Poem-a-Thon

[tungtied2u]

Langston Hughes

Let America Be America Again

Let America be America again.Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--

And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!

Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--

Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!

I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream

In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.

O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?

For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,

The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.

The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

 

[tungtied2u]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I AM WAITING

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting
for someone to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep through the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped’ onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Great Divide to ‘be crossed
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for the American Boy
to take off Beauty’s clothes
and get on top of her
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am waiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

 

[tungtied2u]

Allen Ginsburg

Two Sonnets
Allen Ginsburg

I
I dwelled in Hell on earth to write this rhyme,
I live in stillness now, in living flame;
I witness Heaven in unholy time,
I room in the rennowned city, am
Unknown. The fame I dwell in is not mine,
I would not have it. Angels in the air
Serenade my senses in delight.
Intellengence of poets, saints, and fair
Characters converse with me all night.
But all the streets are burning everywhere.
The city is burning these multitudes that climb
Her buildings. Their inferno is the same
I scaled as a stupendous blazing stair.
They vanish as I look into the light.

II
Woe unto thee, Manhattan, woe to thee,
Woe unto all the cities of the world.
Repent, Chicagos, O repent; ah, me!
Los Angeles, now thou art gone so wild,
I think thou art still mighty, yet shall be,
As the earth shook, and San Francisco fell,
An angel in an agony of flame.
City of horrors, New York so much like Hell,
How soon thou shalt be a city-without-name,
A tomb of souls, and a poor broken knell.
Fire and fire on London, Moscow shall die,
And Paris her livid atomies be rolled
Together into the Woe of the blazing bell-
All cities thenshall toll for their great fame.

New York, Spring 1948

 

[RazzRajen]

Mary Oliver

Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond

As for life,
I'm humbled,
I'm without
words
sufficient to say

how it has been hard as flint,
and soft as a spring pond,
both of
these
and over and over,

and long pale afternoons besides,
and so many mysteries
beautiful
as eggs in a nest,
still unhatched

though warm and watched over
by something I have never
seen-
a tree angel, perhaps,
or a ghost of loneliness.

Every day I walk out into the
world
to be dazzled, then to be reflective.
It suffices, it is all comfort-
along with human
love,

dog love, water love, little-serpent love,
sunburst love, or love for that smallest of
birds
flying among the scarlet flowers.
There is hardly time to think about

stopping, and
lying down at last
to the long afterlife, to the tenderness
yet to come, when
time will brim
over the singular pond, and become forever,

and we will pretend to melt away into the
leaves.
As for death,
I can't wait to be the hummingbird,
can you?

 

[RazzRajen]

Rilke - Rumi et al

The Wait
Rainer Maria
Rilke

It is life in slow motion,
it's the heart in reverse,
it's a hope-and-a-half:
too much
and too little at once.

It's a train that suddenly
stops with no station around,
and we can
hear the cricket,
and, leaning out the carriage

door, we vainly contemplate
a wind we feel
that stirs
the blooming meadows, the meadows
made imaginary by this stop.


Rumi -

"What is the heart?
It is not human,
and it is not imaginary. I call it
you. Stately bird, who one moment
combines
with this world, and the
next, passes through the boundary to
the unseen. The soul cannot find
you
because you are the soul's wings, how
it moves. Eyes cannot see you: you
are the source of
sight".

Rumi

 

[tarablackwood22]

Dylan Thomas

The Boys of Summer by Dylan Thomas


I

I see the boys of summer in their ruin
Lay the gold tithings barren,
Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;
There in their heat the winter floods
Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,
And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.

These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,
Sour the boiling honey;
The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;
There in the sun the frigid threads
Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;
the signal moon is zero in their voids.

I see the summer children in their mothers
Split up the brawned womb’s weathers,
Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs;
There in the deep with quartered shades
Of sun and moon they paint their dams
As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.

I see that from these boys shall men of nothing
Stature by seedy shifting,
Or lame the air with leaping from its heats;
There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse
Of love and light bursts in their throats.
O see the pulse of summer in the ice.

II

But seasons must be challenged or they totter
Into a chiming quarter
Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;
There in his night, the black-tongued bells
The sleepy man of winter pulls,
Nor blows back moon-and midnight as she blows.

We are the dark deniers, let us summon
Death from a summer woman,
A muscling life from lovers in their cramp,
From the fair dead who flush the sea
The bright-eyed worm on Davy’s lamp,
And from the planted womb the man of straw.

We summer boys in this four-winded spinning,
Green of the seaweeds’ iron,
Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,
Pick the world’s ball of wave and froth
To choke the deserts with her tides,
And comb the country gardens for a wreath.

