America
If an eagle be imprisoned
On the back of a coin
And the coin is tossed into the sky,
That coin will spin,
That coin will flutter,
But the eagle will never fly.
Henry Dumas.
From: The Oxford anthology of African-American poetry
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Only recently I discovered Rattle. I think it is a great resource full of energy- never mind their youthful statement that in this century (!!) poetry has become obscure and dusty.
Typically North-American attitude and fresh from high school poetry assignments. Well, I guess they will go find other countries on their own or they won’t.
I am so glad in the Netherlands learning foreign languages is a must. I need to brush up my French and German and I have forgotten most of the ancient Greek and Latin I learned, but I was fortunate to read poetry in high school in all those languages: to feel how impossibly different a german poem is such that you can’t translate without putting your own voice in it. My english teacher said the best english was spoken and written in Ireland. It’s true. Australian english has a shorter feel/sound to it and is languid and you can read from the words, the sentences how different the landscape is.
Anyway, subscribe to Rattle- it is well worth it! http://www.rattle.com/poetry/print/current/
Leila Chatti
14, SUNDAY SCHOOL, 3 DAYS LATE
I’m not stupid—
I know how it works.
But there was a time when
she was just some virgin nobody, too,
small purse of her womb
and her ordinary eggs
waiting like loose pearls.
.
—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith
http://www.rattle.com/poetry/print/40s/i45/
__________
Leila Chatti: “People are always surprised to find out that I’m Muslim, which is funny because I was raised pretty much as Muslim as you can get—Sunday school, Qur’an classes, Fridays at the masjid.
I don’t wear the hijab and so the common assumption is that I’m not religious.
The truth is, I became a poet largely because of my faith.
As a child, I wasn’t allowed to listen to music, but I could listen to recordings of the Qur’an. If you’ve ever heard it read, you know how gorgeous it is.
It was my first realization that language, particularly beautiful language, can hold power. I wanted to try my hand at crafting language that brought people to their knees, too.”
Because The Oxford Anthology of African American Poetry is one of the best, most satisfying, fat books of poetry I have, you should go buy it too. Poets get paid and editors get paid and we get more poesie. This leads to joy.
NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry
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One sad, one happy poem.
Calvary Way
How did you feel, Mary,
Womb heavy with Christ Child,
Tasting the dust of uncertain journey?
Were you afraid?
When, winding the swaddling clothes,
You laid him in the manger,
Were you afraid?
Could you trace nail holes
Under his curling fingers,
Thorn pricks on the forehead?
Could you trace them?
I should bear a warm brown baby,
A new dark world of wonder;
But I fear the nails that pierce the spirit,
The unseen crosses.
How did you feel, Mary,
On the road beyond the star-lit manger,
Up to the hill to crucifixion?
Were you afraid?
May Miller
A graduate of Howard University; did graduate work at Columbia. Teacher of Speech and Dramatics in Baltimore schools.
After Reading Mickey In The Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed
Rita Dove
I’m the milk and the milk’s in me!… I’m Mickey!
My daughter spreads her legs
to find her vagina:
hairless, this mistaken
bit of nomenclature
is what a stranger cannot touch
without her yelling. She demands
to see mine and momentarily
we’re a lopsided star
among the spilled toys,
my prodigious scallops
exposed to her neat cameo.
And yet the same glazed
tunnel, layered sequences.
She is three; that makes this
innocent. We’re pink!
she shrieks, and bounds off.
Every month she wants
to know where it hurts
and what the wrinkled string means
between my legs. This is good blood
I say, but that’s wrong, too.
How to tell her that it’s what makes us —
black mother, cream child.
That we’re in the pink
and the pink’s in us.
.
Thank you Wiki: From 1993 to 1995 she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American Poet Laureate. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1987). 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.
The documentary film Rita Dove: An American Poet by Argentinean-American filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley premiered at the Paramount Theater (Charlottesville, Virginia) on January 31, 2014.
The annual “Rita Dove Poetry Award” was established by Salem College Center for Women Writers in 2004.
.
