Category Archives: Great Poems Online

Two Poems from an Anthology to Benefit Refugees


Yes, loyal readers, it has been a long time since I blogged. I’ve been refreshing my vocation as a Christian writer at the Glen Workshop East, an experience I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who has wondered how the identities “Christian” and “writer” can coexist harmoniously.

While I sort out my thoughts from this high-intensity week, please enjoy the following excerpt from The Last Stanza, a new poetry anthology edited by Dan Savery Raz of Danscribe Books. The Last Stanza features work by the members of StanzAviv, a creative collective of writers associated with Bar Ilan University and Tel Aviv University. StanzAviv members come from Israel, USA, UK, France, Canada, Latvia and beyond. Poets include Dara Barnat from Tel Aviv University’s English Faculty, literary translator Sabine Huynh, and Israeli poet Michal Pirani. The book also features atmospheric shots of Tel Aviv taken by award-winning photographer Nitzan Hafner. All proceeds from the sale of this book go to the ARDC (African Refugee Development Center), an NGO in south Tel Aviv that provides shelter, education, counseling and advice to refugees and asylum seekers in Israel. The ARDC was founded by refugees for refugees.

****


Finally
by Yedida Bernstein Goren

i am refugee, you were this too, yes? my friend
i ran, climbed, snaked to shaky part of your borderwall
oh israel holy-israel my mind breaking into pieces of glass
i hear jews are good people
months i journey hide every some hours
lost friends, brother, child back home
you also lose family shot at by crazed soldiers, yes?
we hear you did long long time ago 60 years
walking and walking and walking and walking
they aim bullets at me
they rape my woman
i stand there
my eyes stretch into my forehead, my pupils fall out my eyelids
i hold back the skyscream
trudge on with wife on back
over last sandkilometer
i reach you, finally, oh Israel
scarred, falling, hungry
you send me to holding station
like prison
you look down on me and wife
you so shy of kindtouch
so short on welcomewords
weeks months later
you tell us to leave on big plane
you pay
where, kind officer, do you think we should return to?

****

easyBank.com
by Dan Savery Raz

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If you like the word ‘muesli’, press five.
If you get scared by thunder and lightning storms at night,
   press six.
If you believe in a monotheistic God, press seven.
If you are an atheist or believe in many gods, such as the
   sun god Helios, press eight.
For reincarnation, press nine.
To listen to some ancient Tibetan Buddhist chants, press
   ten.
Trotskyites, press eleven.
Hermaphrodites, twelve.
For information on the displacement of the Aboriginal population
   of Australia in the late 18th century, press thirteen.
If you just want to get stoned, press fourteen
followed by the hash key.
If you treat your pet dog better than most human beings,
   press fifteen.
People that still carry some torch of hope for humanity, press
   sixteen followed by star.
For sarcasm or wit, don’t press seventeen whatever you do.
To speak to a customer service representative, call the
   premium number between 10 AM and 10.30 AM on Monday,
   Tuesday and Thursday.
To return to the main menu please text the words ‘Egyptian
   Mummification in the Predynastic Period’ to 666 or hold the
   line while we drill holes in your ear.
Thank you for banking with easyBank.com, finance at your fingertips.

Sabine Huynh: “In Memory of a Two-Meter-Tall Israeli Buddhist Monk”


Last fall, I posted some poetry by Sabine Huynh, a Vietnamese-born writer, translator, and linguistics scholar who now lives in Israel. This next poem that she kindly shares with us also reflects the intermingling of cultures and faiths, appropriately for a meditation about crossing the boundary from life to death and…whatever happens next. (Note: A Neshama candle is a Yahrzeit memorial candle that Jews light on the anniversary of a person’s death.)

