Long Michigan Poems
Long Michigan Poems. Below are the most popular long Michigan by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Michigan poems by poem length and keyword.
I love depressing songs.
Like the song about-
Spots in my eyes.
They are weird, but who cares?
It doesn’t hurt.
As long as I don’t cry.
Depressing songs.
Living in Michigan with lakes, and beaches.
Nothing.
No such things as dancing.
Skirts twirling.
And hands and feet moving.
I love depressing songs.
In my car.
Turning on my turn signal.
Stopping at stop signs.
My car is pushing against every thought.
I love depressing songs.
I love sleeping in my car sometimes.
I don’t know how to sing.
But some songs are unstoppable.
So I grumble the words.
I’m happy all the time for some reason.
But sometimes?
Spots scattered.
Trying to pull my eyes out in my sleep.
I love depressing songs!
Pulling into my driveway.
Everything is in my house.
They are in there.
My bags are in the trunk.
Sleeping in my car for no reason at all.
Those depressing songs are strange and real.
I would love to live in my car.
The radio is off tonight.
So silence is still real.
Just as bees squeeze like watermelon seeds
Spit across apricot fields
My wife and I on Friday
Join the lines of highways up north
Pulled by hilltops to the Leelanau blue sky
Where lakes stir in the wind at the citrus rims
Of wine valleys below
And cherry orchards blossom in row after row
Like sheets of cupcakes spiraled with frosting.
Tonight we will sit tight around our lakeside fire
As petals closed upon this blaze of flower
With a Loon trilling her flute of bones
To the stars salted across the night
And voices bump from shore to shore
Murmurs softened beyond repair
The cabins flickering to a second life
In a fuse of fire lit around our lake
A tradition. We stop the car a ways away
From my mom and dad’s cabin
And let out our kids on the shoulder of road
To run like deer the final half mile.
There, 58 years ago, I turned 18.
There. I enrolled and finished college.
There, I fell in love and got married.
There. I obtained my first fulltime job.
There, I purchased my first bycycle.
There, I purchased my first car.
No. I was not born and raised there;
But it is there that I became a man.
It is there that I most claim to be My City.
It is My Ciity because it is there that
I learned lessons, principles, knowledge,
And wisdom that have sustained me
Until now.
It is there where I saw the Depths of man's
Depravity and learned how to best assist
My fellow mortals from such Depths. It was
There that I was given the most opportunities
To care and share my life with them.
Yes. There is a beautiful city, seated along
Lake Michigan. It was there so many years
ago that Chicago became My City.
Make hay while the sun shines.
I grew up as a closeted polypathic nature-mystic
on a marginal, at best, family farm
in Michigan.
This farm was my embryonic home,
an extension of my vastly loved and nurturing Mother,
more than my workaholic homophobic Father,
who most emphatically did create a patriarchal god in his own image.
His farm was for slave labor.
Her farm was a garden for growing healthy wealth.
I loved Mom's Multi-ReGenerational Family Farm
like an extension of my ego-mind and anthro-body.
And, like a turtle without a shell,
when I first headed off to Ann Arbor's University
I brought my happy and healthy ego with me,
eager to begin my new adventure story,
yet I emotionally stumbled,
felt naked and exposed and depressed,
for lack of my embryonic habitus,
my eco-center,
my home,
my interdependently embracing love of sacred spaces
and their seasons of regeneration and degeneration,
growing still and fading without ego me
conjoining.
I was homesick,
but not for Nurturing Nanny
and Fearsome Father
or even Perfect Princess Sister, whom I cherished,
whom I could talk and listen with as whim might invite,
and, although somewhat more of a sore detachment from our farmhouse interior spaces,
my disorienting alienation from Ann Arbor
was as a too-urban outside place
just as my recreating resident embrace
favored my dorm and classroom youth-learning multicultural race
against more oppressive monoculturing times.