Tune for a Teenage Niece
Smile/ rippling river of dance—
Flow, blow green soul-lyre
Ballooning under brown flesh
Song/swirl, startling as claps
Of unexpected waves;
Girlriver dancing its drumdeep past,
Its boogalooborn/e day,
Fluteflown afro freight
Grandmother/mamma/aunt—sun-led—
Yesterwhistling confluence
. /childwoman and charmsong:
. Brown blues and honey-river, girl!
. Girlmother gonna sing her song someday, boy !
. Brown blues and honey-river, girl!”
Smile/river dancing, splashing flame-waves
Applaud and burn/mold brownfruit,
Afro-plum,
River symphony, water ritual:
. “Brown blues and honey-river, girl!”
Girlriver, spiced as pot liquor, flowing up/under
From queenmother’s heartbeam; from magic and marmelade
Fluteflown to fleshdance and birdgrace:
Flowing to omen, to woman:
. “Brown blues and honey-river, girl!”
.
.
Fantastic compilation of black voices: buy the book.
NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry
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.
.
harriet
if i be you
let me not forget
to be the pistol
pointed
to be the madwoman
at the rivers edge
warning
be free or die
and isabell
if i be you
let me in my
sojourning
not forget
to ask my brothers
ain’t i a woman too
and
grandmother
if i be you
let me not forget
to work hard
trust the Gods
love my children and
wait.
.
Lucille Clifton .
.
Isabella Baumfree was the slave name of free woman Sojourner Truth. More thoughts about the poem here.
.
Connotations to “wait”: psalms, patience, Walt Witman’s Song of Myself that ends with “wait” and that Clifton refers to elsewhere and white people telling black folks to “go slow” and wait for more civil rights as sung in Mississippi Goddam by Nina Simone.
.
.
.
.
.
NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry NEW at independent bookstores: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780195125634
Migraine morning, so no reading law but reading poetry.
The Black Unicorn
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.
NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry
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The Black Unicorn isn’t supposed to be funny, but she makes me smile. I’m not sure: I think the mist means that a token black person is white washed by white friends or fellow academics, writers maybe, a place where she feels bound also by misogyny and emphasizes her power comes from her vag. That’s what I read into it. The black unicorn is powerful.
Quick notes about the poem.
The film Selma was heart-aching. One of the most beautiful shots was where Dr. King phones Mahalia Jackson and asks to hear the voice of the Lord and she sings to him My Precious Lord.
Listen to the song hhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1ceCpU25vA
My people
The night is beautiful,
So the faces of my people.
The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people.
Beautiful, also is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.
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.
.
Act Six
Act six begins
when the curtain falls,
the corpses awake,
the daggers are cleaned.
Act six
is Juliet in the supermarket,
Mr Macbeth on the 8.15.
In act six
Hamlet sucks a tranquilliser,
Romeo washes up.
and death
is gentle and anonymous —
Lear’s respirator
switched discreetly off.
After Babel
I read once of a valley
where men and women
spoke a different tongue.
I know that any uncooked theory
can find its tribe
— but this one might be true.
For us there are three languages
— yours, mine, and the English between,
a wall of noises.
At times our children interpret,
or music connects our moods.
There are monosyllables,
the deeper grammar of fucking,
a language too subjective
for nouns.
But even after conjugation
the tense is still the same
— present imperfect.
We take our mouths from each other.
We carry away our tongues,
and the separate dictionaries of our heads.
.
The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse, chosen by Les A. Murray
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The Embankment
.
.
“Indian Summer,” by Mani Leib
My Indian Summer, like an offering,
Burns into gold and spirals of smoke.
With brown hand, I push my last
Starry ember through the ash.
Night and villages. On moonlit flutes
The crickets play a breaking music on my heart;
In white grass, by blue-washed pickets,
Gourds are yellow like the moon.
Trees —blue, waxen— in cool space shining.
Like candles, upright: men fearful before God.
Sharp in stillness, the fall of a spent leaf.
Even sharper —the worries in my step.
.
.
And by Abraham Reisen “A Song”
The sweetest melody,
Your heart can sing
Keep for your autumn hour,
Not for the spring.