In memory of a two-meter tall Israeli Buddhist monk (U. L., 1959-2009)

If you google his first name, a Hebrew name
that sounds like “Where? Tell,” in French,
and his four-letter last name
which happens to be the town where
I grew up on bitter rice and green cherries,
you’ll find him in the World
Buddhist Directory, Chiangmai, Thailand,
after Phra “monk” – a two-meter tall one –
and before an O-six phone number
ending with thirty eight – our house number then,
the house where the mother smashed her anger
into the daughter’s piano keys,
the father’s dreams, the sons’ games,
the garden where the dog died.
Oh yes, an O-six number and an email address
spammed for eternity. There is a website too,
no longer available to disciples,
even the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine
– click on “take me back” –
fails to retrieve him from Nirvana.
When in the evening
I hang the Neshama candle
in my kam kwat tree – “gold orange”
in Chinese, I wonder
whether he is washing
his saffron robe in Basho’s old pond.
Sick on a journey, their dreams
wandered over withered grass.
No rebirth and no soul for him, no peace
of mind, no answer but so much
to remember him for.

****

See a photo of Udi on Sabine’s website.

Saturday Random Song: Dolly Parton, “Jesus & Gravity”


Now that’s the story of my life:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gyqjSn-q34&NR=1
(sorry, no embed code)

I’m to the point where it don’t add up
I can’t say I’ve come this far with my guitar on pure dumb luck
That’s not to say I know it all
Cause everytime I get too high up on my horse I fall

Cause I’ve got
Somethin’ lifting me up
Somethin’ holding me down
Somethin’ to give me wings and keep my feet on the ground
I’ve got all I need
Jesus and gravity

But I’m as bad as anyone
Taking all these blessings in my life for granted one by one
When I start to thinkin’ it’s all me
Well somethin’ comes along and knocks me right back on my knees
And I’ve got…

Somethin’ lifting me up
Somethin’ holding me down
Somethin’ to give me wings and keep my feet on the ground
I’ve got all I need, Jesus and gravity

He’s my friend
He’s my light
He’s my wings
He’s my flight

I’ve got somethin’ lifting me up
Somethin’ holding me down
Somethin’ to give me wings and
Somethin’ to keep my feet on the ground
I’ve got all I’m gonna need
I got Jesus, I got Jesus,

I got somethin’ lifting me up
Somethin’ holding me down
Somethin’ to give me wings and keep my feet on the ground
I’ve got all I’ll ever need
Cause I got Jesus and gravity

I got somethin’ lifting me up
Somethin’ holding me down
Somethin’ to give me wings and keep my feet on the ground
I’ve got all I’ll need
Cause I’ve got Jesus and gravity
Jesus, I’ve got Jesus, I’ve got Jesus
He’s my everything
He lifts me up
He gives me wings
He gives me hope
And He gives me strength
And that’s all I’ll ever need

As long as He keeps lifting me up
He is my life
He is my God
He is my wings
He is my flight
Lift me
I’ve got Jesus, I’ve got Jesus
And that’s all I need

Lyrics courtesy of www.cowboylyrics.com

Jim Ferris: “For Crippled Things”


How good was The Hospital Poems, Jim Ferris’ first poetry collection from Main Street Rag? So good that I loaned it to an otherwise responsible friend and I haven’t seen it since. Ferris writes with a biting wit and raw honesty about the experience of disability, fighting to reclaim his dignity from the fix-it authoritarians of the medical establishment. From early childhood, he endured multiple surgeries to correct bone deformities, but even as the doctors labored to make his body more “normal”, the stigma and strangeness of institutional life imposed their own unique twists and scars on his soul.

I’ve just ordered his new collection Slouching Towards Guantanamo, from which the poem below is reprinted by permission. Main Street Rag is a great indie press in Charlotte, NC that publishes poetry and literary prose. Their authors have a fresh contemporary voice and a social conscience. Support MSR by pre-ordering their new releases. Early birds get a discount.

FYI, this poem is a take-off on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty“.

For Crippled Things

    
Once I turned from thee and hid.
        –Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for crippled things —
For minds as sharp as cracked concrete;
For flab that sags, for joints and thoughts that will not come unstuck;
Forgotten lessons, wisdom . . . what? Nothing.
Growths that thrive and work left incomplete;
All legs grow tired, all clocks their hands get stuck.

