#poetry

Spring by Jenny Rowbory

Winter is all around but in this glade there is no ice or snow; warm sunlight bathes us. My hands are filled with soft white petals that I shower over you like confetti; they brush your cheeks as they fall, melting into your skin, coming to settle gently upon the grief, loss and panic. It makes the heavy feel light for a little while. Here it is safe to sing of the hope of Outdoor Hair. What if the seasons are stuck for good this time and Spring never comes. We were never promised it would. Our bodies are covered in the welts and bruises from the kicks and punches of that unmade promise, the one we wish existed: the guarantee of a certain Spring. We are The Winter People yet our hearts are made of snowdrops.

— We Are The Winter People by Jenny Rowbory

us by Tory Dent

in your arms it was incredibly often enough to be in your arms careful as we had to be at times about the I.V. catheter in my hand, or my wrist or my forearm which we placed, consciously, like a Gamboni vase, the center of attention, placed, frail identity as if our someday-newborn on your chest — to be secluded, washed over in your arms often enough, it was in that stillness, the only stillness amidst the fears which wildly collided and the complexities of the illness, all the work we had yet to do, had just done, the hope, ridiculous amounts of it we had to pump from nothing, really, short-lived consensus possibility & experiment to access from our pinched and tiny minds just the idea of hope make it from scratch, air and water like manufactured snow a colossal fatigue the severe concentration of that, the repetition of that lifted for a moment just above your arms inevitable, pressuring it weighed down but remained above like a cathedral ceiling, strangely sheltering while I held tightly while there I could in your arms only there, the only stillness remember the will, allow the pull, tow against inevitable ebb — you don't need reasons to live one reason, blinking in the fog, organically sweet in muddy dark incredibly often enough it is, it was in your arms

— Black Milk by Tory Dent

Werewolf Avoidance by Nikki Giovanni

I've never "blogged" before so this is new territory for me I do poet though and that is always somewhere in the netherland I think poetry is employed by truth I think our job is to tell the truth as we see it don't you just hate a namby-pamby poem that goes all over the place saying nothing

Poets should be strong in our emotions and our words that might make us difficult to live with but I do believe easier to love Poet is garlic Not for everyone but for those who take it never get caught by werewolves

— Chasing Utopia

Bed days by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

What were my mom's pain days like? Were they all of them? She didn't have weed, friends, a therapist, yoga, baths, Vicodin, T-3s, community acupuncture, fragrance-free or turmeric. She had wine, silence and a garden. She had hidden.

Sometimes I lie in bed on a pain day with my sick and disabled friends a finger swipe away, my twin canes, my partner who loves me my good bed, my nettles and my deep breaths, and still the pain in my knees and legs lives and shouts fire, and I wonder

if my disability is me feeling all the pain my mom never had a chance to feel finally safe enough to come home and talk to me.

— Tonguebreaker by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

A Robin's Poem by Nikki Giovanni

if you plant grain you get fields of flour if you plant seeds you get grass or babies i planted once and a robin red breast flew in my window but a tom cat wouldn't let it stay

— The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni

Reborn by Jason Irwin

A man in a green mask asks me to count backwards from one hundred. At ninety-eight the table begins to spin, and I am swallowed by the light that hangs above me like giant insect eyes.

I can mark time by the surgeries; the way my grandmother marked my growth with pencil slashes on her kitchen door frame.

Each time I awoke from that abyss – my mouth a desert; my eyes two stones sunk in my skull – some small part of me had died; some small part was reborn.

— A Blister of Stars

The Funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Nikki Giovanni

His headstone said FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST But death is a slave's freedom We seek the freedom of free men And the construction of a world Where Martin Luther King could have lived and preached non-violence.

— The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni

Sometimes by Nikki Giovanni

sometimes when i wake up in the morning and see all the faces i just can't breathe

— The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni

Myth by Rebecca Elson

What I want is a mythology so huge That settling on its grassy bank (Which may at first seem ordinary) You catch sight of the frog, the stone, The dead minnow jewelled with flies, And remember all at once The things you had forgotten to imagine.

— A Responsibility to Awe by Rebecca Elson

In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars

of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment,

the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders

of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is

nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned

in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side

is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world

you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it

against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

— Devotions by Mary Oliver (Page 389 - 390)

FUTURA VECCHIA, NEW YEAR’S EVE by Rebecca Elson

Returning, like the Earth
To the same point in space,
We go softly to the comfort of destruction,

And consume in flames
A school of fish,
A pair of hens,
A mountain poplar with its moss.

A shiver of sparks sweeps round
The dark shoulder of the Earth,
Frisson of recognition,
Preparation for another voyage,

And our own gentle bubbles
Float curious and mute
Towards the black lake
Boiling with light,
Towards the sharp night
Whistling with sound.

— A Responsibility to Awe by Rebecca Elson

What I Didn't Know Before by Ada Limón

was how horses simply give birth to other horses. Not a baby by any means, not a creature of liminal spaces, but already a four-legged beast hellbent on walking, scrambling after the mother. A horse gives way to another horse and then suddenly there are two horses, just like that. That's how I loved you. You, off the long train from Red Bank carrying a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two computers swinging in it unwieldily at your side. I remember we broke into laughter when we saw each other. What was between us wasn't a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.

— The Carrying: Poems by Ada Limón (Page 71)

The Cure for Melancholy Is to Take the Horn by Natalie Diaz

Powered unicorn horn was once thought to cure melancholy.

What carries the hurt is never the wound but the red garden sewn by the horn as it left—and she left. I am rosing, blossoming absence—a brilliant alarum.

Brodsky said, Darkness restores what light cannot repair. You thrilled me—torn to the comb. I want everything—the ebon bull and the moon. I come and again for the honeyed horn.

Queen Elizabeth traded a castle for a single horn. I serve the kingdom of my hands— an army of touch marching the alcázar of your thighs blaring and bright as any war horn.

I arrive at you—half bestia, half feast. Night after night we harvest the luxed Bosque de Caderas, reap the darkful fruit mulling our mouths, separate sweet from thron.

My lanternist. Your hands wick at the bronzed lamp of my breast. Strike me to spark— tremble me to awe. Into your lap let me lay my heavy horns.

I fulfilled the prophecy of your throat, loosed in you the fabulous wing of my mouth. Red holy-red ghost. Left my body and spoke to God, came back seraphimed—copper feathered and horned.

Our bodies are nothing if not places to be had by, as in, God, she had me by the throat, by the hip bone, by the moon. God, she hurt me with my own horns.

— Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz (Page 77)

Migratory by Les Murray

I am the nest that comes and goes, I am the egg that isn't now, I am the beach, the food in sand, the shade with shells and the shade with sticks. I am the right feeling on washed shine, in wing-lifting surf, in running about beak-focused: the feeling of here, that stays and stays, then lengthens out over the hills of hills and the feedy sea. I am the wrongness of here, when it is true to fly along the feeling the length of its great rightness, while days burn from vast to a gold gill in the dark to vast again, for many feeds and floating rests, till the sun ahead becomes the sun behind, and half the little far days of the night are different. Right feelings of here arrive with me: I am the nests danced for and now, I am the crying heads to fill, I am the beach, the sand in food, the shade with sticks and the double kelp shade.

— Learning Human by Les Murray

Grandfathers Say by Naomi Shihab Nye

Grandfathers say the garden is deep, old roots twisted beyond our worry or reach. Maybe our grief began there, in the long history of human suffering, where rain goes when it soaks out of sight. Savory smoke from ancient fires still lingers. At night you can smell it in the stones of the walls. When you awaken, voices from inside your pillow still holding you close.

— The tiny journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye (Page 100)