In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly,
Heigh ho the blood and berry,
And nail the merry squires to the trees;
Here love’s damp muscle dries and dies,
Here break a kiss in no love’s quarry.
O see the poles of promise in the boys.

III

I see you boys of summer in your ruin.
Man in his maggot’s barren.
And boys are full and foreign in the pouch.
I am the man your father was.
We are the sons of flint and pitch.
O see the poles are kissing as they cross.

 

[Angeline]

I just posted this little poem in a public comment. It's the only one I know by this poet, and was written about a young American woman (she was at the time the poem was writ only 16 or 17) who was--years later--to become the mother of Winston Churchill.

Jenny kiss'd me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss'd me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss'd me.

-- James Leigh Hunt

 

[tungtied2u]

Steve GreenbergIf I Were Chubby Checker,

If I Were Chubby Checker,
How I Would Change the World by Steve Greenberg
--for Eldridge Cleaver


“. . . then, as if a signal had been given, as if the Mind had shouted to the Body, ‘I’m ready!’ -- the Twist. . . burst upon the scene like a nuclear explosion, sending its fallout of rhythm into the Minds and Bodies of the people. . . The Twist was a guided missile launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. . . The Twist was a form of energy for a convalescing nation.” (from Soul On Ice by Eldridge Cleaver)


Backstage Chubby Checker
Feeling tired and black and blue
Playing poker with the Panthers
Playing joker to the Jews
Sick of watching Belafonte
Shucking with the minstrel show
He decides the mindless coons
and spineless honkies
Got to go
With his hips his manifesto
He prepares his power move
“I wanna make the black man sanctified
And make the white man groove!
But not through switchblade revolution
That the brothers can’t survive
Not with soapbox elocution
All of that’s just shuck and jive
And I’m not Josephine Baker
I ain’t moving to France
I’ll just be moving my body
See, I’ve been working on this dance. . . .”

Now the Panthers were restless
This was not quite their plan
“Where’s the Molotov cocktails?
Slip that glove on my hand”
But Mr. Checker countered
“You don’t seem to understand
Charley just needs the rhythm
So strike up the band
'Cause if the white man could somehow
For one moment feel
What it’s like inside my body
Then my soul can be healed
Taking life on the knife never cuts us free
We should make the white man think he’s Stagger Lee
Yes! Let's cause a distraction
And put a shake in their behinds
While Mr. Brown down in Topeka
Steals us all back our minds”

Panthers laughed:
“Can’t be done”
Chubby growled: “Wanna bet?
We’ll grease the wheels of upheaval
With the white man’s own sweat
Clyde, I've seen the other side of the upraised fist
Just shake your booty
C'mon let's everybody Twist!”

Now since your bones just end up broken
If you’re bent on throwing bombs
And you wind up someone’s token
If you make like Uncle Tom
And if you rule out doing nothing
Cause you can’t just sit and stew
Well then if I were Chubby Checker
Hell, I guess that I'd twist, too
--Steve Greenberg

 

[annaswirls]

A third Body

A third Body

A man and a woman sit near each other, and
they do not long
at this moment to be older, or younger
nor born in any other nation, or time or ploace.

They are content to be where they are,
talking or not talking.
Their breaths together feed someone whom
we do not know
The man sees the way his fingers move;
he sees her hands close around a book she
hands to him
They obey a third body that they share
in common.
They have made a promise to love that body.
Age may come, parting may come, death will come.
A man and a woman sit near each other;
as they breathe they feed someone we do not know
someone we know of, whom we have never seen.

Robert Bly, A third Body

 

[annaswirls]

Talking to Grief

Talking to Grief

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone
I should trust you.

I should coax you into the house
and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish

You think I don't know you've been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders
to consider my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.

Denise Levertov, Talking to Grief from Life in the Forest, pg 43

 

[Guest]

Silence Is Easier

by Kit Dobson


anne bronte’s grave
in scarborough
stands in view of the sea

it is the only one clearly
and completely
legible
in that area
of the graveyard
the rest are blackened
and eroded

hers has been repainted repeatedly

most everyone else
in the graveyard
seems
to have been named
either elizabeth or george

purging the couch of memory
onto the page

and the wind whips
across the town
and into my hair
filling it with sand
from the hooves of donkeys
giving children rides
on the beach

the scene is red
but the faded red
of drooping flowers
and paint flaking away
from the amusement
and bingo
parlors

between the chip shops

and words are carried on th wind
in every direction
but that of the listener

in this light
silence is easier

and another time

a man stands
in a corner
of the center pompidou
and masturbates quietly
as we walk carefully on tiptoes
into the hazy afternoon
of urban commodities

these words stand in for speech

as a wisp of gas reaches my nose
burning lightly

and we get in the car and drive
and drive
until our throats are dry and tired
complaining in the dust
of our oratory

I’ll tell these times
Instead
As we sit and stare
Into the burnt prairie horizon

 

[tungtied2u]

Prayer by Stuart Kestenbaum

Our problem- may I include you?- is that we

don't know how to start, how to just close

our eyes and let something dance between

our heart and our lips. We don't know how

to skip across the room only for the joy of the leap.

