Stamping her foot like a naughty Enid Blyton child,

Shouting "Poets don’t do arithmetic!"

Or drawing caricatures of me in her book.

Then there were the ‘moments of vision’, her eyes

Dissolving the blank walls and made-up faces,

Genius painfully going through her paces,

The skull she drew, the withered chrysanthemum

And scarlet rose, ‘Descensus averno’, like Virgil,

I supposed.

Now three years later, in nylons and tight skirt,

She returns from grammar school to make a chaos of my room;

Plaiting a rose in her hair, I remember the words of her poem -

‘For love is wrong/in word, in deed/But you will be mine’

And now her promise to come the last two days of term,

"But not tell them", the diamond bomb exploding

In her eyes, the key left ‘Accidentally’ on my desk

And the faint surprise.
Written by Maya Angelou | Create an image from this poem

Men

When I was young, I used to
Watch behind the curtains
As men walked up and down the street. Wino men, old men.
Young men sharp as mustard.
See them. Men are always
Going somewhere.
They knew I was there. Fifteen
Years old and starving for them.
Under my window, they would pauses,
Their shoulders high like the
Breasts of a young girl,
Jacket tails slapping over
Those behinds,
Men.

One day they hold you in the
Palms of their hands, gentle, as if you
Were the last raw egg in the world. Then
They tighten up. Just a little. The
First squeeze is nice. A quick hug.
Soft into your defenselessness. A little
More. The hurt begins. Wrench out a
Smile that slides around the fear. When the
Air disappears,
Your mind pops, exploding fiercely, briefly,
Like the head of a kitchen match. Shattered.
It is your juice
That runs down their legs. Staining their shoes.
When the earth rights itself again,
And taste tries to return to the tongue,
Your body has slammed shut. Forever.
No keys exist.

Then the window draws full upon
Your mind. There, just beyond
The sway of curtains, men walk.
Knowing something.
Going someplace.
But this time, I will simply
Stand and watch.

Maybe.
Written by Charles Bukowski | Create an image from this poem

We Aint Got No Money Honey But We Got Rain

 call it the greenhouse effect or whatever
but it just doesn't rain like it used to.
I particularly remember the rains of the 
depression era.
there wasn't any money but there was
plenty of rain.
it wouldn't rain for just a night or
a day,
it would RAIN for 7 days and 7
nights
and in Los Angeles the storm drains
weren't built to carry off taht much
water
and the rain came down THICK and 
MEAN and
STEADY
and you HEARD it banging against
the roofs and into the ground
waterfalls of it came down
from roofs
and there was HAIL
big ROCKS OF ICE
bombing
exploding smashing into things
and the rain 
just wouldn't
STOP
and all the roofs leaked-
dishpans,
cooking pots
were placed all about;
they dripped loudly
and had to be emptied
again and
again.
the rain came up over the street curbings,
across the lawns, climbed up the steps and
entered the houses.
there were mops and bathroom towels,
and the rain often came up through the 
toilets:bubbling, brown, crazy,whirling,
and all the old cars stood in the streets,
cars that had problems starting on a 
sunny day,
and the jobless men stood
looking out the windows
at the old machines dying
like living things out there.
the jobless men,
failures in a failing time
were imprisoned in their houses with their
wives and children
and their
pets.
the pets refused to go out
and left their waste in 
strange places.
the jobless men went mad 
confined with
their once beautiful wives.
there were terrible arguments
as notices of foreclosure
fell into the mailbox.
rain and hail, cans of beans,
bread without butter;fried
eggs, boiled eggs, poached
eggs; peanut butter
sandwiches, and an invisible 
chicken in every pot.
my father, never a good man
at best, beat my mother
when it rained
as I threw myself
between them,
the legs, the knees, the
screams
until they
seperated.
"I'll kill you," I screamed
at him. "You hit her again
and I'll kill you!"
"Get that son-of-a-bitching
kid out of here!"
"no, Henry, you stay with
your mother!"
all the households were under 
seige but I believe that ours
held more terror than the
average.
and at night
as we attempted to sleep
the rains still came down
and it was in bed
in the dark
watching the moon against 
the scarred window
so bravely
holding out 
most of the rain,
I thought of Noah and the
Ark
and I thought, it has come
again.
we all thought
that.
and then, at once, it would 
stop.
and it always seemed to 
stop
around 5 or 6 a.m.,
peaceful then,
but not an exact silence
because things continued to
drip
 drip
 drip


