One of my all-time favorite poems.

Heart, we will forget him!

by Emily Dickenson


Heart, we will forget him!
You an I, tonight!
You may forget the warmth he gave,
I will forget the light.

When you have done, pray tell me
That I my thoughts may dim;
Haste! lest while you're lagging.
I may remember him!

The name of that country is lonesome

by Marge Piercy

We go to meet our favorite programs
the way we might have met a lover,
the mixture of the familiar routine
and the unexpected revelation.

We can buy love at the shelter
if we get there before they have
executed it for being unwanted,
its fur cooling in the garbage.

It becomes more and more unusual
to be invited to dinner;
fast food is the family feast.
Who can be bothered with friends?

They have needs, you have to remember
their birthdays, they want to talk
when you’re just too tired.
Leave the answering machine on.

No one comes to the door any longer.
We would be scared.
That’s why we have an alarm.
That’s why we keep the gun loaded.

Drive in food, drive in teller,
drive by shooting, stay in the car.
Talk only to the television set.
It tells you just what to buy

so you won’t feel lonely
any longer, so you won’t feel
inadequate, bored, so you can
almost imagine yourself alive.

The well preserved man

He was dug up from a bog
where the acid tanned him
like a good leather workboot.

He is complete, teeth, elbows,
toenails and stomach, penis,
the last meal he was fed.

Sacrificed to a god or goddess
for fertility, good weather,
an end to a plague, who knows?

Only he was fed and then killed,
as I began to realize as you
ordered the expensive wine,

urged lobster or steak, you
whose eyes always toted the bill,
I was to be terminated that night.

I could not eat my last meal.
I kept running to the ladies room.
All I could do was drink and try,

try not to weep at the table.
I was green as May leaves on the maple.
I was new as a never folded dollar,

a child who didn't know how the old
story always ended. Sacrificed
to a woman with more to offer up,

the new May queen, lady of prominent
family, like the bog man I was
strangled with little bruising.

I lay in my bed with my arms folded
believing my life had bled out.
How astonished I was to survive,

to find I was intact and hungry.
All that happened was I knew the story
now and I grew long nails and teeth.



Copyright 1998, Middlemarsh, Inc.
from Early Grrrl
A Leapfrog Press Paperback Original
ISBN 0-9654578-6-9 Available Now
http://www.margepiercy.com/

Embrace Them All

by Katy Didden

Parc Georges-Brassens, Paris

Most afternoons, I’d run laps through Parc Brassens
where grows the second smallest vineyard

I have ever seen, and where those silver,
pruned-back stalks looked blunt,

strung-out on wires, and mostly dead
all winter. That was how I saw them.

That’s all I expected. Even in the cold,
I’d see a guy my age there, once a week,

playing his guitar. He’d sit next to the bench
where I’d be stretching. He rarely spoke—

just to ask if I’d like a song—
until the week before I left for good.

I was sitting at the top of a hill
about a hundred feet away from where

if you stand tiptoe you can see the Eiffel Tower.
He sat too close to me. We spoke of many things.

Then he suggested we go at it right there,
on the ground, under the sun. This is how

one lives who knows that she will die:
rolling in the arms of anyone when she can—

rolling in the arms of a musician—aware
that no one cares much what we do

in little knolls behind reedy forsythia,
in the middle of a Tuesday, in the middle

of living. And I would know now
how he felt, and the ground against me,

and whether he was rough or sweet.
And what is possible would widen every hour.

Oh, but me, I thought I was immortal.


Katy Didden is pursuing her PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Missouri.

I realized I forgot to post the Poem of the Week today (yesterday? today?) and then I heard this poem on Album 88 (WRAS 88.5 in Atlanta - Georgia State University's Radio Station) and immediately fell in love with it. Also, it's appropriate for Valentine's Day...kind of. Hehe.

