This is a good poem.

Slow Fuse Around the Cranium

Another gutshot dawn, and the day

Wakes to a crow alarm clock.

Have the birds turned anti-American, little

Feathered terrorists in the heartland of sleep?

 

Inside the wreckage, I can't tell if

The coffee cup's half empty or half full,

But it's all caffeine, wetting down

That thistle at the back of my throat.

 

Ah, sun, it's a hard morning

For you, too, those low clouds black

As a pew of Presbyterian elders, set

To ruin your reputation for a hot time.

 

For weeks now, the air's hung heavy

Over everything, the soap so soft

It's like a palmful of ectoplasm: not even

A cold shower can make me come clean.

 

For weeks now, my mind's felt both

Shifty and shiftless, brain waves no more than

Motion in love with itself, and less spry

Than old women with a leg up on ninety.

 

Maybe I should move from the Midwest

To the Mideast, some sandy place you know

Where you stand, like a lame camel,

Bad knees bent between God and atrocity.

 

But the heat's already here, and the caterpillars

Have raised their tents in the summer trees.

Why stir the one-eye mullahs, when I can

Flay myself in the doldrums of my own home?

 

I'm at the age for adages and elegies:

What there's no help for, let go. Not until

The fat's in the fire will it sing for you.

Even the sheen of day darkens in the dark heart.

 

Like those spazzed-out insects on the patio,

I've spun myself to a dither, and who knows

When I'll come sliding back, bone and soul,

To the absolute enormities of whatever life

 

The future might ring in, the rich bronze

Midnight tone of some Mongolian death gong,

Loud enough to stun the years and make me take it

All in good faith and down to the quick.

 

 

(Elton Glaser, Southern Poetry Review, Volume 51, Issue 2)

 

Alexander McCall Smith

Acacia

Notwane River

This week I picked up The Kalahari Typing School For Men,  the story of Mma Ramotswe, keeping her business afloat in Gaborone, Botswana.  I sometimes feel like my visit there in college was just a short, passing dream.  I will always remember the stillness, the smells, the sounds.

     '"Those are small things," Mr. Molefelo interjected. "Bills and debts are nothing, really. What really counts are the things that you have done to people. That is what counts. And that is why I've come to see you , Mma. I want to confess. I do not go to the Catholic Church, where you can sit in a box and tell the priest all about the things you have done. I cannot do that. But I want to talk to somebody, and that is why I have come to see you."
      Ma Ramotswe nodded. She unnderstood. Shortly after opening the No. I Ladies' Detective Agency, she had discovered that part of her role would be to listen to people and to help them unburden themselves of their past. And indeed her subsequent reading of Clovis Andersen had confirmed this. Be gentle, he had written. Many of the people who will come to see you are injured in spirit. They need to talk about things that have hurt them, or about things that they have done. Do not sit in judgement of them, but listen. Just listen.
      They had reached a place where the path dipped down into a dried-up watercourse. There was a termite mound to one side of it, and on the other, a small expanse of rock rising out of the red earth. There was the chewed-up pith of sugarcane lying to the side of the path and a fragment of broken blue glass, which caught the sun. Not far away a goat was standing on its hind legs, nibbling at the less accessible leaves of the shrub.  It was a good place to sit and listen, under a sky that had seen so much and heard so much that one more wicked deed would surely make no difference. Sins, thought Mma Ramotswe, are darker and more powerful when contemplated within confining walls. Out in the open, under such a sky as this, misdeeds were reduced to their natural proportions--small, mean things that could be faced quite openly, sorted, and folded away.'

A Palestinian Poet writes about exile

We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere. As if traveling
Is the way of the clouds. We have buried our loved ones in the
                Darkness of the clouds, between the roots of the trees.
And we said to our wives: go on giving birth to people like us               
                For hundreds of years so we can complete this journey
To the hour of a country, to a meter of the impossible.
We travel in the carriages of the psalms, sleep in the tents of the
                Prophets and come out of the speech of the gypsies.
We measure space with a hoopoe’s beak or sing to while away the               
                Distance and cleanse the light of the moon.
Your path is long so dream of seven women to bear this long path
On your shoulders. Shake for them palm trees so as to know their
                Names and who’ll be the mother of the boy of Galilee.
We have a country of words. Speak speak so we may know the end of               
                This travel.
                                              — Mahmoud Darwish, “We Travel Like Other People” (1984)¹

Janet Smith - Southern Poetry Review

The Children's Section

As a child I sat on stiff chairs
and read. None belonged to me.
I could be pushed out by someone
larger. I owned nothing, not even 
my face when a hand approached to
lift the bangs from my eyes, not even
an unbroken hour. I planned to read
every book in the children’s section.
I began with A and read about
archaeology and Antarctica.
Some words had a flavor: zodiac,
periwinkle, bracelet, savannah.
They held a space I could breathe in.

Childhood is a fierce land where
the laughing sounds like crying.
It felt safe to sit on the metal kitchen
chair left to rust behind the lilacs,
a library book splayed on my lap.
The heart meanwhile knocked on its
own door and waited in its warm locker
while the long years ahead stood
orderly on a shelf until my full pardon
would be granted. I wrote lists
of the titles of the books I’d read
as slow tides pulled me through
the locks of days. I read as I walked
to school, the margins holding me.

Adrienne Rich

“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions--predigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.”  

Violent Rooms

by Dawn Lundy Martin

1.

 

The contours of the girl blur. She is both becoming and fact.

A rancor defines the split. Rip into. Flatten the depth of voice. That

 

urgent flex peels off the steady layers. A girl, I say.

Girl. Gu-erl. Quell. He. He—unbuttons before emergence.

 

As in yard rake pressed to roof of mouth. A fragrant rod.

Suh—sssuh—ssuck. Insistence. Lips go lisp. Our brutish boy.

 

Having not ever been whole. Or simple. Or young. Just split and open.

Not of it. For it. Born a cog of hard wheel at five, six, seven . . .

 

What to know of what has never been?

 

2.  

No common place would do: bar stool, front porch, sea rock.

Such a room should crawl into the soul. Stretch it. Contort it.

 

Could be the straddle of this stranger at the neck. I am this.

She does not waver. She is twenty-five. The bed is wet. As many

 

as had done this thing before. The wound is rupture. Blood-faced.

Between sailing and anchor. No, between shipwreck and burial.

 

What does the mouth do? It does not mean no, saying no.

It does not mean yes. It gurgles. It swells. It is comfort.

 

A quick kick. Mighty, mighty.

A Little Shift

Today I removed some poetry from this blog because I am submitting it for publication. And so, if you are a reader here, I hope you will not mind.  I will continue to post poetry from other poets and artists that are inspiring, like this piece by Alexandre Day.  Other changes will be forthcoming.

Why Poetry

"There's very, very little money to be made from writing poetry. In that way, it's subversive since anyone can steal it. Anyone can take it. Anyone can learn it by heart. Anyone can whisper it, can carry it into a jail, through borders, across all sorts of state lines. Poetry is that which can be carried anywhere. It's invisible. And that makes it very, very precious in a culture where everything has a price."
 -Marie Howe