We walk, we run, but what happenned to the skip

and its partner the gallop, the useless and imaginary

way we could move through space, the horses we

rode before we knew how to saddle up, before we

had opinions about everything and just loved

the wind in our faces and the horizons in our eyes.

_______________________________

From the August 2004 issue of the Sun magazine.

 

[tungtied2u]

Fred Chappell

The Strain of Mercy

Aunt Agnes takes it all in stride:
Uncle Einar's boorishness,
Cousin Lilia's need to hide,
Cousin Willoughby's sordid mess
He thinks is a "bohemian life,"
Aunt Alicia's wandering wits,
What Uncle Lewis did to his wife,
The way that Uncle Nahum sits
In his creepy corner and calculates,
Aunt Wilma's plans for sweet revenge,
Cousin Hubert in dire straits,
The inevitable and dreaded change
Coming to young Elizabeth,
Cousin Ellie's hordes of mates,
Uncle Ozzie's fear of death.

She recognizes what we are,
Yet holds us in affection
As steadfast as the morning star,
As if our faults had no connection
With the persons we are within.
She doesn't pretend an ignorance
Of our dark collective sin;
She only believes that circumstance
Has gone against us every one,
That by blind forces we were driven.

We make a painful silent moan
At being so horribly forgiven.

 

[tungtied2u]

The Woman at the Dig

Poem: "The Woman at the Dig" by Leo Dangel, from The Crow on the Golden Arches © Spoon River Poetry Press. Reprinted with permission.

The Woman at the Dig

Tired from running a combine
all day through acres of wheat,
alone in front of the TV, I pay
attention because the show's about
scientists digging up an ancient site.
I have no special interest in bones,
pottery, spearheads, or prehistoric
garbage dumps, and I always look past
the man describing animal migrations,
burial rites, or building design and try
to catch a glimpse of the women
working at the site - one of them
might be wearing cut-off jeans
and a halter top, clearing a patch
of ground with a trowel or brush.
These women are all experts.
You can tell by the way they look
at a bone chip or a pottery shard
they understand worlds about
the person who left it. Sifting soil,
they show more grace than contestants
in a Miss Universe pageant.
Years from now, when these farms
are ancient history, an expedition
with such a woman might come along.
I could drop something for her to find,
a pocketknife, a brass overalls button.
If only she could discover my bones.
My eyes would be long gone,
But I can see her form coming into focus
above me as she gently sweeps aside
the last particles of dust - her knee, thigh,
hip, shoulders, and finally, set off by sky
and spikes of sunlight, her face - a woman
who recognizes what she's found.

 

[tungtied2u]

e e cummings

Poem: "87" from 100 Selected Poems, by e.e. cummings.

87

o by the by
has anybody seen
little you-I
who stood on a green
hill and threw
his wish at blue

with a swoop and a dart
out flew his wish
(it dived like a fish
but it climbed like a dream)
throbbing like a heart
singing like a flame

blue took it my
far beyond far
and high beyond high
bluer took it your
but bluest took it our
away beyond where

what a wonderful thing
is the end of a string
(murmurs little you-I
as the hill becomes nil)
and will somebody tell
me why people let go

 

[Angeline]

Selection from Cicada
Mark Nickels

1

Even before the story begins, you endure
a hundred subtractions not accounted for
in this turning: a grimness coming down
that doesn’t answer to your name, and wayward
urgencies of memory that have you stupefied,
engrossed. I’m thinking you don’t know
how much. What do you know of it,
your spectral, green, small icehouse wound,
and under it, the wounds of others, owned
by a line of hominids with lips compressed,
concealing mossy teeth, and in the DNA,
a quiver of time defying ecstasies and ailments
gone underground for thirteen generations,
like cicadas, only to surface in you?

No fewer, and I’m thinking you don’t know
how many, there are obscure enchantments
knotted in your nerves. Atavistic old religions
shoal at night, in choirs, in silent tides,
on highways driving after dark, cornball
music on the radio fading in and out,
mile markers signaling.
Your passengers asleep, you wouldn’t tell
them anyway, how the willow, the willow
in the margin of the road, closes
its eyes, in its winter branches feels
the glamour of the sea, and whatnot.
Now, these drooping trees possess you
with sensations you call love.

