POEMS

Destiny. It's like a crazy river
Where you see different people's boats
That they have going by on it.

But tomorrow, tomorrow's a knife.
Tomorrow's a big knife.

“This Magic Moment,” David Kirby

Poetry does make things happen. A friend says, “I wanted
to let you know that my stepfather is chattering like
a schoolboy about a poem of yours on my Facebook page.
This may not seem like much to you, but this guy has been
giving me a hard time since I was two. You built a bridge
between people who never understood each other before.”
How’d that happen? Magic, that’s how. I know the poem

she means; it took me years to write it. Songwriter
Doc Pomus was crippled by polio, and he wrote once
about this dream he had again and again: “I used to believe
in magic and flying and that one morning I would wake up
and all the bad things were bad dreams. . . . And I would
get out of the wheelchair and walk and not with braces
and not with crutches,” though when the light came through


the window in the morning, there he was, encased
in steel and leather from hip to ankle, unable to move.
Again and again he has the dream, and then one day
he writes “This Magic Moment,” where the guy meets
the girl, and suddenly he has everything he wants. How?
Magic! Wouldn’t you love to have saved pale Keats
with his blood-speck’d lips? And Fanny, her skin like cream,


listening through the wall. He dies with his lungs on fire,
she mourns, marries, gives birth, and, after her husband dies,
gives Keats’ letters to her children—she had kept them all
that time. We have them, and we have his poems. And his
tool kit, too: look what he does in the “Ode to a Nightingale.”
Nobody bolts music and lyrics together the way Keats does,
no one pays more attention to detail. There’s a Jack Gilbert


poem that begins with a real incident from World War II,
when the Polish cavalry rode out against the Germans
with their swords glittering, only the Germans had tanks.
But that’s not bravery, says Gilbert. Bravery is doing
the same thing every day when you don’t want to.
Not the marvelous but the familiar, over and over again.
Do that, and the magic will come. My dad was frail


and distracted in his last hours. My mother said he asked,
Do we have enough money? and when she said yes, he said,
Then let’s just get in the Buick and go. He was looking
at car trips, thirty-cent gas, roadside picnics, these new things
they called motels. My brother, me, the little house
we lived in, fifty years of marriage, a long and happy life as
a Chaucer scholar: all that was in the sunny days to come.

There was an age when you played records
with ordinary steel needles which grew blunt
and damaged the grooves or with more expensive
stylus tips said to be made of tungsten or diamond
which wore down the records and the music receded

—W.S. Merwin

A Devastating Retaliation
by Brittany "Exile" Thiedol

in the ads
Take Green
e with you
let it
all
out
Ass
even I
WILL KICK YOU
RIGHT

IN THE ADS
I WANT YOU
TO KNOW


S
im
on
gate

"My memory is like a pomegranate. Shall I open it over you and let it scatter, seed by seed: red pearls befitting a farewell that asks nothing of me except forgetfulness?"

 Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence

Snow Drops
by Louise Gluck

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring–

afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

Langston Hughes

"Over cypress trees
east of passion
there are gilded clouds
and in the heart a chestnut 
dark-skinned beauty
diaphanous in shadow 
I drink her like water
it's time we frolic
time we travel
to any planet."

Mahmoud Darwish, from "If I Were Another"

“Tis but a day we sojourn here below,
And all the gain we get is grief and woe,
Then, leaving our life's riddles all unsolved,
And burdened with regrets, we have to go.”

Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat.

Amaranthine scenes play out in malformed pools of skyscraper rubble.
Emerge from besotted despair with the coin that they lodged in your throat
for safe passage in the everlasting river that was forcefully and brutally expunged.
It dribbled a few paces before you and made a queer hymn like a dirge that you once heard
played in reverse, and Charles Manson swore it was the Second Coming of Orpheus. 
You hear machine gun fire in the distance that cackles like Eurydice in eglantine repose.
But you don't look back, you never look back, not until you reach quiescent Herakles
who towers above the storm clouds.

- St. Exquisite

We are old.
We have no teeth.
We swallow what we chew.
We chew up all the swallows.
Then we excrete the swallows.
Poor swallows - they do not fly
once they are out of us.

Mushroom dweller poetry ; transl. Samuel Tonsure

Wow, that guy thought "This ankle," formed a grammatically complete sentence. What an embarrassing error to include in his professionally published poem.

Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.