To this day,
despite a six week backpacking hike
along California's Pacific Coast Trail,
plundered by surreal vistas and fragrance and light and unspeakable beauty,
when I imagine a meadow, a field, a woodland,
a pond,
a barn,
an unpaved road,
a gravel drive,
a herd of cattle,
a pen of pigs,
a coop of chickens,
a litter of kittens with eyes still sealed shut,
I recall iconic scenes from this sacred originating home,
my eco-memory
calling my doubly-bound ego-enculturing self
back home
to where we permaculturally began together,
making hay while the sun did shine.
(Note: In this abecedarian poem, I redacted the name of the particular denomination to protect the innocent and to universalize the context. Fill in your own favorite groups! Prejudice against those perceived to be “other” than “us” infiltrates human hearts no matter the identity or extent of the difference.)
Closed Community Prejudice (an Alphabetized Memoir)
By Mark D. Stucky
Almost everyone in my home community
belonged to _________ churches.
Churches not _________ (like Methodist and Lutheran)
didn’t seem “right” somehow, although nobody whispered it.
Every other group was less homogenous than us,
fated to be born “different” from us.
Good people maybe.
However,
inferior to us surely.
Just not quite like us.
Knew them only superficially.
Looked like us on the outside.
Maybe not that different after all?
No, they weren’t the same ethnicity as us.
Otherness lurked inside them.
…
Perhaps prejudices in all people,
quietly
rise
slowly
toward
unholy
vantage points.
What if
xenophobes, like
you and me, could
zero out all our distortions?
(Originally published as "Closed Community Memoir (Alphabetized)" in Reflecting on Race Through Poetry, a collection of participant poems from a class at First United Methodist Church in Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1 Nov. 2000. See also my poems "Races," "Weapons of Wonder," and "Hate Vacuuming?")
(Original image by Braden Collum on Pexels.com.)
Autumn arrives
Like calloused hands
From Canada,
Squeezing
The summer sogginess
From the air
Like a wet rag
Wrung
From a pail of warm water.
Downhill
From
Its hollow avalanche of wind,
We bang
With brooms
At the shins of the fleeing trees
Like shepherds.
The first scarlet leaves
Are stripped
And flow like rivers
Of snapping piranhas
Vibrating atop the sidewalks.
I put my dog on a leash.
He is not trustworthy
In crowds,
Especially in riots
Of ghosts
That flail
In spiral gales
Like newspaper pages
Sailing back to life
From gutters.
In my garage,
I take my rake
From its hook on the wall.
I stand as a scarecrow in his front yard,
Straw shoulders
Shaking from the introduction.
One by one,
Crows
Gather
And eat from the ground.
A raspy cawing.
I am coughing.
NEVER BEEN TO LAS VEGAS NEVER FELT THE NEED TO VENTURE THE DESERT PERHAPS ITS MY ASTHMA THE DRY HEAT TAKING MY BREATH AWAY I ADORE BRISK AIR GROWING UP IN CHICAGO THAT CHICAGO BREEZE WE CALLED THE HAWK BLARING DOWN LAKESHORE DRIVE AS THE SUN BEAMS OVER THE IRISH RIVER LAKE MICHIGAN FROZEN OVER EVERY THING STILL FRESH AND NEW I AGREE WITH FRANK SINATRA I WOULD ABSOLUTELY HATE CALIFORNIA WEST COAST AND THE DESERT NEVER BEEN TO LAS VEGAS WHY I NEVER HAD THE NEED TO VENTURE THERE NOT EVEN THE SPARKLING LIGHTS CASINOS AROUSED MY SENSES I ADORE THE BAVARIAN ALPS I LIVED IN PERLACHER FORST ABTINY VILLAGE IN MUNICH GERMANY I ADORED WATCHING THE SNOW CAPPED MOUNTAINS IN JUNE THE WAY THE TALL PINES CAPTURE THE FOREST AMAZING TO WITNESS NEVER BEEN TO LAS VEGAS FUNNY THIS IS MY FIRST TIME WRITING ABOUT LAS VEGAS I NEVER GAMBLE WHY GO TO VEGAS WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD I AM TRULY BLESSED I BECAME AND ADULT IN GERMANY THE HISTORY OF AVA BRUAN AND THE FEURER AUSTRIA UNCANNING THEE OKTOBERFEST THE KNEELING BLACK KNIGHTS HORSE TOY TOWN TOWN THOMAS MANN STATUE IN MANN PARK THE STRASUS SEATED AT THE VEINERWALD VEINER SCHITZEL AND POMFRITTS FOR BREAKFAST A SALAD EDGED A CRISP REISLING READING RATZINGER POEMS THE BARVARIAN ALPS AND ME
Michigan is the best place to wear a sun hat.