and there was no smog then
and by 8 a.m.
there was a
blazing yellow sunlight,
Van Gogh yellow-
crazy, blinding!
and then
the roof drains
relieved of the rush of 
water
began to expand in the warmth:
PANG!PANG!PANG!
and everybody got up and looked outside
and there were all the lawns
still soaked
greener than green will ever
be
and there were birds
on the lawn
CHIRPING like mad,
they hadn't eaten decently 
for 7 days and 7 nights
and they were weary of 
berries
and
they waited as the worms
rose to the top,
half drowned worms.
the birds plucked them 
up
and gobbled them
down;there were
blackbirds and sparrows.
the blackbirds tried to
drive the sparrows off
but the sparrows,
maddened with hunger,
smaller and quicker,
got their
due.
the men stood on their porches
smoking cigarettes,
now knowing
they'd have to go out
there
to look for that job
that probably wasn't 
there, to start that car 
that probably wouldn't
start.
and the once beautiful
wives
stood in their bathrooms
combing their hair,
applying makeup,
trying to put their world back
together again,
trying to forget that
awful sadness that
gripped them,
wondering what they could
fix for 
breakfast.
and on the radio
we were told that
school was now
open.
and
soon
there I was
on the way to school,
massive puddles in the 
street,
the sun like a new
world,
my parents back in that
house,
I arrived at my classroom
on time.
Mrs. Sorenson greeted us
with, "we won't have our
usual recess, the grounds 
are too wet."
"AW!" most of the boys 
went.
"but we are going to do
something special at
recess," she went on,
"and it will be
fun!"
well, we all wondered
what that would
be
and the two hour wait
seemed a long time
as Mrs.Sorenson
went about
teaching her
lessons.
I looked at the little
girls, they looked so 
pretty and clean and
alert,
they sat still and
straight
and their hair was 
beautiful
in the California
sunshine.
the the recess bells rang 
and we all waited for the 
fun.
then Mrs. Sorenson told us:
"now, what we are going to
do is we are going to tell
each other what we did 
during the rainstorm!
we'll begin in the front row
and go right around!
now, Michael, you're first!. . ."
well, we all began to tell
our stories, Michael began
and it went on and on,
and soon we realized that
we were all lying, not
exactly lying but mostly
lying and some of the boys
began to snicker and some 
of the girls began to give
them dirty looks and
Mrs.Sorenson said,
"all right! I demand a
modicum of silence
here!
I am interested in what
you did
during the rainstorm
even if you
aren't!"
so we had to tell our 
stories and they were
stories.
one girl said that
when the rainbow first
came 
she saw God's face
at the end of it.
only she didn't say which end.
one boy said he stuck
his fishing pole
out the window
and caught a little
fish
and fed it to his
cat.
almost everybody told
a lie.
the truth was just
too awful and
embarassing to tell.
then the bell rang
and recess was 
over.
"thank you," said Mrs.
Sorenson, "that was very
nice.
and tomorrow the grounds 
will be dry
and we will put them
to use
again."
most of the boys
cheered
and the little girls 
sat very straight and
still,
looking so pretty and 
clean and
alert,
their hair beautiful in a sunshine that 
the world might never see 
again.
and
Written by Allen Ginsberg | Create an image from this poem

