Theme: Loss

[bennmorland.livejournal.com]

This post has been edited, per the community guidelines.

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Blinded by the Light
Anonymous

Look Ma,
What’s that star?
It’s just a passing plane.
Grandma sighs so sadly,
The nights just aren’t the same;
I’m sure they used to be darker;
Wonder filled the skies;
Where have all the stars gone?
Could it be my failing eyes?
Too many of our children
Haven’t known a true dark night;
Will they ever see the beauty
We’re losing to the light?

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Ghetto Woo
Thien-bao Phi (b. 1974 or 1975 in Saigon, Viet Nam)
Bao Phi, transcribed from his website

Let them have their speckless neighborhood love
soft hands inside coffee shops,
ice cream parlours, burger joints,
all within walking distance
of their shredded cash lawns

(though soon they will have parent bought cars and/
access to bars with/ fake Washington State I.D.’s)

I have a plastic red shopping cart
with an aggressive grid pattern
no windows to roll down
but if we roll hard enough
you can feel the wind

who says romance is not a 7-11 on the corner of
25th and Bloomington which is not a Super America
(yet)

the sludge from the slushee machine
pools as a rainbow without rain
I say I luv u like Prince would say
and save money on the letters I didn’t use

buy a rose wreathed in thin plastic
for $1.99
romance for the price of lunch money
with a penny to spare
and next to them, astrological forecasts
wrapped tight in tiny tubes
we can check our destiny
at the check out

or we can invest in bus fair
to trip down to Ridgedale
laught at people dressed like pretty gifts
from God
and whisper to them we know the truth
laugh at their gigantic cookies
cry at their starving mannequins

but the question that every boarded up house
in the neighborhood begs to ask

is
can I afford
to deserve you?

Isn’t it true
that the one thing history is afraid
of teaching all of us
is that no man
has ever deserved a woman?
Isn’t it true
that men have only been lucky
or allowed?

And when it snows on the railroad tracks
under Chicago Avenue
when it snows on top of the parked car
above an alleycat whose globed pupils gleam green
from the headlights of a passing car
when it snows on top
of my neighbor’s rusted barbeque grill
the brand name long faded off

and when it snows here
when it snows here
when it snows here
to teach us all
that no one
is above a blanket

won’t I have your warm hand
and won’t it be enough?


7-22-98

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Idea: Sonnet Sixty-One
Michael Drayton (1563—1631)
Michael Drayton, from Idea (1619)
Transcribed from Literature: A Pocket Anthology (ed. R. S. Gwynn) (2007)

Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part;
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me,
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart
That thus so cleanly I myself can free;
Shake hands forever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of love’s latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, passion speechless lies,
When faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And innocence is closing up his eyes,
-----Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
-----From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.

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August 14, 2004 (In Memory of Czeslaw Milosz, 1911—2004)
Mary Elizabeth “Meena” Alexander (b. 1951/02/17 in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, India)
Meena Alexander, from Harvard Review (Issue 28: Spring 2005)

I have never been to Krakow,
I imagine it filled with chestnut trees.

It was a green day when you died and hard the telling of it,
Now is the time for patience.

The west is a knot of thundershowers,
The east, a nest of small scale fires.

On terraces covered with roses
Instead of honey bees, bullets swarm.

In alleyways torn silk reveals the bodies of infants
Laid head to toe in caskets of desire.

On a dresser made of mahogany
A woman’s hand arranges a display of attar,

Each vial culled from a separate continent—
Jasmine, lilac, rose—last of all, attar of earth,

Red earth in pouring rain,
August 14th in the year of the Lord, 2004.

Was it wet in Krakow when you died?
Through airport lounges and shuttered doors,

Through coast lines gashed by mist
Through barricades of blunt words,

Torment of the ant and ox,
In a miserable century with its corrupt couplings

You kept note of it all,
Petticoats trimmed with lace from the black heart of Europe,

Cotton from India, crystal from Lithuania,
A woman’s cheek wet with dew as paradise swims up,

Gold fish, icon of the journeying soul,
In a garden pond struck by muscular roots and fleshly scents

Ferocious toil with pitchfork and spade.
How much time is enough in the life of a poet?

You cannot answer now.
The chestnut trees are thick with rain.

You turn away from the window pane,
The dirt is a honeycomb of consonants.

Hour by hour as you come close to your death
Someone whose face is covered with a veil,

Man or woman I cannot tell,
Reads from the Letter of Paul to the Corinthians.

Reads in a slow, clear but quavering voice,
In speech that erodes the clarity of your own,

Crystalline disturbance of the liquid atmosphere
Where sun and storm collide,

Reads in the tongues of men and of angels,
From the poems you composed and poems to come,

Zone of limestone, chestnut and linden
Zone of sweet water, laced by fever,

Book of the migrant soul,
Now losing, now finding love.

(August, 2004, New York City/Skopje)

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On Closing the Apartment of My Grandparents of Blessed Memory
Robyn Sarah, from Questions about the Stars

And then I stood for the last time in that room.
The key was in my hand. I held my ground,
and listened to the quiet that was like a sound,
and saw how the long sun of winter afternoon
fell slantwise on the floorboards, making bloom
the grain in the blond wood. (All that they owned
was once contained here.) At the window moaned
a splinter of wind. I would be going soon.

I would be going soon; but first I stood,
hearing the years turn in that emptied place
whose fullness echoed. Whose familiar smell,
of a tranquil life, lived simply, clung like a mood
or a long-loved melody there. A lingering grace.
Then I locked up, and rang the janitor’s bell.