8/3/18

The Poet With His Face in His Hands - Mary Oliver

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need any more of that sound.

So if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water-fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

8/2/18

The Voices - Richard Shelton

Suddenly dawn
had to get up and build the trees.

I could no longer deny
the voices so I came
to terms with them: glistening
votaries dipped in madness,
a blue eye in the wrong socket,
an old chair
rocking by itself,
leather with its memory and silk
which forgets everything,
a machine producing time
in the factory.

This does not mean
I learned to trust them
but I came to terms with them

because, as they said,
we are the only family you have.

7/10/18

After Years - Ted Kooser

Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood in the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.

7/9/18

DAUGHTER - Lisel Mueller

My next poem will be happy,
I promise myself. Then you come
with your deep eyes, your tall jeans,
your narrow hands, your wit,
your uncanny knowledge, and
your loneliness. All the flowers
your father planted, all
the green beans that have made it,
all the world’s recorded pianos
and this exhilarating day
cannot change that.

4/27/18

The Sirens - Lawrence Raab

After a while we got tired of singing.
One morning out on the rocks
with not a ship in sight, we all felt it—

a certain weariness, a malaise,
if you will. We felt it together,
sympathy having become

one of the finer aspects
of our nature. We’ve drifted apart
since those days, yet we’re happy

being remembered as impossible
to resist. The legends used to claim
we knew the future as well—all things

which shall be hereafter upon the earth,
as our song put it. Everyone only assumed
we were beautiful. But we were, and are,

though not unlike so many other
women now, those who promise much less,
but let you live. It was a relief

to give up our powers willingly.
That didn’t happen often in our world,
where the gods went on amusing themselves

with their meddling, and the hero
plowed ahead, lashed to the mast,
dying to be tempted. Did we enjoy the clamor

of shipwreck? The cries of the disillusioned?
It was our job, our particular talent.
We weren’t supposed to want anything else.

4/17/18

The Witch's Story - Lawrence Raab

Everything you have heard about me
is true, or true enough.
You shouldn’t think
I’d change my story now.
A stubborn, willful little girl
comes sneaking
around my house, peering
in all the windows. She’s disobeyed
her parents, who knew
where the witch lived. “If you go,
you’re not our daughter any more.”
That’s what they told her. I have
my ways of knowing. All pale
and trembly then, she knocks at my door.
“Why are you so pale?”
I ask, although of course
I know that too.
She'd seen what she’d seen—
a green man on the stairs, and the other one,
the red one, and then the devil himself
with his head on fire, which was me,
the witch in her true ornament, as I
like to put it. Oh, she’d seen what she needed
to send her running home
but she walked right in, which is the part
I never understand completely. Maybe
she believed, just then,
that she was no one’s daughter any more,
and had to take her chances, poor thing,
inside with me. “So you’ve come
to brighten up my house,”
I said, and changed her into a log.
It was an easy trick, and gave me little pleasure.
But I’d been waiting all day.
I was cold, and even that
small fire was bright, and warm enough.