meikuree

not going through any hard times (for now!), but I've been inspired by a "what's your favourite poem" post and wanted to share some of mine:

poems

1.

Unrelenting
by Joan Houlihan

If by succeeding you mean doing things right,
and exactly, then it has no future.
Ash blows from us madly and without cause.
To keep things the same, where do you stop
to worship and repair? It is natural to decline. I decline.

The modicum of life that strung the little necks
of crocuses, that lulled the feeble seed
into its disease called grass, that heaped the pious
branches with their only whiteness,
that broke silver from the jawbone of moon,

now walks me through the same lesson of snow
until I am humble, until I am grateful, until birches
lean far enough to undermine their spot, their root,
until aftergrass turns to wheat and rope, and what can I do
but walk over it, divine another origin, cast it off.

2.

Monastery Nights
By Chase Twichell

I understand no one I consider to be religious.

I have no idea what’s meant when someone says

they’ve been intimate with a higher power.

I seem to have been born without a god receptor.

I have fervor but seem to lack

even the basic instincts of the many seekers,

mostly men, I knew in the monastery,

sitting zazen all night,

wearing their robes to near-rags

boy-stitched back together with unmatched thread,

smoothed over their laps and tucked under,

unmoving in the long silence,

the field of grain ripening, heavy tasseled,

field of sentient beings turned toward candles,

flowers, the Buddha gleaming

like a vivid little sports car from his niche.

What is the mind that precedes

any sense we could possibly have

of ourselves, the mind of self-ignorance?

I thought that the divestiture of self

could be likened to the divestiture

of words, but I was wrong.

It’s not the same work.

One’s a transparency

and one’s an emptiness.

3.

Self-Pity
by Cecilia Woloch

So few birds I know by name—

bluejay, cardinal, sparrow, crow,

pigeon and pigeon and pigeon again.

This morning I woke to the thump

of soft breast, frantic wings against glass—

female robin, I thought, confused,

mistaking her own reflection

for some other, enemy bird;

launching herself from the limb

of the dying tree outside my window

toward the ghost limb—there; not there.

My sister calls all birds suicidal.

Our mother sits in her big green chair,

too weary, even, to talk on the phone.

All afternoon it’s rained and rained—

all the damp world weeping, so I’ve thought.

Self-pity stinks, my mother says

and says, You should see me naked now.

Her body a map of the broken world

through which I slipped, and my sister, once.

Well, I would eat ash if I thought

it could bring back the dead,

or my own youth, or anyone’s.

Nothing gets done around here, we complain,

but I’ve learned a few trees by heart:

Here is my sycamore, Mother, Sister,

here is the branch I have loved like an arm.

4.

Most Days I Want to Live
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Not all days. But most days
I do. Most days the garden’s
almost enough: little pink flowers
on the sage, even though
the man said we couldn’t eat
it. Not this kind. And I said,
Then, gosh. What’s the point?
The flowers themselves,
I suppose. The rain came
and then the hail came and my love
brought them in. Even tipped
over they look optimistic.
I know it’s too late to envy
the flowers. That century’s
over and done. And hope?
That’s a jinx. But I did set them
right. I patted them a little.
And prayed for myself, which
is embarrassing to admit
in this day and age. But I did it.
Because no one was looking
or listening anyway.

5.

Girl Lithe and Tawny
by Pablo Neruda (tr. W. S. Mervin)

Girl lithe and tawny, the sun that forms
the fruits, that plumps the grains, that curls seaweeds
filled your body with joy, and you luminous eyes
and your mouth that has the smile of water.

A black yearning sun is braided into the strands
of your black mane, when you stretch your arms.
You play with the sun as with a little brook
and it leaves two dark pools in your eyes.

Girl lithe and tawny, nothing draws me towards you.
Everything bears me farther away, as though you were noon.
You are the frenzied youth of the bee,
the drunkenness of the wave, the power of the wheat-ear.

My somber heart searches for you, nevertheless,
and I love your joyful body, your slender and flowing voice.
Dark butterfly, sweet and definitive
like the wheat-field and the sun, the poppy and the water.