As flowers floating around stick to the brim.
A park bench with a big tree provides even more shade.
So we surrender to the coolness.
Michigan is the best place to wear sandals.
To protect your feet from the little stones.
Try to walk barefoot for a while.
And grimacing as the harsh ground laughs.
Michigan is the best place to order ice cream.
Even though the lines are long in the summer.
We set our beach towels aside and line up anyway.
Eating ice cream to the sound of the lakes.
Michigan is the best place to buy a fudge scented candle.
And laugh about all those weird fall smells.
Then reminisce that we didn’t pay attention to summer smells.
We try to remember.
Tool boxes in the garage.
And a shed with mysterious cobwebs.
Things that are weathered.
The most forgotten parts of Michigan.
Michigan is the best place-
To stay for a while.
Packed my 92-year-old dad
Into the old Lansing-made black Cadillac
To see the Detroit Symphony play at Wharton
We’re dressed up at the red light of Waverly and Saginaw
This vital busy corridor
Once home to Schmidt’s Estes Furniture Leonard’s Appliances
A golf course with sledding hill
Sully’s Drive-In
Now this crossroad is a Plasma Center a closed Rite Aid and a fortressed Walgreens
Along with the many amateur drug dealers
Meth heads wandering with their hook hands out on corners
Holding cardboard signs Anything Will Help
Hair wild like bamboo shoots
Golf course long ago abandoned the hill fenced off
An automated carwash over Hole 13
Next to us rumbles a pickup truck
Two huge flags stuck up in the wind from the rack in back
One
A faded dirty American flag
The other
Blue and black FxxK Biden
Two fat hillbillies laugh it up in the cab
Blow their horn
Children from nearby cars learn how to read
Shame
This is the capital city of Michigan
Wharton is jammed with suits and gowns
White-tapped graduation caps
The theater a carpet canyon of chatter
Next to the baton-poking Maestro from Italy
Stands a blond violin soloist with a sassy haircut
Red dress and red lips
A fire roaring to the center of those seated companions
Stringing and preening around her
She dips and weaves her wild bow under her chin
For 35 minutes of solo flame-throwing
At the end as we stand and bravo
I look over to my dad
He is weeping
“Are you ok Dad?”
“It’s just so magnificent what humans can do
And this will probably be my last symphony
And I was able to spend it with you.”
My mouth curls
I wonder whether this might be the last symphony
For any of us.
We suddenly strolled down Lakeshore drive
facing Goethe street named after Wolfgang von
Goethe famous German poet just at the crosswalk
while waving to the hidden Walter Payton
nooks wandering steel of recycled metal
forming beautiful art found beneath the
Gold coast and shorelines of ancient buildings
surrounding the Drake hotel while rust erosion
casted away sticking to the bottom of stalled
sail boats awaiting the thaw of Lake Michigan
dashing for coffee mingling with the chess
players when a lady stepped on my sketchers
right at the heel I continued strutting reaching
Lincoln park zoo in time for the giant Tigers
to pounce my finger tips began to frost a bit
I took a few easy steps to the museum I always
love the museums of Chicago dazzled by creativity
art and history settling down the Dusable atmosphere
I supposed I'd wandered to far facing the cheese
building on Lasalle and Van Burean that housed
all the serial killers over looking Navy pier in a faint
distance I approached Maggie Daley park named
after Mayor Daleys precious wife finally resting for a
calming respite overlooking the cities shoreline
walking backwards I notice the water tower behind
a quiet bench empty calming glancing over the hustle
and bustle of Lakeshore drive last stop the sign reads
do not enter only way Goethe and Lakeshore drive the
old homeless shelter salvation army chaplin services home
That's Chicago