In The Baggage Room At Greyhound

 I

In the depths of the Greyhound Terminal 
sitting dumbly on a baggage truck looking at the sky 
 waiting for the Los Angeles Express to depart 
worrying about eternity over the Post Office roof in 
 the night-time red downtown heaven 
staring through my eyeglasses I realized shuddering 
 these thoughts were not eternity, nor the poverty 
 of our lives, irritable baggage clerks, 
nor the millions of weeping relatives surrounding the 
 buses waving goodbye, 
nor other millions of the poor rushing around from 
 city to city to see their loved ones, 
nor an indian dead with fright talking to a huge cop 
 by the Coke machine, 
nor this trembling old lady with a cane taking the last 
 trip of her life, 
nor the red-capped cynical porter collecting his quar- 
 ters and smiling over the smashed baggage, 
nor me looking around at the horrible dream, 
nor mustached ***** Operating Clerk named Spade, 
 dealing out with his marvelous long hand the 
 fate of thousands of express packages, 
nor fairy Sam in the basement limping from leaden 
 trunk to trunk, 
nor Joe at the counter with his nervous breakdown 
 smiling cowardly at the customers, 
nor the grayish-green whale's stomach interior loft 
 where we keep the baggage in hideous racks, 
hundreds of suitcases full of tragedy rocking back and 
 forth waiting to be opened, 
nor the baggage that's lost, nor damaged handles, 
 nameplates vanished, busted wires & broken 
 ropes, whole trunks exploding on the concrete 
 floor, 
nor seabags emptied into the night in the final 
 warehouse. 

 II

Yet Spade reminded me of Angel, unloading a bus, 
dressed in blue overalls black face official Angel's work- 
 man cap, 
pushing with his belly a huge tin horse piled high with 
 black baggage, 
looking up as he passed the yellow light bulb of the loft 
and holding high on his arm an iron shepherd's crook. 

 III

It was the racks, I realized, sitting myself on top of 
 them now as is my wont at lunchtime to rest 
 my tired foot, 
it was the racks, great wooden shelves and stanchions 
 posts and beams assembled floor to roof jumbled 
 with baggage, 
--the Japanese white metal postwar trunk gaudily 
 flowered & headed for Fort Bragg, 
one Mexican green paper package in purple rope 
 adorned with names for Nogales, 
hundreds of radiators all at once for Eureka, 
crates of Hawaiian underwear, 
rolls of posters scattered over the Peninsula, nuts to 
 Sacramento, 
one human eye for Napa, 
an aluminum box of human blood for Stockton 
and a little red package of teeth for Calistoga- 
it was the racks and these on the racks I saw naked 
 in electric light the night before I quit, 
the racks were created to hang our possessions, to keep 
 us together, a temporary shift in space, 
God's only way of building the rickety structure of 
 Time, 
to hold the bags to send on the roads, to carry our 
 luggage from place to place 
looking for a bus to ride us back home to Eternity 
 where the heart was left and farewell tears 
 began. 

 IV

A swarm of baggage sitting by the counter as the trans- 
 continental bus pulls in. 
The clock registering 12:15 A.M., May 9, 1956, the 
 second hand moving forward, red. 
Getting ready to load my last bus.-Farewell, Walnut 
 Creek Richmond Vallejo Portland Pacific 
 Highway 
Fleet-footed Quicksilver, God of transience. 
One last package sits lone at midnight sticking up out 
 of the Coast rack high as the dusty fluorescent 
 light. 

The wage they pay us is too low to live on. Tragedy 
 reduced to numbers. 
This for the poor shepherds. I am a communist. 
Farewell ye Greyhound where I suffered so much, 
 hurt my knee and scraped my hand and built 
 my pectoral muscles big as a vagina.

 May 9, 1956


Written by Carl Sandburg | Create an image from this poem

Smoke and Steel

 SMOKE of the fields in spring is one,
Smoke of the leaves in autumn another.
Smoke of a steel-mill roof or a battleship funnel,
They all go up in a line with a smokestack,
Or they twist … in the slow twist … of the wind.

