ineedtoreadmorepoetry

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

Outbreaks

by Kitchen McKeown

i search for god but the sun is a penny. looper moths form halos beneath the streetlamps. summer’s ghostly curtains. check the weather. haze. i search for god but the moon is gone. i search for comfort, and the eels come. they cross my meadow every twilight, up to seven feet in length, traversing mountain napes with open eager mouths. the fires heaved them from the rivers, now they curve themselves across the precipice of life, toward black oceans. haunted yellow eyes. looper moths become a gentle cloud. i become an eel, then rethink it. i cough. reveal a wet moth. some gray little heart. it’s all hazy now. pale as sunbleached wood, i go forth. in a slant of moonlight, i search for comfort. the neon 24-hour fried chicken sign gleams behind the pines. i crawl in the moss. it is easy to find god. she is a cluster of eels beneath my palms. i ask of her, am i doing any of this life right? and she, with her many mouths, says nothing.

#kitchen mckeown

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

richard siken’s new poem in the new yorker—at the link, you can hear him read it in full

#richard siken

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

This Morning I Pray for My Enemies

by Joy Harjo

And whom do I call my enemy? An enemy must be worthy of engagement. I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking. It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind. The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun. It sees and knows everything. It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing. The door to the mind should only open from the heart. An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.

#Joy Harjo

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

Samhain by Annie Finch

The Celtic Halloween

In the season leaves should love, since it gives them leave to move through the wind, towards the ground they were watching while they hung, legends says there is a seam stitching darkness like a name.

Now when dying grasses veil earth from the sky in one last pale wave, as autumn dies to bring winter back, and then the spring, we who die ourselves can peel back another kind of veil

that hangs among us like thick smoke. Tonight at last I feel it shake. I feel the nights stretching away thousands long behind the days, till they reach the darkness where all of me is ancestor.

I turn my hand and feel a touch move with me, and when I brush my young mind across another, I have met my mother's mother. Sure as footsteps in my waiting self, I find her, and she brings

arms that have answers for me, intimate, a waiting bounty. "Carry me." She leaves this trail through a shudder of the veil, and leaves, like amber where she stays, a gift for her perpetual gaze.

#Annie Finch

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

The Cats of Kilkenny by Anonymous

There were once two cats of Kilkenny, Each thought there was one cat too many; So they fought and they fit, And they scratched and they bit, Till, excepting their nails And the tips of their tails, Instead of two cats, there weren’t any.

#anonymous

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

The Book and I by Stephen Dunn

Already I lived in an unmanaged world-- from a book I needed something different. And along the way it wouldn't hurt, I kept thinking, if I could please, please, be enthralled. I put it down-- the merciful language you use when you've decided the poor dog would be better off dead. I put the book down and began to clip the coleus. I made some long-overdue calls to my relatives, old attempts at reining in the chaos. The book remained on the coffee table, its characters as good as gone, the plod of their progress now forever curtailed. They had been sad characters, but in a book I wanted sadness tuned so it might give pleasure, I wanted it oddly funny, or to brilliantly unsettle my heart. These characters were only sad, the father cruel but undriven by any flaws I might share, the son-- like the author--unreliably unreliable. Some books fail so maddeningly I've tossed them across the room, which means they'd been loved until they broke some big promise, or forgot one was made. This book I just wanted to go quietly, perhaps to some yard sale. There'd be no afterlife for it, no, no place for it even on the highest, out-of-sight shelf in the house. After all, the others were up there, my chosens, all spine and substance.

#Stephen Dunn

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

dinosaurs in the hood by Danez Smith

let’s make a movie called Dinosaurs in the Hood. Jurassic Park meets Friday meets The Pursuit of Happyness. there should be a scene where a little black boy is playing with a toy dinosaur on the bus, then looks out the window & sees the T. rex, because there has to be a T. rex.

