Everyday Miracles #2sDayPoems

Tags

And Other Poems, Bloodaxe Books, Elizabeth Bishop, everyday miracles, Stephanie Norgate, women poets

 

I was introduced to the work of British poet Stephanie Norgate last October when one of her poems came across the fantastic And Other Poems blog. You’ll want to subscribe to their posts if you aren’t already. Go ahead, I’ll wait a minute while you sign up. Anyway, I remember being so surprised by its ending and very moved by these very “everyday” miracles. It stuck with me for a long time and I revisited it this morning while preparing this post. I’m pairing it here with Elizabeth Bishop’s A Miracle for Breakfast for your #2sDayPoems enjoyment.

 

MIRACLE

by Stephanie Norgate

In supermarkets, strapped
in a trolley,

on the motorway,
belted in the back of a car,

under the foundered houses,
open mouthed and fed by drips,

in a box drilled with holes,
in the hold of a boat,

in fish crates and on cardboard,
on pallets and straw,

on a bed of needles
on the forest…

FULL TEXT HERE

 

 

A MIRACLE FOR BREAKFAST

by Elizabeth Bishop

At six o’clock we were waiting for coffee,
waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb
that was going to be served from a certain balcony
–like kings of old, or like a miracle.
It was still dark. One foot of the sun
steadied itself on a long ripple in the river.

The first ferry of the day had just crossed the river.
It was so cold we hoped that the coffee
would be very hot, seeing that the sun
was not going to warm us; and that the crumb
would be a loaf each, buttered, by a miracle.
At seven a man stepped out on the balcony.

He stood for a minute alone on the balcony
looking over our heads toward the river.
A servant handed him the makings of…

FULL TEXT HERE

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#2sDayPoems :Purple Gorillas& Purses

Tags

American Poets, Bloodaxe Books, Grief, Handbag, Matthew Dickman, Norton, Ruth Fainlight, The New Yorker, The Poetry Archive, Wonderland

Photo by Tim Moore

GRIEF

by Matthew Dickman

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what’s left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside,
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
her eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.
I am not afraid. She has been here before
and now I can recognize her gait
as she approaches the house.
Some nights, when I know she’s coming,

I unlock the door, lie down on my back,
and count her steps
from the street to the porch.
Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,
tells me to write down…

FULL TEXT HERE

latest collection: Wonderland (Norton)

 

 

HANDBAG

by Ruth Fainlight

My mother’s old leather handbag,
crowded with letters she carried
all through the war. The smell
of my mother’s handbag: mints
and liptsick and Coty powder.
The look of those letters, softened…

 

FULL TEXT w/audio HERE

latest collection: New & Collected Poems (Bloodaxe)

Seshadri &Dawes #2sDayPoems

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3 Sections, Graywolf Press, Kwame Dawes, Memoir, poetry readings, poets of color, Red Hen Press, Tornado Child, Vijay Seshardi, Wisteria: Poems from the Swamp Country

Full text of poem here

from 3 Sections (Graywolf Press)

Full text of poem here

from Wisteria:Poems from the Swamp Country (Red Hen Press)

#2sdayPoems (2×2) featuring Natalie Young

Tags

#2sDayPoems, #readwomen, Drunken Boat, Hurricane Maria, Natalie Young, Puerto Rico, Rock and Sling, Sugar House Review, Superstition Review, Terrain, women poets

Natalie Young is my kind of poet, art director by day, wordsmith by night, a leftie, a mixed blood, a fan of Tom Selleck, purple pototoes and Oscar the Grouch. She also happens to be the founding editor of Sugar House Review, a poetry gem. And although I question her taste for green olives and swiss cheese, I find her poems always absolutely delectable.

On more of a down-note, as the terrible fly-over footage of Puerto Rico’s devastation from Hurricane Maria rolls on, I keep thinking about her monster poems from one of the 2015(?) issues of Rock And Sling. Yes, they are about the personified Great Salt Lake, but the lonely orphan “island” felt like PR.

Anyway, I can only give you one of the monster poems (from her own website), but I’m throwing in three more on other “alien” subjects from their various online homes.

THE GREAT SALT LAKE HAS BEEN SHRINKING SINCE THE ROUNDING OF THE LAST ICE AGE

The monster has lasted centuries

            with little light, in one place.

This lake once spanned hundreds of monsters,

           millions of gallons to roam.

Now he has a small city, a village

           deep enough to safely travel. He doesn’t mind much,

but wonders about humans and sun.

What will be done when the many things collected

           are uncovered? Bones and rings and rocks.

What was lost. Cast off.

           The trash of time. He and his house release

only what breathes oxygen or is…

FULL TEXT HERE (you may have to scroll)

 

notes on earth life

A child in a pink coat leaves her music lesson. Her cheeks match her coat. Her father sells
insurance based on how long an equation expects a person to stay alive.

The old man died. Sometimes humans just die. And you cannot save them.
Sometimes humans do not die, and you cannot save them.

There is a television program about a real human family doing normal earth things—there are
many programs with real people doing what people always do. Humans stop doing what they do
to watch.

When humans determine an animal is too ill, they…

FULL TEXT HERE (w/audio)

the mums are always dying

We’re gonna do it easy, but then we’re gonna do the finish rough.
—Tina Turner’s intro to “Proud Mary”

Holding out a bundle of mums
from the grocery store
to offset a bad day,

She tells the alien how hard it is
to remember everything, every day to do
every thing, how proud she feels

to have shopped and gathered
so much, saved
dollars with coupons and…

FULL TEXT HERE (w/audio)

 

bird of war

Today let’s talk about the bird who wages his own war.
He flutters shades of late summer: cloudless sky, cornfields,
early-morning sun, asphalt.

He clangs his black beak against his cage in rapid fire, hurls
steel bowl to ground, a landmine of fruity pellets. His head full
of mischief juts to the hum of vacuum erasing siege.

Tomorrow he will…

FULL TEXT HERE

Cranberries& Rugs (#2sdayPoems)

Tags

2sDay Poems, Jill Osier, Molly Peacock, poets reading, Should Our Undoing Come Down Upon Us White, The Second Blush, women poets

There is the slightest chill in the air today, and already I am thinking of cranberries, sweaters and fire-side rugs. Here are two colder-weather poems by Molly Peacock & Jill Osier with bonus audio files.

THE FLAW

by Molly Peacock

The best thing about a hand-made pattern
is the flaw.
Sooner or later in a hand-loomed rug,
among the squares and flattened triangles,
a little red nub might soar above a blue field,
or a purple cross might sneak in between
the neat ochre teeth of the border.
The flaw we live by, the wrong color floss,
now wreathes among the uniform strands…

FULL TEXT HERE (audio file at top-center of that page)

from The Second Blush (W.W.Norton,2008)

 

IO

by Jill Osier

Today I find lowbush cranberries edging the yard. Full ripe,
they lie secret as gems among broken twigs and leaves blown down.
I pick two generous handfuls. There may be more. You told me
the story of Jupiter once. How when Voyager passed by one of its moons,
it recorded something like ten volcanic eruptions. Scientists reasoned
that if at random they found ten, the place must be breaking all the time.
They looked closer, and they were right. It is later and I’m home and I stand….

 

FULL TEXT HERE
audio here
latest collection: Should Our Undoing Come Down Upon Us White

Symbols of Life, Rebirth & Renewal (#2sdayPoems)

Tags

#2sDayPoems, Alice Walker, Andrea Cohen, blue bowls, Cherries, Daily Painter, flash fiction, Fourway Books, Furst Not Mine, Graywolf Press, Jane Kenyon, Kathy Wochele, New England, Orion, Poetry Foundation, Southern, women painters, Women writers

Kathy Wochele–“Cherries ” 8×10

Today’s picks are from New England masters, and are poems short in length but long on symbolism–life (blue bowls), rebirth (cherries) and renewal (robin), to name a few.  I also wanted to gift you with a beautiful bit of flash fiction centered around the same symbolism.

BONUS ALERT===> Click Alice Walker’s “My Mother’s Blue Bowl” to read the piece in its entirety.  And be sure to check out more work from Daily Painter Kathy Wochele, whose painting “Cherries” is featured above.

 

THE BLUE BOWL

by Jane Kenyon

Like primitives we buried the cat

with his bowl. Bare-handed

we scraped sand and gravel

back into the hole. It fell with a hiss

and thud on his side,

on his long red fur, the white feathers

that grew between his toes, and his

long, not to say aquiline, nose.

We stood and brushed each other off.

There are sorrows much keener than these.

Silent the rest of the day, we worked,

ate, stared, and slept. It stormed

all night; now it clears, and a robin…

 

FULL TEXT HERE (w/ audio)

from Collected Poems (Graywolf, 2005)

 

CHERRIES

by Andrea Cohen

 

In the minute it took
to fetch the blue bowl

from the kitchen
to pick the just-ripe

cherries, the blackbirds
had come. They picked

the branches clean, ascending
into their own blue bowl.

Lacking wings, I…

 

FULL TEXT HERE
latest collection: Furs Not Mine (Fourway, 2015)

American Landscapes (#2sdayPoems)

Tags

2sDay Poems, American Landscape, BOA, Constance Urdang, In a Landscape, John Gallaher, Pitt Poetry Series, Poetry Foundation, Poetry Out Loud, The Lone Woman and Others

Roadside “lawn ornament” (Mount Airy, NC)

I recently ran across this image of Mount Airy, NC’s Big Apple Cow in flickr wonderland.  Hope Bill doesn’t mind the link.  It made me think of a poem I’d seen on Poetry Out Loud in April, which led me back to another poem from  Poetry mag (June 2014), which ended in this interesting but somewhat rambling post. There are apples and cows and interior/American landscapes. Well, just read the post.

[ Use the links for full text, author bio and collection info.]

 

IN A LANDSCAPE: I
by John Gallaher

“Are you happy?” That’s a good place to start, or maybe,

“Do you think you’re happy?” with its more negative

tone. Sometimes you’re walking, sometimes falling. That’s part

of the problem too, but not all of the problem. Flowers out the window

or on the windowsill, and so someone brought flowers.