If the north wind comes they run to the south.
If the west wind comes they run to the east.
 By this sign
 all smokes
 know each other.
Smoke of the fields in spring and leaves in autumn,
Smoke of the finished steel, chilled and blue,
By the oath of work they swear: “I know you.”

Hunted and hissed from the center
Deep down long ago when God made us over,
Deep down are the cinders we came from—
You and I and our heads of smoke.

Some of the smokes God dropped on the job
Cross on the sky and count our years
And sing in the secrets of our numbers;
Sing their dawns and sing their evenings,
Sing an old log-fire song:

You may put the damper up,
You may put the damper down,
The smoke goes up the chimney just the same.

Smoke of a city sunset skyline,
Smoke of a country dusk horizon—
 They cross on the sky and count our years.

Smoke of a brick-red dust
 Winds on a spiral
 Out of the stacks
For a hidden and glimpsing moon.
This, said the bar-iron shed to the blooming mill,
This is the slang of coal and steel.
The day-gang hands it to the night-gang,
The night-gang hands it back.

Stammer at the slang of this—
Let us understand half of it.
 In the rolling mills and sheet mills,
 In the harr and boom of the blast fires,
 The smoke changes its shadow
 And men change their shadow;
 A ******, a wop, a bohunk changes.

 A bar of steel—it is only
Smoke at the heart of it, smoke and the blood of a man.
A runner of fire ran in it, ran out, ran somewhere else,
And left—smoke and the blood of a man
And the finished steel, chilled and blue.

So fire runs in, runs out, runs somewhere else again,
And the bar of steel is a gun, a wheel, a nail, a shovel,
A rudder under the sea, a steering-gear in the sky;
And always dark in the heart and through it,
 Smoke and the blood of a man.
Pittsburg, Youngstown, Gary—they make their steel with men.

In the blood of men and the ink of chimneys
The smoke nights write their oaths:
Smoke into steel and blood into steel;
Homestead, Braddock, Birmingham, they make their steel with men.
Smoke and blood is the mix of steel.

 The birdmen drone
 in the blue; it is steel
 a motor sings and zooms.

Steel barb-wire around The Works.
Steel guns in the holsters of the guards at the gates of The Works.
Steel ore-boats bring the loads clawed from the earth by steel, lifted and lugged by arms of steel, sung on its way by the clanking clam-shells.
The runners now, the handlers now, are steel; they dig and clutch and haul; they hoist their automatic knuckles from job to job; they are steel making steel.
Fire and dust and air fight in the furnaces; the pour is timed, the billets wriggle; the clinkers are dumped:
Liners on the sea, skyscrapers on the land; diving steel in the sea, climbing steel in the sky.

Finders in the dark, you Steve with a dinner bucket, you Steve clumping in the dusk on the sidewalks with an evening paper for the woman and kids, you Steve with your head wondering where we all end up—
Finders in the dark, Steve: I hook my arm in cinder sleeves; we go down the street together; it is all the same to us; you Steve and the rest of us end on the same stars; we all wear a hat in hell together, in hell or heaven.

Smoke nights now, Steve.
Smoke, smoke, lost in the sieves of yesterday;
Dumped again to the scoops and hooks today.
Smoke like the clocks and whistles, always.
 Smoke nights now.
 To-morrow something else.

Luck moons come and go:
Five men swim in a pot of red steel.
Their bones are kneaded into the bread of steel:
Their bones are knocked into coils and anvils
And the sucking plungers of sea-fighting turbines.
Look for them in the woven frame of a wireless station.
So ghosts hide in steel like heavy-armed men in mirrors.
Peepers, skulkers—they shadow-dance in laughing tombs.
They are always there and they never answer.

One of them said: “I like my job, the company is good to me, America is a wonderful country.”
One: “Jesus, my bones ache; the company is a liar; this is a free country, like hell.”
One: “I got a girl, a peach; we save up and go on a farm and raise pigs and be the boss ourselves.”
And the others were roughneck singers a long ways from home.
Look for them back of a steel vault door.