All things imperfect, asymmetric, strange;
Whatever is transient, moaning, full aware that they’re hamstrung meat;
Lost pieces of walk talk see hear laugh run good luck;
He must love the lame — he made us in so wide a range;
We are his joy, his music all we sing;
Our praise is in our flux.

Two Poems by Nick Demske


“An idea’s value depreciates the moment/you drive it off the lot,” proclaims Nick Demske in the one untitled poem in his self-titled collection from Fence Books, anticipating critics who might carp that his furious, punning, scatological, exploded sonnets are as overstuffed with pop-culture ephemera as the trash can outside Mickey D’s. How long before we need footnotes to understand a line like “Peppermint/Schnapps complements uninsured Hummers like an over/Eager metrosexual”? Will civilization survive that long? (Assuming it isn’t already dead.)

Eleven years after America indulged in a month-long exegesis of certain presidential ballots, many of us will reach back into the mental file marked “old news” and come up empty. Remember pregnant chads? The V-chip? David Schwimmer? The end of history? Ah, those were the days.

Ecdysiast, now: a word that conceals (with its prissy erudition) as much as the act it describes, reveals. A similar double-mindedness is at work in Nick Demske’s poetry. Cheap goods and commercialized words join with sacrosanct ones in a passionate melee. Could be an orgy, could be a fistfight. Sometimes all I see is a cloud of dust, as in the cartoons. But worth watching anyhow.

PREGNANT CHAD

Vote yes on this ballot and get a free
Abortion when you purchase any additional abortion of equal or lesser
Of two evils. Honk if you’re saving yourself for marriage. Hear ye
Sinners; he clave the rock and the waters

Menstruated forth like a head wound—no, a
Boil on Job’s ass! Vote yes if you’re not chicken.
Bu bawk bawk bawwwk. This poem paid for by the
People that brought you natural selection,

Epidurals and baby bibs
With Noah’s ark graphics stitched on. Vote yes and choose to give
A child Life. Vote yes for
Promotional use only, vote yes sir, right away sir,

Vote yes if you love me, vote yes, vote yes, vote yes
Yes, yes, no please don’t stop I was so close.

****

ECDYSIAST POETRY

“the answer to all those rhetorical questions”
-Nick Demske

for Sara Thornton

A finger contours the serrations. A hand with all its digits
Intact caresses these stumps with a wash rag. This is
All my fault. I never should have let this happen.
So liberated we voluntarily bind our librations

Inside this cage; its dimension lines a high art form, throbbing out our rhythm.
She sways like the bangs of a willow. With her bamboo manicure.
With your skin shell hide husk rind etc. But I’ll never die because I am
A god. You, on the other hand, are

Female. It’s so cold the snow looks like diamonds. If we’re
So frickin’ beautiful, we’ll shove our lily hands into the contents
Of this diaper here and mould them to a song. We’ll burrow deeper
Into all our thickly caked integuments, just to dim our radiance’s violent,

Seismic vox. Undistorted majesty demands
It’s own grotesqueness. It’s so cold the coal looks like diamonds.

Ellery Akers: “The Word That Is a Prayer”


Debates about the Word of God can preoccupy us so much, we forget that Christ’s real message, compassion, is much simpler but far from easy. That’s why I like this poem, reprinted here by permission from American Life in Poetry, a project of the Poetry Foundation.

American Life in Poetry: Column 312

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Ellery Akers is a California poet who here brings all of us under a banner with one simple word on it.

The Word That Is a Prayer

One thing you know when you say it:
all over the earth people are saying it with you;
a child blurting it out as the seizures take her,
a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital.
What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin:
at a street light, a man in a wool cap,
yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window;
he says, Please.
By the time you hear what he’s saying,
the light changes, the cab pulls away,
and you don’t go back, though you know
someone just prayed to you the way you pray.
Please: a word so short
it could get lost in the air
as it floats up to God like the feather it is,
knocking and knocking, and finally
falling back to earth as rain,
as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch,
collecting in drains, leaching into the ground,
and you walk in that weather every day.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©1997 by Ellery Akers, whose most recent book of poetry is Knocking on the Earth, Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Reprinted from The Place That Inhabits Us, Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010, by permission of Ellery Akers and the publishers. Introduction copyright © 2011 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Murder Ballad Monday: Johnny Cash, “I Hung My Head”


Crime stories fascinate us because they give voice to our anxiety that a single rash misstep can irrevocably alter our fate. My prison pen pals’ letters give ample proof of this, as does this week’s musical selection, one of the Man in Black’s many haunting ballads about lives wasted through violence. You can find it on the last and greatest album he released during his lifetime, American Recordings IV: The Man Comes Around.



