Poetry Month

Thanks for Remembering Us
Dana Gioia

The flowers sent here by mistake,
signed with a name that no one knew,
are turning bad. What shall we do?
Our neighbor says they're not for her,
and no one has a birthday near.
We should thank someone for the blunder.
Is one of us having an affair?
At first we laugh, and then we wonder.

The iris was the first to die,
enshrouded in its sickly-sweet
and lingering perfume. The roses
fell one petal at a time,
and now the ferns are turning dry.
The room smells like a funeral,
but there they sit, too much at home,
accusing us of some small crime,
like love forgotten, and we can't
throw out a gift we've never owned.

Poetry Month

The Darkling Thrush
by Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate
   When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
   The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
   Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
   Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
   The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
   The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
   Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
   Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
   The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
   Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
   In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
   Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
   Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
   Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
   His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
   And I was unaware.

Poetry Month

Fat Is Not a Fairy Tale
Jane Yolen

I am thinking of a fairy tale,
Cinder Elephant,
Sleeping Tubby,
Snow Weight,
where the princess is not
anorexic, wasp-waisted,
flinging herself down the stairs.

I am thinking of a fairy tale,
Hansel and Great,
Repoundsel,
Bounty and the Beast,
where the beauty
has a pillowed breast,
and fingers plump as sausage.

I am thinking of a fairy tale
that is not yet written,
for a teller not yet born,
for a listener not yet conceived,
for a world not yet won,
where everything round is good:
the sun, wheels, cookies, and the princess.

Poetry Month

Caroline
Allison Joseph

In eighth grade, we teased that girl
As much as we could, mocking

her clothes, her stringy hair,
her flat, pallid face that revealed

little protest. Used to be being
the one white girl in our class

of blacks, Hispanics, she endured
our taunts on her lack of rhythm,

on her stiff, flat-butted walk.
How we pitied her—brown hair

parted straight, pulled back
in a dull ponytail, her jeans

or corduroy pants in washed-out
shades of gray or blue,

her homework neatly done
in pained, legible print.

How weak it was to be white,
we thought, not able to dance

or run fast, to have skin
that peeled from too much sun.

We never let Caroline forget
that she as white and we

were black, that we could
swing our hips and snap

our fingers without trying,
privy to street-slang rhythms.

But she was our white girl,
and if anyone else dared

to touch her or call her names,
we’d be on them in a second,

calling them ugly right back,
slapping offenders if necessary.

With one of us by her side,
she could walk the school

safely, knowing she was ours
even if we didn’t let her in

all the way, even if we laughed
at her white speech, thin lips.

Poetry Month

Selecting a Reader
Ted Kooser

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.

Poetry Month

Lesson
Forrest Hamer

It was 1963 or 4, summer,
and my father was driving our family
from Ft. Hood to North Carolina in our 56 Buick.
We'd been hearing about Klan attacks, and we knew

Mississippi to be more dangerous than usual.
Dark lay hanging from the trees the way moss did,
and when it moaned light against the windows
that night, my father pulled off the road to sleep.

............................................................Noises
that usually woke me from rest afraid of monsters
kept my father awake that night, too,
and I lay in the quiet noticing him listen, learning
that he might not be able always to protect us

from everything and the creatures besides;
perhaps not even from the fury suddenly loud
through my body about his trip from Texas
to settle us home before he would go away

to a place no place in the world
he named Viet Nam. A boy needs a father
with him, I kept thinking, fixed against noise
from the dark.

Poetry Month

Biscuit
Jane Kenyon

The dog has cleaned his bowl
and his reward is a biscuit,
which I put in his mouth
like a priest offering the host.

I can't bear that trusting face!
He asks for bread, expects
bread, and I in my power
might have given him a stone.

Steps to the Second Floor

There are 16 steps leading upstairs from front hall to bedrooms.

How long does it take to go up (or down) 16 steps? Ten seconds? Fifteen? It certainly takes me less than half a minute to get from the couch to my bedroom most of the time.

I took Beast to the spine surgeon's office today. He saw the surgeon about two weeks ago, and after the doc had time to look over Beast's records, he wanted him to have one more cortisone injection in his spine with his needle-guy. So, that was this morning. This doctor didn't give Beast any general anesthetic (unlike every other one he's ever had), so he was fully awake and had only (very) local anesthetic. When they came to the waiting room to get me, he'd only been back there for ten minutes, at most. He was in absolutely the most pain I've seen him in for the past week or more, because there's so much inflammation and the addition of a syringe or so of liquid in a space where it had nowhere to be. But we got home ok, and I headed off to work.

When I got home at about 6:30, I started collecting the household garbage before I realized that Beast needed to get upstairs to bed NOW.

"NOW" means that at 7:45, I was finally dragging the garbage can and recycling bins to the end of the driveway.

• Ten minutes, and a Percocet, to get out of the recliner.
• Five minutes to cross the living room, front hall and reach the bottom of the stairs.
• Approximately 25 minutes later, Beast was sprawled on the floor at the top of the steps.
• About twenty minutes after that, he had made it to bed and was sitting on the edge of it emptying his pants pockets.
• And ten minutes after that, I told him I was going to go do the garbage and I'd bring his cell phone and some water upstairs.

When I came back in, he had dropped off to sleep.

I let him rest for about half an hour and then went back up to make sure he got his CPAP going.

I've been home two and a half hours and it feels like either 30 minutes or all day.