They laugh at the cost.
They lift the birdmen into the blue.
It is steel a motor sings and zooms.

In the subway plugs and drums,
In the slow hydraulic drills, in gumbo or gravel,
Under dynamo shafts in the webs of armature spiders,
They shadow-dance and laugh at the cost.

The ovens light a red dome.
Spools of fire wind and wind.
Quadrangles of crimson sputter.
The lashes of dying maroon let down.
Fire and wind wash out the slag.
Forever the slag gets washed in fire and wind.
The anthem learned by the steel is:
 Do this or go hungry.
Look for our rust on a plow.
Listen to us in a threshing-engine razz.
Look at our job in the running wagon wheat.

Fire and wind wash at the slag.
Box-cars, clocks, steam-shovels, churns, pistons, boilers, scissors—
Oh, the sleeping slag from the mountains, the slag-heavy pig-iron will go down many roads.
Men will stab and shoot with it, and make butter and tunnel rivers, and mow hay in swaths, and slit hogs and skin beeves, and steer airplanes across North America, Europe, Asia, round the world.

Hacked from a hard rock country, broken and baked in mills and smelters, the rusty dust waits
Till the clean hard weave of its atoms cripples and blunts the drills chewing a hole in it.
The steel of its plinths and flanges is reckoned, O God, in one-millionth of an inch.

Once when I saw the curves of fire, the rough scarf women dancing,
Dancing out of the flues and smoke-stacks—flying hair of fire, flying feet upside down;
Buckets and baskets of fire exploding and chortling, fire running wild out of the steady and fastened ovens;
Sparks cracking a harr-harr-huff from a solar-plexus of rock-ribs of the earth taking a laugh for themselves;
Ears and noses of fire, gibbering gorilla arms of fire, gold mud-pies, gold bird-wings, red jackets riding purple mules, scarlet autocrats tumbling from the humps of camels, assassinated czars straddling vermillion balloons;
I saw then the fires flash one by one: good-by: then smoke, smoke;
And in the screens the great sisters of night and cool stars, sitting women arranging their hair,
Waiting in the sky, waiting with slow easy eyes, waiting and half-murmuring:
 “Since you know all
 and I know nothing,
 tell me what I dreamed last night.”

Pearl cobwebs in the windy rain,
in only a flicker of wind,
are caught and lost and never known again.

A pool of moonshine comes and waits,
but never waits long: the wind picks up
loose gold like this and is gone.

A bar of steel sleeps and looks slant-eyed
on the pearl cobwebs, the pools of moonshine;
sleeps slant-eyed a million years,
sleeps with a coat of rust, a vest of moths,
a shirt of gathering sod and loam.

The wind never bothers … a bar of steel.
The wind picks only .. pearl cobwebs .. pools of moonshine.
Written by Gregory Corso | Create an image from this poem