Glad is the blossom time
With its own tune and chime;
Ah, but the sunset day—
Sing it away.
.
.
From: a Treasury of Yiddish Poetry edited by Irving Howe and Liezer Greenberg.
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I have news for you
(9th century Irish)
I have news for you:
The stag bells, winter snows, summer has gone
Wind high and cold, the sun low, short its course
The sea running high.
Deep red the bracken; its shape is lost;
The wild goose has raised its accustomed cry,
cold has seized the birds’ wings;
season of ice, this is my news
In the Green Wood from Mother Goose
(making the fire)
Oak-logs will warm you well,
That are old and dry;
Logs of pine will sweetly smell
But the sparks will fly.
Birch-logs will burn too fast,
Chestnut scarce at all;
Hawthorn-logs are good to last –
Catch them in the fall.
Holly-logs will burn like wax,
You may burn them green;
Elm-logs like to smoldering flax,
No flame to be seen.
Beech-logs for winter time,
Yew-logs as well;
Green elder-logs it is a crime
For any man to sell.
Pear-logs and apple-logs,
They will scent your room,
Cherry-logs across the dogs
Smell like flower of the broom.
Ash-logs, smooth and grey,
Burn them green or old,
Buy up all that come your way –
Worth their weight in gold.
The Child in the Gardens
How sudden, this entering the fallen
gardens for the first time, to feel the blisters
of the world’s father, as his own hand
does. It is everything dying at once,
the slimed pond and the riffling of leaves,
shoes drenched across sapless stalks.
It is what you will read a thousand times.
You will come to think, who has not stood
there, holding that large hand, not said
Can’t we go back? I don’t like this place.
Your voice sounds like someone else’s. You
rub a sleeve against your cheek, you want
him to laugh, to say, ‘The early stars can’t hurt
us, they are further than trains we hear
on the clearest of nights.’ We are in a story
called Father, We Must Get Out.
Leaves scritch at the red walls,
a stone lady lies near the pond, eating
dirty grass. It is too sudden, this
walking into time for its first lesson,
its brown wind, its scummed nasty
paths. You know how lovely yellow
is your favourite colour, the kitchen at home.
You touch the big gates as you leave,
the trees stand on their bones, the shoulders
on the vandaled statue are huge cold
eggs. Nothing there wants to move.
You touch the gates and tell them, We
are not coming back to this place. Are we, Dad?
Vincent O’Sullivan
From: Nice Morning for It, Adam (Victoria University Press, 2004)
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More information about the poet:
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/vincent-osullivan
Because sometimes you can’t get a woman out of your mind. Not even by watching Buffy. Or The Good Wife. This poem especially the last line, shows so much tenderness and knowing…
Rosa Gutman Jasny “produced much of their work in Eastern Europe […] also found their way to New York at various stages in their lives. The lives of several women writers were spent in a perpetual state of wandering…”
http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/yiddish-womens-poetry
The Faraway Moon
The faraway moon, has she already heard
That any minute now
She’s to become a world by herself?
No longer lotus flower, tender and bemused —
Just an ordinary drab world.
Today she shows us half her face,
drawn and pale.
That blond capricious moon —
What might she not do from rage?
Turn swiftly to her lords on high,
And scatter all dreams since time began,
Like dust into outer space?
Oh no, moon, don’t.
.
Poem by Rosa Gutman Jasny and translated from Yiddish to English by Etta Blum.
Treasury of Yiddish Poetry. Edited by Irving Howe, Eliezer Greenberg.
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James Berry (OBE, 1924-) From Jamaica to the UK!
Two Black Labourers on a London Building Site
Been a train crash.
. Wha?
Yeh — tube crash.
. Who the driver?
Not a black man.
. Not a black man?
I check that firs.
. Thank Almighty God.
Bout thirty people dead.
. Thirty people dead?
Looks maybe more.
. Maybe more?
Maybe more.
. An black man didn drive?
No. Black man didn drive.
.
A Story I am in: Selected Poems by James Berry:
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From: London a History in Verse, ed by Mark Ford.
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From Wiki with thanks:
Awesome poetry from all over. 