Poetry

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original New Yorker article here

Image version

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

Yi Lei, 1987
Translated by Tracy K. Smith

14. Hope Beyond Hope

This city of riches has fallen empty.
Small rooms like mine are easy to
breach. Watchmen pace, peer in,
gazes hungry.
I come and go, always alone, heavy with
worry. My flesh forsakes itself. Strangers’
eyes
Drill into me till I bleed. I beg God:
Make me a ghost.

    Fellow citizens:

Something invisible blocks every
road.
I wait night after night with a hope beyond
hope. If you come, will nation rise against
nation?
If you come, will the Yellow River drown its
banks? If you come, will the sky blacken and
rage?
Will your coming decimate the harvest?
There is nothing I can do in the face of all I
hate. What I hate most is the person I’ve
become.

    You didn’t come to live with me.

Federico García Lorca, 1921--24

Woodcutter.
Cut my shadow from me.
Free me from the torment
of seeing myself without fruit.

Why was I born among mirrors?
The day walks in circles around me,
and the night copies me
in all its stars.

I want to live without seeing myself,
and I will dream that ants
and thistleburrs are my
leaves and my birds.

Woodcutter.
Cut my shadow from me.
Free me from the torment
of seeing myself without fruit.

Emily Dickinson

“Faith” is a fine invention
For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency!

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1905

I live my life in widening rings
which spread over earth and sky.
I may not ever complete the last one,
but that is what I will try.

I circle around God, the primordial tower,
and I circle ten thousand years long;
and I still don't know if I'm a falcon, a storm,
or an unfinished song.

This poem is a bit formal in nature, but I still think it fits the vibe. Just wanted to share! :)

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

— W. H. Auden

William Blake, 1794

"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."

So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

"Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."

Louise Glück, 1996

Little soul, little perpetually undressed one,
Do now as I bid you, climb
The shelf-like branches of the spruce tree;
Wait at the top, attentive, like
A sentry or look-out. He will be home soon;
It behooves you to be
Generous. You have not been completely
Perfect either; with your troublesome body
You have done things you shouldn’t
Discuss in poems. Therefore
Call out to him over the open water, over the bright
Water
With your dark song, with your grasping,
Unnatural song—passionate,
Like Maria Callas. Who
Wouldn’t want you? Whose most demonic appetite
Could you possibly fail to answer? Soon
He will return from wherever he goes in the
Meantime,
Suntanned from his time away, wanting
His grilled chicken. Ah, you must greet him,
You must shake the boughs of the tree
To get his attention,
But carefully, carefully, lest
His beautiful face be marred
By too many falling needles.

W.E.B. DuBois, 1903

Within the veil was he born, said I; and there within shall he live,

a Negro and a Negro's son. Holding in that little head

ah, bitterly!

the unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with that tiny dimpled hand -- ah, wearily! ---to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful, and seeing with those bright wondering eyes that peer into my soul a land whose freedom is to us a mockery and whose liberty a lie.

Stephen Berg, 1981

You can't frighten me by saying Fate's dangerous,
by talking about the boredom of the great North.
I'm miles from the city now, almost asleep on the grass
    beside you
for the first time,
and I hear everybody I know call this weekend of ours
    Goodybye.
I feel your thighs pressing all along the front of
    my thighs,
my face swims in the hollows of your neck,
my hands are in your hair.
There's the smell of you and the earth

mortal,
    overwhelming!
So we won't see dawn swelling the fields again all that
    easily;
so the moon won't take its old path over us here.
Today I'm still going to give you
things no one else was ever able to

my face and breasts alive in the water
late at night when the stream won't let me sleep,
that sour, childish frown of helplessness
when a star vanishes and can't be brought back.
But best of all this tired, cracked voice, this echo
that was once liquid and young,
that soothed you and made you hear

till you stopped shivering

crows chattering all over Moscow, and made October
fresher than May. Then,
the raised, three-pointed brass stars on the plugs in the
    cannon muzzles
still gleamed. Oh remember me, my angel
of the hope and hopelessness that makes love possible,
remember me
I hate the paralyzing snow.

Christopher Logue, 1959 (begun)

“And Patroclus,
Shaking the voice out of his body, says:
‘Big mouth.
Remember it took three of you to kill me.
A god, a boy, and, last and least, a prince.
I can hear Death pronounce my name, and yet
Somehow it sounds like Hector.
And as I close my eyes I see Achilles’ face
With Death’s voice coming out of it.’

Saying these things Patroclus died.
And as his soul went through the sand
Hector withdrew his spear and said:
‘Perhaps.'”

Derek Walcott, 1990

These are the days when, however simple the future, we do not go
towards it but leave part of life in a lobby whose elevators
divide and enclose us, brightening digits that show

exactly where we are headed, while a young Polish woman
is emptying an ashtray, and we are drawn to a window
whose strings, if we pull them, widen an emptiness.

Audrey Lorde, 1978

The black unicorn is greedy.
The black unicorn is impatient.
The black unicorn was mistaken
for a shadow or symbol
and taken
through a cold country
where mist painted mockeries
of my fury.
It is not on her lap where the horn rests
but deep in her moonpit
growing.
The black unicorn is restless
the black unicorn is unrelenting
the black unicorn is not
free.

Adrienne Rich, 2008

Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon's eyelid

later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere

Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve

Syntax of rendition:

verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action

verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verb    disgraced    goes on doing

there are adjectives up for sale

now diagram the sentence

Elizabeth Bishop, 1946

From a magician's midnight sleeve
    the radio-singers
distribute all their love-songs
over the dew-wet lawns.
    And like a fortune-teller's
their marrow-piercing guesses are whatever you believe.

But on the Navy Yard radio aerial I find
    better witnesses
for love on summer nights.
Five remote red lights
    keep their nests there; Phoenixes
burning quietly, where the dew cannot climb.

Wallace Stevens, 1959

That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.

It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.

Corazón, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.

He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own . . .

The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.

Bett Williams, 2020

They're coming over
All the people from all the directions
The ones who keep their altars right
The ones who keep it clean
Who know how to do ceremony in a closed-up house
This is a closed-up house
All the doors in all the four directions
They're closed up tight
We do it this way
Keep our altars clean
All the relatives are coming over
Bringing chicken
All the ones on your side
Are filling up the house
For ceremony
That's how we party
In ceremony
Ceremony in a closed-up house

"Louder Than A Bomb" is a great documentary about the Rooted & Radical Youth Poetry Festival in Chicago. Definitely give it a watch and obviously if you have access to the Festival itself, it's the largest youth poetry festival in the world.

Eileen Myles, 2017

humans have dogs

to hold a distant spot close

a star

a cool glow

for the

lonely

by me, 2023

Because of the flatulence
of a paper mill nearby,
the wind is tinged with farts.

Plus old plumbing
a drainage bag,
and holidays have an inoffensive,
human waft of anus
like a perfume trail
in every room.