Gregory Corso

 Budger of history Brake of time You Bomb
 Toy of universe Grandest of all snatched sky I cannot hate you
 Do I hate the mischievous thunderbolt the jawbone of an ass
 The bumpy club of One Million B.C. the mace the flail the axe
 Catapult Da Vinci tomahawk Cochise flintlock Kidd dagger Rathbone
 Ah and the sad desparate gun of Verlaine Pushkin Dillinger Bogart
 And hath not St. Michael a burning sword St. George a lance David a sling
 Bomb you are as cruel as man makes you and you're no crueller than cancer
 All Man hates you they'd rather die by car-crash lightning drowning
Falling off a roof electric-chair heart-attack old age old age O Bomb
 They'd rather die by anything but you Death's finger is free-lance
 Not up to man whether you boom or not Death has long since distributed its
 categorical blue I sing thee Bomb Death's extravagance Death's jubilee
 Gem of Death's supremest blue The flyer will crash his death will differ
 with the climbor who'll fall to die by cobra is not to die by bad pork
Some die by swamp some by sea and some by the bushy-haired man in the night
 O there are deaths like witches of Arc Scarey deaths like Boris Karloff
 No-feeling deaths like birth-death sadless deaths like old pain Bowery
 Abandoned deaths like Capital Punishment stately deaths like senators
 And unthinkable deaths like Harpo Marx girls on Vogue covers my own
 I do not know just how horrible Bombdeath is I can only imagine
 Yet no other death I know has so laughable a preview I scope
 a city New York City streaming starkeyed subway shelter 
 Scores and scores A fumble of humanity High heels bend
 Hats whelming away Youth forgetting their combs
 Ladies not knowing what to do with their shopping bags
 Unperturbed gum machines Yet dangerous 3rd rail
 Ritz Brothers from the Bronx caught in the A train
 The smiling Schenley poster will always smile
 Impish death Satyr Bomb Bombdeath
 Turtles exploding over Istanbul
 The jaguar's flying foot
 soon to sink in arctic snow
 Penguins plunged against the Sphinx
 The top of the Empire state
 arrowed in a broccoli field in Sicily
 Eiffel shaped like a C in Magnolia Gardens
 St. Sophia peeling over Sudan
 O athletic Death Sportive Bomb
 the temples of ancient times
 their grand ruin ceased
 Electrons Protons Neutrons 
 gathering Hersperean hair
 walking the dolorous gulf of Arcady
 joining marble helmsmen
 entering the final ampitheater
 with a hymnody feeling of all Troys
 heralding cypressean torches
 racing plumes and banners
 and yet knowing Homer with a step of grace
 Lo the visiting team of Present
 the home team of Past
 Lyre and tube together joined
 Hark the hotdog soda olive grape
 gala galaxy robed and uniformed 
 commissary O the happy stands
 Ethereal root and cheer and boo
 The billioned all-time attendance
 The Zeusian pandemonium
 Hermes racing Owens
 The Spitball of Buddha
 Christ striking out
 Luther stealing third
 Planeterium Death Hosannah Bomb
 Gush the final rose O Spring Bomb
 Come with thy gown of dynamite green
 unmenace Nature's inviolate eye
 Before you the wimpled Past
 behind you the hallooing Future O Bomb
 Bound in the grassy clarion air
 like the fox of the tally-ho
 thy field the universe thy hedge the geo
 Leap Bomb bound Bomb frolic zig and zag
 The stars a swarm of bees in thy binging bag
 Stick angels on your jubilee feet
 wheels of rainlight on your bunky seat
 You are due and behold you are due
 and the heavens are with you
 hosanna incalescent glorious liaison
 BOMB O havoc antiphony molten cleft BOOM
 Bomb mark infinity a sudden furnace
 spread thy multitudinous encompassed Sweep
 set forth awful agenda
 Carrion stars charnel planets carcass elements
 Corpse the universe tee-hee finger-in-the-mouth hop
 over its long long dead Nor
 From thy nimbled matted spastic eye