don’t let Tarantino direct this. in his version, the boy plays with a gun, the metaphor: black boys toy with their own lives the foreshadow to his end, the spitting image of his father. nah, the kid has a plastic brontosaurus or triceratops & this is his proof of magic or God or Santa. i want a scene

where a cop car gets pooped on by a pterodactyl, a scene where the corner store turns into a battleground. don’t let the Wayans brothers in this movie. i don’t want any racist shit about Asian people or overused Latino stereotypes. this movie is about a neighborhood of royal folks–

children of slaves & immigrants & addicts & exile–saving their town from real ass dinosaurs. i don’t want some cheesy yet progressive Hmong sexy hot dude hero with a funny, yet strong, commanding Black girl buddy-cop film. this is not a vehicle for Will Smith & Sofia Vergara. i want grandmas on the front porch taking out raptors

with guns they hid in walls & under mattresses. i want those little spitty screamy dinosaurs. i want Cecily Tyson to make a speech, maybe two. i want Viola Davis to save the city in the last scene with a black fist afro pick through the last dinosaur’s long, cold-blood neck. But this can’t be a black movie, this can’t be a black movie. this movie can’t be dismissed

because of its cast or its audience. this movie can’t be metaphor for black people & extinction. This movie can’t be about race. this movie can’t be about black pain or cause black pain. this movie can’t be about a long history of having a long history with hurt. this movie can’t be about race, nobody can say nigga in this movie

who can’t say it to my face in public. no chicken jokes in this movie. no bullet holes in the heroes. & no one kills the black boy, & no one kills the black boy. & no one kills the black boy. besides, the only reason i want to make this is for the first scene anyway: little black boy on the bus with his toy dinosaur, his eyes wide & endless

                            his dreams possible, pulsing, & right there.

#Danez Smith

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

A Conference by Renee and Theodore Weiss

“Everyone in this room  knows at least two languages.”

The same languages being known become different?

Twenty-two everyones knowing forty-four languages?

Forty-four ways of arguing about the same thing?

Forty-four ways of making the same thing strange?

A new language flowers: the forth-fifth? the sixtieth?

But a new language as every poem is meant to be?

Everyone in the room  knows at least two languages.

Everyone in the room longs to be free of language.

Everyone in the room longs to be free of the room.

#Renee and Theodore Weiss

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

Montaigne by W.H. Auden

Outside his library window he could see A gentle landscape terrified of grammar, Cities where lisping was compulsory, And provinces where it was death to stammer.

The hefty lay exhausted. O it took This donnish undersexed conservative To start a revolution, and to give The Flesh its weapons to defeat the Book.

When devils drive the reasonable wild, They strip their adult century so bare, Love must be regrown from the sensual child.

To doubt becomes a way of definition, Even belles lettres legitimate as prayer, And laziness an act of pure contrition.

#W.H. Auden

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

On the Dunes by Sara Teasdale

If there is any life when death is over, These tawny beaches will know much of me, I shall come back, as constant and as changeful As the unchanging, many-colored sea.

If life was small, if it has made me scornful, Forgive me; I shall straighten like a flame In the great calm of death, and if you want me Stand on the sea-ward dunes and call my name.

#Sara Teasdale

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

A Poem for My Librarian, Mrs. Long by Nikki Giovanni

(You never know what troubled little girl needs a book)

At a time when there was no tv before 3:00 P.M.

And on Sunday none until 5:00

We sat on front porches watching

The jfg sign go on and off greeting

The neighbors, discussing the political

Situation congratulating the preacher

On his sermon

There was always the radio which brought us

Songs from wlac in nashville and what we would now call

Easy listening or smooth jazz but when I listened

Late at night with my portable (that I was so proud of)

Tucked under my pillow

I heard nat king cole and matt dennis, june christy and ella fitzgerald

And sometimes sarah vaghan sing black coffee

Which I now drink

It was just called music

There was a bookstore uptown on gay street

Which I visited and inhaled that wonderful odor

Of new books

Even today I read hardcover as a preference paperback only

As a last resort

And up the hill on vine street

(The main black corridor) sat our carnegie library

Mrs. Long always glad to see you

The stereoscope always ready to show you faraway

Places to dream about

Mrs. Long asking what you are looking for today

When I wanted Leaves of Grass or alfred north whitehead

She would go to the big library uptown and I now know

Hat in hand to ask to borrow so that I might borrow

Probably they said something humiliating since southern

Whites like to humiliate southern blacks

But she nonetheless brought the books

Back and I held them to my chest

Close to my heart

And happily skipped back to grandmother's house

Where I would sit on the front porch

In a gray glider and dream of a world

Far away

I love the world where I was

I was safe and warm and grandmother gave me neck kisses

When I was on my way to bed

But there was a world

Somewhere

Out there

And Mrs. Long opened that wardrobe

But no lions or witches scared me

I went through

Knowing there would be

Spring

#Nikki Giovanni

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

“A Woman’s Place” by Denice Frohman

i heard a woman becomes herself the first time she speaks without permission

then, every word out of her mouth a riot

say, beautiful & point to the map of your body say, brave & wear your skin like a gown or a suit say, hero & cast yourself in the lead role