Kisses

by Kim Addonizio

All the kisses I've ever been given, today I feel them on my mouth.
And my knees feel them, the reckless ones placed there
through the holes in my jeans while I sat on a car hood
or a broken sofa in somebody's basement, stoned, the way I was
in those day, still amazed that boys and even men would want to
lower their beautiful heads like horses drinking from a river and taste me.
The back of my neck feels them, my hair swept aside to expose the nape,
and my breasts tingle the way they did when my milk came in after the birth,
when I was swollen, and sleepless, and my daughter fed and fed until I pried
her from me and laid her in her crib. Even the chaste kisses that brushed
my cheeks, the fatherly ones on my forehead, I feel them rising up from underneath
the skin of the past, a delicate, roseate rash; and the ravishing ones, God,
I think of them and the filaments in my brain start buzzing crazily and flare out.
Every kiss is here somewhere, all over me like a fine, shiny grit, like I'm a pale
fish that's been dipped in a thick swirl of raw egg and dragged through flour,
slid down into a deep skillet, into burning. Today I know I've lost no one.
My loves are here: wrists, eyelids, damp toes, all scars, and my mouth
pouring praises, still asking, saying kiss me; when I'm dead kiss this poem,
it needs you to know it goes on, give it your lovely mouth, your living tongue.


Kim Addonizio's website

Namaste

by Ruth Becker

The road opens up
I travel along its path
Where it leads me I know not
Yet up it I go anyway

Family, Friends, Coworkers
Light, Healing, Health
Love, Joy, Peace
Ananda

I thank the open road
For its willingness to be traveled
I thank the open road
For all it has in store

A traveler I am now
A path that ever changes
Travel with me my friend
Find your way with me.

Namaste

Hide and Seek

by Justin Blackburn

When I was a child
I played hide and seek with angels
One day I hid in the darkest place around
They didn’t find me
Until I came out.

Justin Blackburn's book of poems, Farting Fire, is available via Virgogray Press here.

Used Bookstore

by B.Z. Niditch

There is something
to a used bookstore;
the quiet earthy climate,
moving, fluttery sounds
of hands which retrieve
a love note in the leaf,
binding us to someone
who notes and writes
in certain creative corners;
those brusque, foaming reviews
which stay with you
long after volumes return
to their rebound leather
in our solitary rooms.


From Illogical Muse

Iron Flowers

by Kalamu ya Salaam


sluggish, semi-stagnant
the water in Haitian gutters,
small gullets, trickles green,
sewerage green, here even
the dirt is poor and
there is a cloying dullness
camouflaging even strongly
persistent colors

in squared, white walled
cemeteries
funeral flowers are made of
painted iron/ i see no roses
rising through this Port
Au Prince poverty

i hesitate to take pictures
it is like thievery
almost like
i am stealing precious light
that these, my brothers and sister,
need to live

Snow Day

by Billy Collins

Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,
its white flag waving over everything,
the landscape vanished,
not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,
and beyond these windows

the government buildings smothered,
schools and libraries buried, the post office lost
under the noiseless drift,
the paths of trains softly blocked,
the world fallen under this falling.

In a while, I will put on some boots
and step out like someone walking in water,
and the dog will porpoise through the drifts,
and I will shake a laden branch
sending a cold shower down on us both.

But for now I am a willing prisoner in this house,
a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow.
I will make a pot of tea
and listen to the plastic radio on the counter,
as glad as anyone to hear the news

that the Kiddie Corner School is closed,
the Ding-Dong School, closed.
the All Aboard Children’s School, closed,
the Hi-Ho Nursery School, closed,
along with—some will be delighted to hear—

the Toadstool School, the Little School,
Little Sparrows Nursery School,
Little Stars Pre-School, Peas-and-Carrots Day School
the Tom Thumb Child Center, all closed,
and—clap your hands—the Peanuts Play School.

So this is where the children hide all day,
These are the nests where they letter and draw,
where they put on their bright miniature jackets,
all darting and climbing and sliding,
all but the few girls whispering by the fence.

And now I am listening hard
in the grandiose silence of the snow,
trying to hear what those three girls are plotting,
what riot is afoot,
which small queen is about to be brought down.

From Poetry Foundation

Billy Collins, “Snow Day” from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (New York: Random House, 2001). Copyright © 2001 by Billy Collins.

Burning the Old Year

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.


From PoetryFoundation.Org