Poems on Death Row


Last month I shared part of a letter from my prison pen pal “Jon”, in which he talked about the crucial role of books and libraries in rehabilitating criminals. Jon and his co-defendant have just been convicted of a double homicide during a burglary, and now he is waiting for the jury to decide whether to sentence him to life without parole or the death penalty. He writes about his trial:

“The hardest parts were when family members of the departed testified. Then when some of my ex-girlfriends and family I haven’t seen in years testified on my behalf, I was shocked to hear all the good they had to say, but it did hurt a lot as well. I know I’ll likely never get out, but it makes it harder to see and be reminded of all the harm I caused to others, and of all the opportunities I had at having a happy life.”

It’s a sad commentary on the brutality of prison life that Jon, age 30, says he’d actually prefer the death sentence:

“I do not want to die, of course, but on death row I can live in solitude and peace. With life without, I will be forced to have a cellie, and be around others. That is a very negative environment for me, and I don’t believe I can handle it. I cannot focus around others at all. Also considering I walked away from the racist prison politics in my past, it can be rough for me, and I would likely be forced to violence, or not be able to contain myself. I suppose the best way to explain my feelings is to pose a question. Would you choose to live for twenty years in peace and then die, or would you choose to live 50-70 years in torture?”

Given that it’s taken the state of California seven years to bring Jon’s case to trial, his estimate of 20 years to execution may be close to the truth.

Meanwhile, here are some poems he’s been writing while he waits to learn what his future holds.

Shujin

With bare walls of graffiti,
cut and carved, etched and written.
Halls of hallowed curses,
and purses held on paper.
Smitten with the photos,
of foes and scarlet maidens.
Lost souls, cups for bowls,
salvation becomes the answer.
Animals are cockroaches,
or perhaps the spider that can eat them.
Rats are thieves, swift in the night,
taking crumbs, and leaving their stench.
Light comes through the cracks,
on benches made of stone.
Whispers travel dreamily in silence,
in an alliance of shujin prayers.
Listening closely to the air,
a gentle remedy, defeats the dark.

****

Awaiting

Clanging chains and rattling hopes
awaiting an outcome
that should surely come to death
there’s no gray lines
no more right and wrong
just have patience
the verdict might come soon
Were they so surprised
that I told the truth
and was it such a shock
when I explained pro-death
waiting for results
to see what they’ll decide
will they understand true justice
or will they cower down inside

****

When the Sun Goes Down

There was a sunset in the sky
and a fabrication in the stars
it’s falling into darkness
never near nor far
the coldness will come soon
consuming all the warmths
of all the temples’ stones–
What is left will be a shell
of just another shattered youth

Murder Ballad Monday: Jimmie Rodgers, “Frankie and Johnny”


One of my favorite panels at this year’s AWP conference featured the novelist Wesley Stace , also known as singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding, talking about storytelling in music. Ballads and poems provide essential clues to the mystery in his excellent first novel, the comic melodrama Misfortune, and also feature in his just-released book, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer.

Stace praised the ballad form as a deceptively simple yet profound form that gets right to the crisis point in a character’s history. Though retribution is usually swift and inevitable, there’s rarely any moralizing about the characters’ crimes, an open-endedness that allows us to choose how deeply we identify with the story.

I thought of his analysis when I heard these lines toward the end of the classic murder ballad “Frankie and Johnny,” performed here by Jimmie Rodgers: “This story has no moral, this story has no end, this story just goes to show that there ain’t no good in men.”