 exhaust deluges of celestial ghouls
 From thy appellational womb
 spew birth-gusts of of great worms
 Rip open your belly Bomb
 from your belly outflock vulturic salutations
 Battle forth your spangled hyena finger stumps
 along the brink of Paradise
 O Bomb O final Pied Piper
 both sun and firefly behind your shock waltz
 God abandoned mock-nude
 beneath His thin false-talc's apocalypse
 He cannot hear thy flute's
 happy-the-day profanations
 He is spilled deaf into the Silencer's warty ear
 His Kingdom an eternity of crude wax
 Clogged clarions untrumpet Him
 Sealed angels unsing Him
 A thunderless God A dead God
 O Bomb thy BOOM His tomb
 That I lean forward on a desk of science
 an astrologer dabbling in dragon prose
 half-smart about wars bombs especially bombs
 That I am unable to hate what is necessary to love 
 That I can't exist in a world that consents
 a child in a park a man dying in an electric-chair
 That I am able to laugh at all things
 all that I know and do not know thus to conceal my pain
 That I say I am a poet and therefore love all man
 knowing my words to be the acquainted prophecy of all men
 and my unwords no less an acquaintanceship
 That I am manifold
 a man pursuing the big lies of gold
 or a poet roaming in bright ashes
 or that which I imagine myself to be 
 a shark-toothed sleep a man-eater of dreams
 I need not then be all-smart about bombs
 Happily so for if I felt bombs were caterpillars
 I'd doubt not they'd become butterflies
 There is a hell for bombs
 They're there I see them there
 They sit in bits and sing songs
  mostly German songs
 And two very long American songs
 and they wish there were more songs
 especially Russian and Chinese songs
 and some more very long American songs
 Poor little Bomb that'll never be 
 an Eskimo song I love thee 
 I want to put a lollipop
 in thy furcal mouth
 A wig of Goldilocks on thy baldy bean
 and have you skip with me Hansel and Gretel
 along the Hollywoodian screen
 O Bomb in which all lovely things
 moral and physical anxiously participate
  O fairylike plucked from the 
 grandest universe tree 
 O piece of heaven which gives
 both mountain and anthill a sun
 I am standing before your fantastic lily door
 I bring you Midgardian roses Arcadian musk
 Reputed cosmetics from the girls of heaven
 Welcome me fear not thy opened door
 nor thy cold ghost's grey memory
 nor the pimps of indefinite weather
 their cruel terrestial thaw
 Oppenheimer is seated
 in the dark pocket of Light
 Fermi is dry in Death's Mozambique
 Einstein his mythmouth
 a barnacled wreath on the moon-squid's head
 Let me in Bomb rise from that pregnant-rat corner
 nor fear the raised-broom nations of the world
 O Bomb I love you
 I want to kiss your clank eat your boom
 You are a paean an acme of scream
 a lyric hat of Mister Thunder
 O resound thy tanky knees
 BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM
 BOOM ye skies and BOOM ye suns
 BOOM BOOM ye moons ye stars BOOM
 nights ye BOOM ye days ye BOOM
 BOOM BOOM ye winds ye clouds ye rains
 go BANG ye lakes ye oceans BING
 Barracuda BOOM and cougar BOOM
 Ubangi BOOM orangutang 
 BING BANG BONG BOOM bee bear baboon
 ye BANG ye BONG ye BING
 the tail the fin the wing
 Yes Yes into our midst a bomb will fall
 Flowers will leap in joy their roots aching
 Fields will kneel proud beneath the halleluyahs of the wind
 Pinkbombs will blossom Elkbombs will perk their ears
 Ah many a bomb that day will awe the bird a gentle look
 Yet not enough to say a bomb will fall
 or even contend celestial fire goes out
 Know that the earth will madonna the Bomb
 that in the hearts of men to come more bombs will be born
 magisterial bombs wrapped in ermine all beautiful
 and they'll sit plunk on earth's grumpy empires
 fierce with moustaches of gold
Written by Audre Lorde | Create an image from this poem