But as a wavering kid, both you and I
were scared of willows. I saw you running
only halfway down a neighbor’s drive
because a giant willow loomed there,
whispering, distracting, a restless cover.

 

[denis hale]

The River Charles

THE PLEASURES OF READING by Charles Simic

On his deathbed my father is reading
The memoirs of Casanova..
I'm watching the night fall,
A few windows being lit across the street.
In one of them a woman is reading
Close to the glass.
She hasn't looked up in a long while,
Even with the darkness coming.

While there's still a bit of light,
I want her to lift her head,
So I can see her face
Which I have already imagined,
But her book must be full of suspense,
And besides, it's so quiet,
Every time she turns a page,
I can hear my father turn one too,
As if they are reading the same book.

 

[Angeline]

Re: The River Charles

THE PLEASURES OF READING by Charles Simic

On his deathbed my father is reading
The memoirs of Casanova..
I'm watching the night fall,
A few windows being lit across the street.
In one of them a woman is reading
Close to the glass.
She hasn't looked up in a long while,
Even with the darkness coming.

While there's still a bit of light,
I want her to lift her head,
So I can see her face
Which I have already imagined,
But her book must be full of suspense,
And besides, it's so quiet,
Every time she turns a page,
I can hear my father turn one too,
As if they are reading the same book.

 

[denis hale]

 

[Angeline]

Re:

was that esp? lol. i understood.

i know you love Simic. that poem is a good argument for reading a lot more of him.

did you like the Mark Nickels? I just read every poet in the current issue of Rattapallax Magazine, and his poem shone out like a beacon--uh, so to speak. it was good. there were a few other really good ones, but they were by yknow Robert Creely. Nickels is a relative newby.

 

[denis hale]

hey

Hi Ange!

I just googled Mark Nickels.

Apparently he has a book out, on Amazon.com.


I need to check out a couple of his googlisms. Yeah, I liked that poem you posted.

Oh wait, I've got a guy you should check out.


Hang on...

 

[Angeline]

Re: hey

Hi Ange!

I just googled Mark Nickels.

Apparently he has a book out, on Amazon.com.


I need to check out a couple of his googlisms. Yeah, I liked that poem you posted.

Oh wait, I've got a guy you should check out.


Hang on...

ok. i'll hang out and have another glass of wine, lol. hey the other poet in Rattapallax i liked was published in one of the same places as me. i feel like poetry fame's second cousin.

 

[denis hale]

Here ya go!

CAPE WORK by Michael Pettit

Comes my mercurial woman, kazoo
of a heart buzzing and her breasts
pink with it. You'd think it
wasn't anger that so moves her
down the street, but love. The way
her legs are in motion but her eye
is fixed is lovely.
She sees the cape I'm waving, red satin,
and would do me in except for
the flourish-- once around the body
and I'm naked, no suit of lights.
Later, my ear against her belly,
it's not Sousa I hear and not
a thousand banjoes. Not brass,
strings, woodwinds, drums beneath
her skin. It's a white noise, and heartless,
as if my head lay on a pillow of down
and she were gone or going or never there.

 

[Angeline]

Re: Here ya go!

CAPE WORK by Michael Pettit

Comes my mercurial woman, kazoo
of a heart buzzing and her breasts
pink with it. You'd think it
wasn't anger that so moves her
down the street, but love. The way
her legs are in motion but her eye
is fixed is lovely.
She sees the cape I'm waving, red satin,
and would do me in except for
the flourish-- once around the body
and I'm naked, no suit of lights.
Later, my ear against her belly,
it's not Sousa I hear and not
a thousand banjoes. Not brass,
strings, woodwinds, drums beneath
her skin. It's a white noise, and heartless,
as if my head lay on a pillow of down
and she were gone or going or never there.

that's beautiful.

i think i just read a poem by him recently, too. lemme see if i can find it.

 

[Angeline]

nope, couldn't find it--maybe it was someone else. here's the other poem i liked though--

Kalypso’d I

for Mark Nickels

On the first day of spring, I watch as a gray wind
blows inland off the ocean. Later a featureless mist
settles on hills, on vague birds puffed and huddled.
And I remember that the eucalyptus flowers at just
this time of year–white and snowy–and how a heron,
with its flowery feathers, breaks open the dark woods
somewhere in a poem (although the poet herself
is lost and hidden, concealed by a veil that keeps
her from the core of things); how the covered tree
unwraps itself, the shaggy bark slipping from its sides,
the trunk exposed in palest green; how a blue jay
strops its beak on unmantled wood; how the sky forms
a hush–or the suggestion of. And how we struggle
toward identity, shedding garments of oblivion.





i didn't notice till after i read it that it was dedicated to mark nickels! funny, that. and she was in A Small Garlic Press and me, too. it's like six degrees of separation.