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[poemmedicine]

For Keeps

Joy Harjo

Sun makes the day new. Tiny green plants emerge from earth. Birds are singing the sky into place. There is nowhere else I want to be but here. I lean into the rhythm of your heart to see where it will take us. We gallop into a warm, southern wind. I link my legs to yours and we ride together, Toward the ancient encampment of our relatives. Where have you been? they ask. And what has taken you so long? That night after eating, singing, and dancing We lay together under the stars. We know ourselves to be part of mystery. It is unspeakable. It is everlasting. It is for keeps.

                              MARCH 4, 2013, CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS

[poemmedicine]

Lies About Sea Creatures

Ada Limón

I lied about the whales. Fantastical blue water-dwellers, big, slow moaners of the coastal. I never saw them. Not once that whole frozen year. Sure, I saw the raw white gannets hit the waves so hard it could have been a showy blow hole. But I knew it wasn’t. Sometimes, you just want something so hard you have to lie about it, so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute, how real hunger has a real taste. Someone once told me gannets, those voracious sea birds of the North Atlantic chill, go blind from the height and speed of their dives. But that, too, is a lie. Gannets never go blind and they certainly never die.

[poemmedicine]

Before You Came

Faiz Ahmed Faiz Translated by Agha Shahid Ali

Before you came, things were as they should be: the sky was the dead-end of sight, the road was just a road, wine merely wine. Now everything is like my heart, a color at the edge of blood: the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns, the gold when we meet, the season ablaze, the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames, and the black when you cover the earth with the coal of dead fires. And the sky, the road, the glass of wine? The sky is a shirt wet with tears, the road a vein about to break, and the glass of wine a mirror in which the sky, the road, the world keep changing. Don't leave now that you're here— Stay. So the world may become like itself again: so the sky may be the sky, the road a road, and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.

[poemmedicine]

[Again and again, even though we know love’s landscape]

Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by Edward Snow

Again and again, even though we know love’s landscape and the little churchyard with its lamenting names and the terrible reticent gorge in which the others end: again and again the two of us walk out together under the ancient trees, lay ourselves down again and again among the flowers, and look up into the sky.

[poemmedicine]

Camomile Tea

Katherine Mansfield

Outside the sky is light with stars; There's a hollow roaring from the sea. And, alas! for the little almond flowers, The wind is shaking the almond tree.

How little I thought, a year ago, In the horrible cottage upon the Lee That he and I should be sitting so And sipping a cup of camomile tea.

Light as feathers the witches fly, The horn of the moon is plain to see; By a firefly under a jonquil flower A goblin toasts a bumble-bee.

We might be fifty, we might be five, So snug, so compact, so wise are we! Under the kitchen-table leg My knee is pressing against his knee.

Our shutters are shut, the fire is low, The tap is dripping peacefully; The saucepan shadows on the wall Are black and round and plain to see.

[poemmedicine]

How to Drown

Devin Kelly

I’m weighted & full of words,           a cloud                     of vowels                     soft-sinking toward ground.                               (No one ever told me it would be like this,                                         that the past                               could scream past until                                                   it inhabits a kind of present, the way                                                             the word weight                                                             holds the sound of wait                                         until what you feel becomes a softened                                                   mantra binding you to night.) Each morning I wake           hushing an ocean                               back into place, my body shored up                                                   & sandy, pouring coffee into the faint           wound of my mouth. Every object                     contains a story.                                         Failed love is only                                         a drunkenness you attempt to stumble                               out of, without water,                                                             without the hope                                                                       of mo(u)rning.                                         Once, my mother sat me                                         at the foot of her bed, years after she left                                                                                 my father,                     to tell me she still loved him. I touched the faint vein trickling long           her hand,                     tried to find whatever yarn                                         binds two people together. She fed me                                                   ice cream                               until I fell asleep on her couch           & then spent a forever-sickness of years                               chasing nothing but what she left behind. I am so wrong for all of this.                                         The love-quiet                               of city at night, how each small thing turned                                                   in the right kind of light can bring me                               to my knees,           remind me of a forever I have lost.                                         If you lead me by leash to the pond                                                   in the middle of the park,                                         if you tie a brick                                                   to my ankle & usher my body                                                             gently toward water                                                   as I have seen horses led —the way supplication does not have to contain a kind of violence, the way prayer was invented to fill the time we would spend watching others die—                                         if you weigh me down,                                                   you will have to wait           for my body to surrender, for all this                     givingness, all this gentleness, all this all-of-this           to bend back                                                   under the kiss of star & streetlight,                     to give in,                               to beg forgiveness,                                                   & disappear.