Inheritance—His

 I. 
My face resembles your face
less and less each day. When I was young
no one mistook whose child I was.
Features build coloring
alone among my creamy fine-boned sisters
marked me Byron's daughter.

No sun set when you died, but a door
opened onto my mother. After you left
she grieved her crumpled world aloft
an iron fist sweated with business symbols
a printed blotter dwell in the house of Lord's
your hollow voice changing down a hospital corridor
 yea, though I walk through the valley
 of the shadow of death
 I will fear no evil.

II.
I rummage through the deaths you lived
swaying on a bridge of question.
At seven in Barbados
dropped into your unknown father's life
your courage vault from his tailor's table
back to the sea.
Did the Grenada treeferns sing
your 15th summer as you jumped ship
to seek your mother
finding her too late
surrounded with new sons?

Who did you bury to become the enforcer of the law
the handsome legend
before whose raised arm even trees wept
a man of deep and wordless passion
who wanted sons and got five girls?
You left the first two scratching in a treefern's shade
the youngest is a renegade poet
searching for your answer in my blood.

My mother's Grenville tales
spin through early summer evenings.
But you refused to speak of home
of stepping proud Black and penniless
into this land where only white men
ruled by money. How you labored
in the docks of the Hotel Astor
your bright wife a chambermaid upstairs 
welded love and survival to ambition
as the land of promise withered
crashed the hotel closed
and you peddle dawn-bought apples
from a push-cart on Broadway.

Does an image of return
wealthy and triumphant
warm your chilblained fingers
as you count coins in the Manhattan snow
or is it only Linda
who dreams of home?

When my mother's first-born cries for milk
in the brutal city winter
do the faces of your other daughters dim
like the image of the treeferned yard
where a dark girl first cooked for you
and her ash heap still smells of curry?

III.
Did the secret of my sisters steal your tongue
like I stole money from your midnight pockets
stubborn and quaking
as you threaten to shoot me if I am the one? 
The naked lightbulbs in our kitchen ceiling
glint off your service revolver
as you load whispering.

Did two little dark girls in Grenada
dart like flying fish
between your averted eyes
and my pajamaless body
our last adolescent summer?
Eavesdropped orations
to your shaving mirror
our most intense conversations
were you practicing how to tell me
of my twin sisters abandoned
as you had been abandoned
by another Black woman seeking
her fortune Grenada Barbados
Panama Grenada.
New York City.

IV.
You bought old books at auctions
for my unlanguaged world
gave me your idols Marcus Garvey Citizen Kane
and morsels from your dinner plate
when I was seven.
I owe you my Dahomeyan jaw
the free high school for gifted girls
no one else thought I should attend
and the darkness that we share.
Our deepest bonds remain
the mirror and the gun.

V.
An elderly Black judge
known for his way with women
visits this island where I live
shakes my hand, smiling.
"I knew your father," he says
"quite a man!" Smiles again.
I flinch at his raised eyebrow.
A long-gone woman's voice
lashes out at me in parting
"You will never be satisfied
until you have the whole world
in your bed!"

Now I am older than you were when you died
overwork and silence exploding your brain.
You are gradually receding from my face.
Who were you outside the 23rd Psalm?
Knowing so little
how did I become so much
like you?

Your hunger for rectitude
blossoms into rage
the hot tears of mourning
never shed for you before
your twisted measurements
the agony of denial
the power of unshared secrets.
Written by Adrienne Rich | Create an image from this poem

Planetarium

 Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), 
astronomer, sister of William; and others.

A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them

a woman 'in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles'

in her 98 years to discover
8 comets

She whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled


in those spaces of the mind

An eye,
'virile, precise and absolutely certain'
from the mad webs of Uranusborg
encountering the NOVA
every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us

Tycho whispering at last
'Let me not seem to have lived in vain'

What we see, we see
and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus

I am bombarded yet I stand
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.
Written by Carolyn Forche | Create an image from this poem

The Testimony Of Light

 Our life is a fire dampened, or a fire shut up in stone.
 --Jacob Boehme, De Incarnatione Verbi

Outside everything visible and invisible a blazing maple.
Daybreak: a seam at the curve of the world. The trousered legs of the women
 shimmered.
They held their arms in front of them like ghosts.

The coal bones of the house clinked in a kimono of smoke.
An attention hovered over the dream where the world had been.

For if Hiroshima in the morning, after the bomb has fallen,
 is like a dream, one must ask whose dream it is. {1}

Must understand how not to speak would carry it with us.
With bones put into rice bowls.
While the baby crawled over its dead mother seeking milk.

Muga-muchu {2}: without self, without center. Thrown up in the sky by a wind.

The way back is lost, the one obsession.
The worst is over.
The worst is yet to come.



1--...is the question asked by Peter Schwenger in Letter Bomb. 
 Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding Word.
2--...is from Robert Jay Lifton's Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry