Written by
Maya Angelou |
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
Hayden Carruth |
"Form follows function follows form .
.
.
, etc.
"
--Dr.
J.
Anthony Wadlington
Here I am writing my first villanelle
At seventy-two, and feeling old and tired--
"Hey, Pops, why dontcha give us the old death knell?"--
And writing it what's more on the rim of hell
In blazing Arizona when all I desired
Was north and solitude and not a villanelle,
Working from memory and not remembering well
How many stanzas and in what order, wired
On Mexican coffee, seeing the death knell
Of sun's salvos upon these hills that yell
Bloody murder silently to the much admired
Dead-blue sky.
One wonders if a villanelle
Can do the job.
Granted, old men now must tell
Our young world how these bigots and these retired
Bankers of Arizona are ringing the death knell
For everyone, how ideologies compel
Children to violence.
Artifice acquired
For its own sake is war.
Frail villanelle,
Have you this power? And must Igo and sell
Myself? "Wow," they say, and "cool"--this hired
Old poetry guy with his spaced-out death knell.
Ah, far from home and God knows not much fired
By thoughts of when he thought he was inspired,
He writes by writing what he must.
Death knell
Is what he's found in his first villanelle.
Credit: Copyright © 1995 by Hayden Carruth.
Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.
coppercanyonpress.
org
|
Written by
Robinson Jeffers |
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the
mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and deca-
dence; and home to the mother.
You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stub-
bornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thick-
ening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there
are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught--they say--
God, when he walked on earth.
|
Written by
James A Emanuel |
A little bit of fool in me
Hides behind my inmost tree
And pops into the narrow path
I walk blindfolded by my wrath
Or shrunken by some twist of pain,
Some hope that will not wind again.
He ogles with his antic eyes
and somersaults a you're-not-wise
Until the patches in his pants
Go colorwheeling through my glance
So fast that I cannot recall
That I was mad or sad at all.
A little bit of fool in me
Keeps evergreen my inmost tree.
|
Written by
Anne Sexton |
We are born with luck
which is to say with gold in our mouth.
As new and smooth as a grape,
as pure as a pond in Alaska,
as good as the stem of a green bean--
we are born and that ought to be enough,
we ought to be able to carry on from that
but one must learn about evil,
learn what is subhuman,
learn how the blood pops out like a scream,
one must see the night
before one can realize the day,
one must listen hard to the animal within,
one must walk like a sleepwalker
on the edge of a roof,
one must throw some part of her body
into the devil's mouth.
Odd stuff, you'd say.
But I'd say
you must die a little,
have a book of matches go off in your hand,
see your best friend copying your exam,
visit an Indian reservation and see
their plastic feathers,
the dead dream.
One must be a prisoner just once to hear
the lock twist into his gut.
After all that
one is free to grasp at the trees, the stones,
the sky, the birds that make sense out of air.
But even in a telephone booth
evil can seep out of the receiver
and we must cover it with a mattress,
and then tear it from its roots
and bury it,
bury it.
|
Written by
Barry Tebb |
L’orage qui s’attarde, le lit d?fait
Yves Bonnefoy
Here am I, lying lacklustre in an unmade bed
A Sunday in December while all Leeds lies in around me
In the silent streets, frost on roof slates, gas fires
And kettles whistle as I read Bonnefoy on the eternal.
Too tired to fantasize, unsummoned images float by,
Feebly I snatch at them to comply with the muse’s dictum: write.
The streets of fifties summers, kali from the corner shop,
Sherbet lemons and ice pops, the voice of Margaret at ten,
What times will have done to you, what men
Used and abused you?
Solitary but not alone I read Lacan on desire
It is not a day I can visit the ward
Overcome by delusion’s shadow.
|