[poemmedicine]

Old Love

Pat Schneider

Old love is a ripe persimmon on a wild persimmon tree. Love, we are old, have you noticed — you and me? And our love is old, and sweet and ripe on the tip of the lover’s tongue. Remember, love, the bitter sting sometimes, when we were young? But now we have ripened, round and full of golden sweetness, golden sun, and we look with surprise at each other: You are the one. You are the one, beloved, we say. Don’t fear the flight. We’re just taking the seeds of this sweetness back to the earth’s good night.

[poemmedicine]

If You Have Had Your Midnights

Mari Evans

        if you have had              your midnights     and they have drenched         your barren guts            with tears

  I sing you sunrise          and love and someone to touch

[poemmedicine]

Quietly

Kenneth Rexroth

Lying here quietly beside you, My cheek against your firm, quiet thighs, The calm music of Boccherini Washing over us in the quiet, As the sun leaves the housetops and goes Out over the Pacific, quiet– So quiet the sun moves beyond us, So quiet as the sun always goes, So quiet, our bodies, worn with the Times and the penances of love, our Brains curled, quiet in their shells, dormant, Our hearts slow, quiet, reliable In their interlocking rhythms, the pulse In your thigh caressing my cheek. Quiet.

[poemmedicine]

Lowering of the Gaze

Mohja Kahf

I love the man of lowered gaze and the woman of lowered gaze And I love the man who looks hungrily and the woman who looks hungrily I have been the man with the hungry gaze and the man of iron restraint whose eyes leave what is covered, covered I have been the woman with the ravenous mouth and the woman with the disciplined will like an axe sharply splitting wood like an axe at the moment it is lifted poised, in that pause before descent And I am the gaze and the pause and the wood that is split

[poemmedicine]

My Cathedral

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Like two cathedral towers these stately pines   Uplift their fretted summits tipped with cones;   The arch beneath them is not built with stones,   Not Art but Nature traced these lovely lines, And carved this graceful arabesque of vines;   No organ but the wind here sighs and moans,   No sepulchre conceals a martyr's bones.   No marble bishop on his tomb reclines. Enter! the pavement, carpeted with leaves,   Gives back a softened echo to thy tread!   Listen! the choir is singing; all the birds, In leafy galleries beneath the eaves,   Are singing! listen, ere the sound be fled,   And learn there may be worship without words. 

[poemmedicine]

Sorrow Is Not My Name

—after Gwendolyn Brooks

No matter the pull toward brink. No matter the florid, deep sleep awaits. There is a time for everything. Look, just this morning a vulture nodded his red, grizzled head at me, and I looked at him, admiring the sickle of his beak. Then the wind kicked up, and, after arranging that good suit of feathers he up and took off. Just like that. And to boot, there are, on this planet alone, something like two million naturally occurring sweet things, some with names so generous as to kick the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon, stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks at the market. Think of that. The long night, the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah. But look; my niece is running through a field calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel and at the end of my block is a basketball court. I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.

      —for Walter Aikens

[poemmedicine]

The Peace of Wild Things

Wendell Berry

When despair grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting for their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

[poemmedicine]

What We Need Is Here

Wendell Berry

Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.

[poemmedicine]

I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life (Ten)

Mary Oliver

Love, love, love, says Percy. And run as fast as you can along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust. Then, go to sleep. Give up your body heat, your beating heart. Then, trust.

[poemmedicine]

Ending the Estrangement

Ross Gay

from my mother's sadness, which was, to me, unbearable, until, it felt to me not like what I thought it felt like to her, and so felt inside myself—like death, like dying, which I would almost have rather done, though adding to her sadness would rather die than do— but, by sitting still, like what, in fact, it was— a form of gratitude which when last it came drifted like a meadow lit by torches of cardinal flower, one of whose crimson blooms, when a hummingbird hovered nearby, I slipped into my mouth thereby coaxing the bird to scrawl on my tongue its heart's frenzy, its fleet nectar-questing song, with whom, with you, dear mother, I now sing along.

[poemmedicine]

Within Two Weeks the African American Poet Ross Gay is Mistaken for Both the African American Poet Terrance Hayes and the African American Poet Kyle Dargan, Not One of Whom Looks Anything Like the Others

Ross Gay

If you think you know enough to say this poem is about good hair, I'll correct you and tell you it's about history which is the blacksmith of our tongues. Our eyes. Where you see misunderstanding I see knuckles and teeth for sale in a storefront window. I see the waterlogged face of the fourteen-year-old boy. The bullet's imperceptible sizzle toward an unarmed man. And as you ask me to sign the book that is not mine, your gaze shifting between me and the author's photo, whispering, but that's not you? I do not feel sorry for you. No. I think only that when a man is a concept he will tell you about the smell of smoke. He will tell you the distance between heartbreak and rage.