We spend a long time interested in which way the car would

best go in the driveway. Is that the beginning of an answer?

Some way to say who we are?

 

Well, it brings us up to now, at any rate, as the limitations

of structure, which is the way we need for it to be. Invent some muses

and invoke them, or save them for the yard, some animus

to get us going. And what was it Michael said yesterday? That

the committee to do all these good things has an agenda to do all these

other things as well, that we decide are less good in our estimation,

so then we have this difficulty. It just gets to you sometimes. We have

a table of red apples and a table of green apples, and someone asks you

about apples, but that’s too general, you think, as you’ve made several distinctions to get to this place of two tables, two colors. How can that be an answer to anything?…

 

FULL TEXT HERE

from In a Landscape(BOA,2014)

 

TO LIVE WITH A LANDSCAPE

By Constance Urdang

 

      1

Take your boulevards, your Locust Street,

Your Chestnut, Pine, your Olive,

Take your Forest Park and Shaw’s Garden,

Your avenues that lead past street-corner violence,

Past your West End, past your Limit,

To shabby suburban crime,

Vandalism in the parking-lot,

Abductions from the shopping mall—

Like making the same mistake over and over

On the piano or typewriter keys,

Always hitting the wrong note—

How “very alive, very American”

They are, how chockful of metaphysics,

Hellbent to obliterate the wilderness.

 

    2

Learn to live with sycamores,

Their sad, peeling trunks, scabbed all over

With shabby patches, their enormous leaves

In dingy shades of ochre and dun

Rattling like castanets, their roots

Thick as a man’s leg, crawling

Like enormous worms out of the broken pavements,

Continually thrusting themselves up

From pools of shade they make,

Sculpturing the street

With dappled dark and light

As glaucoma, a disease of the eye,

Makes the world more beautiful

With its mysterious rainbows…

 

 

FULL TEXT HERE
from The Lone Woman and Others (Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1980)

2 Views on the Oyster (#2sdayPoems)

Tags

#2sDayPoems, Anne Sexton, British Women's Poetry, ellen bass, Food Poems, Like a Beggar, Oysters, Selected Poems of Anne Sexton

The phenomenal poets Anne Sexton & Ellen Bass bring two different views on the much-loved, summer favorite:

OYSTERS

by Anne Sexton

Oysters we ate,
sweet blue babies,
twelve eyes looked up at me,
running with lemon and Tabasco.
I was afraid to eat this father-food
and Father laughed and
drank down his martini,
clear as tears.
It was a soft medicine
that came from the sea into my mouth,
moist and plump.
I swallowed.
It went down like a large pudding.
Then I ate one o’clock and two o’clock.
Then I laughed and then we laughed
and let me take note –
there was a…

FULL TEXT HERE

from Selected Poems of Anne Sexton

 

REINCARNATION

by Ellen Bass

Who would believe in reincarnation
if she thought she would return as
an oyster? Eagles and wolves
are popular. Even domesticated cats
have their appeal. It’s not terribly distressing
to imagine being Missy, nibbling
kibble and lounging on the windowsill.
But I doubt the toothsome oyster has ever
been the totem of any shaman
fanning the Motherpeace Tarot
or smudging with sage.
Yet perhaps we could do worse
than aspire to be a plump bivalve. Humbly,
the oyster persists in….

 

FULL TEXT HERE (w/ audio)
latest collection: Like a Beggar

A 2Jane ‘House’ (2sday Poems)

Tags

2sDay Poems, An Hour is Not a House, art/poetry fusion, Jane Cooper, Jane Hirshfield, TED talk, the art of the metaphor, The Building of a House, women poets

Two prolific poets approach ‘house’ through different doors:

THE BUILDER OF HOUSES

by Jane Cooper

What was the blond child building
Down by the pond at near-dark
When the trees had lost their gilding
And the giant shadows stepped
To the water’s edge, then stopped?
With intent fingers, doing a boy’s work
In a boy”s old sweater
She hammered against her dear world’s dirty weather.

Proud of her first house
Which boasted an orange-crate ceiling
A pillow, a stuffed mouse…

 

FULL TEXT HERE
from Poetry, Oct. 1958

 

 

AN HOUR IS NOT A HOUSE

by Jane Hirshfield

An hour is not a house,
a life is not a house,
you do not go through them as if
they were doors to another.

Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,
four walls, a ceiling
An hour can be dropped like a glass….

FULL TEXT HERE
from Poetry, Apr. 2013

Bonus tidbit: Hirshfield on The Art of the Metaphor (TED talk)

A Poem for my Grandfather on the Anniversary of His Death

Tags

Passing Over

PASSING OVER
–for R. Davis

I try to see the sunshine in
the trees and not the bugs.

I try to leave no scars,
but lately I feel my body

is becoming one. Ugly
enough to some, but a sign

to me that I am living as
fully as a soul can live.

Where I go next, I enter
raw, as the moon enters

nightly. I think I can hear
the angels in the Holy City

singing. They sound like
lovely birds. I think this

boatman has now become a
captain. I mount my horse.