///

when a girl pronounces her own name there is glory

when a woman tells her own story she lives forever

all the women i know are perennials– marigolds, daffodils soft things that refuse to die

i don’t come from anything tamed or willing i come from soil flossed with barbed wire

meaning, abuela would cuss you out with the same breath     she kissed

you with     her bood a wild river

my mother     doesn’t rely on instruction manuals or men            nor does she equate the two

can fix anything if you get out of her way

says the best technology is her own two hands

///

but once, i dreamed     i had no teeth just a mouth                             to hold other people’s                          things

if this poem is the only thing that survives me

tell them i grew a new tongue tell them i built me a throne

tell them when we discovered life on another planet it was a woman & she built a bridge, not a border

got god & named gravity after herself.

#denice frohman

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

Re-reading Jane by Anne Stevenson

To women in contemporary voice and dislocation she is closely invisible, almost an annoyance. Why do we turn to her sampler squares for solace? Nothing she saw was free of snobbery or class. Yet the needlework of those needle eyes... We are pricked to tears by the justice of her violence: Emma on Box Hill, rude to poor Miss Bates, by Mr. Knightley's were she your equal in situation-- but consider how far this is from being the case shamed into compassion, and in shame a grace.

Or wicked Wickham and selfish pretty Willoughby, their vice pure avarice which, displacing love, defiled the honour marriages should be made of. She punished them with very silly wives. Novels of manners? Hymeneal theology! Six little circles of hell, with attendant humours. For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbors And laugh at them in our turn? The philosophy paused at the door of Mr. Bennet's century; The Garden of Eden's still there in the grounds of Pemberley.

The amazing epitaph's 'benevolence of heart' precedes 'the extraordinary endowments of her mind' and would have pleased her, who was not unkind. Dear votary of order, sense, clear art and irresistible fun, please pitch our lives outside self-pity we have wrapped them in and show us how absurd we'd look to you. You knew the mischief poetry could do. Yet when Anne Elliot spoke of its misfortune to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoy it completely, she spoke for you.

#Anne Stevenson #Jane Austen

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

Instinct by Edith Sodergran

My body is a mystery. As long as this brittle thing is alive you will feel its power. I will save the world. That is why Eros’ blood is coursing through my lips and Eros’ gold runs through my tired curls. I need only to look, weary or in pain: the earth is mine. When I lie exhausted on my bed I know: in this weakened hand lies the fate of the earth. It is power that trembles in my shoe, it is power that moves in the folds of my dress, and it is power, fearing no abyss, that stands before you.

#translated by Stina Katchadourian #Edith Sodergran

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

My Daughter and Apple Pie by Raymond Carver

She serves me a piece of it a few minutes out of the oven. A little steam rises from the slits on top. Sugar and spice-- cinnamon--burned into the crust. But she's wearing these dark glasses in the kitchen at ten 'clock in the morning--everything nice-- as she watches me break off a piece, bring it to my mouth, and blow on it. My daughter's kitchen, in winter. I fork the pie in and tell myself to stay out of it. She says she loves him. No way could it be worse.

#Raymond Carver

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

Winter Pages by Andrew D. Scrimgeour

So much can be heard in the stillness of the snow-swept slopes of an open book

A train laboring its way across the Siberian hinterland as trees hold out napkins of snow to Zhivago and his fellow passengers

The wind lashing the Overlook Hotel high in the Colorado Rockies as a limping man chases small foot- prints in the drifting snow

Carols warming the Christmas Eve night in Godric's Hollow as Harry and Hermione brush snow off tombstones in the church yard

Where a spring thaw may be just a page-turn away.

#Andrew S. Scrimgeour

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

When You Are Old by W.B. Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

#W.B. Yeats