Category Archives: Great Poems Online

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.”



K. Silem Mohammad’s “Sonnagrams”


The poet K. Silem Mohammad, who blogs at Lime Tree and is credited/blamed for co-inventing the absurdist experimental poetry movement Flarf, has been writing a series of deliciously nonsensical “Sonnagrams” that are anagrams of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I discovered this project in the latest issue of Fence. Here’s a sample from Boo Journal:

OMG, Dog Pee!

Don’t screw around with darkling yellow finches:
Their feathers harbor deadly poison quills,
There’s bird flu in their tiny talons’ pinches,
And bad saliva dribbles from their bills.

If you escape the Scylla of their antlers,
As well as the Charybdis of their hooves,
You yet must dodge the anti-guy Dismantlers,
That whup the ass of every dude that moves:

We’re talking fifty-five-foot-tall vaginas,
With wicked fangs and terrible disdain
For evil men in both the Carolinas
Who diss their furry magnitude in vain.

Can any bums pump gum at “Champ” le Beau?
De dee, de dee, de dee, de dee, de doe.

———

[Sonnet 153 (“Cupid laid by his brand and fell asleep”)]

Read more at Wag’s Revue and Salt Hill Journal.

Book Notes: Stacey Waite, “the lake has no saint”


I’ve been a fan of Stacey Waite’s poetry since I read hir chapbook love poem to androgyny (Main Street Rag, 2007). That collection was both more accessible and more aggressive than hir new work, the lake has no saint, winner of the Tupelo Press Snowbound Series Chapbook Competition. Repeated images of old houses, vines, and being underwater give this book the blurry, yearning atmosphere of a recurring dream, where one searches for the lost or never-known phrase that would make sense of a cloud of memories. Even as Waite offers compelling glimpses of discovering a masculine self within a body born female, womanhood exerts its tidal pull through domestic scenes with a female lover who seems perpetually on the verge of vanishing. S/he kindly shares this sample poem with us.

when an imposition of meaning

naming. kindergarten. i do not like salt water, the class gerbil or writing on the blackboard. i do not like the girls’ line and the boys’ line. i do not like swallowing my gum. i will not tell anyone my middle name. the teacher tells the whole class my middle name.

“it’s ann,” they scream, “we know it’s ann.”

don’t count on it–was what my father used to say to mean no. the trees never mean it. they spit up fire. they sometimes think they can make stars. no one is there to deny them.

Alegria Imperial: “Spangled Seasons”


This poem by Alegria Imperial, a Canadian writer of Filipino descent, was first published on Rick Lupert’s Poetry Super Highway website. “Spangled Seasons” appealed to me, not only for its musical sounds and distinctive verbs, but because it features some memorable places in my old hometown, New York City. Visit Alegria’s blog jornales for more poetry and meditations on the writing process.

Spangled Seasons

Under hazed New York
spheres, spring sousing Riverside, earlier
cocooned in the Moor shedding off
mover’s trip, bundled molehills against
walls –once sparks we strung
onto a nebulae over
nights on Federal Hill—you and
I trudge on.

Trails we looped
between Chesapeake,
Susquehanna and
the Hudson, Venus sputtering
on Pennsylvania woods these,
too, we tucked abreast in
memory, if Manhattan
spares us.

Our cherry
noon-s have leaped into infinity
from finiteness; as well warbled
peace from cypress groves at
Inner Harbor, dandelions mirroring
our masquerade, a yucca spurting
by the window squirrels flying
a trapeze on pines mocked,

ends of days orioles
griped about—we plucked to
spangle our seasons. Soon mere
revenant: Baltimore winters we
skidded, wincing but
un-bruised. I posed for you
that summer cicadas plunged
into passion deaths, smearing

wind shields Fells Point’s
mists we eluded fogged.
Tall suns now spear
mornings at the Moor, we flex
our years on West Broadway: summers
on a mountain lake maybe, a bowery at
Brooklyn Gardens in the fall, sunset
behind Grant’s tomb perhaps, or by

Shakespeare’s lagoon, divining
on its surface the play
of wind on our
dreams

Frannie Lindsay: “The Thrift Shop Dresses”


My delight in thrift shops and tag sales goes beyond bargain-hunting. I enjoy the writerly speculation about the backstory of clothes and knicknacks, and the sense of gratitude to mysterious strangers who left this one-of-a-kind object here for me to find. On a more somber note, after a friend of ours died of cancer last summer, I feel good seeing some of his shirts having a second life in my husband’s closet.

That’s why this poem by Frannie Lindsay resonated with me. The column is reprinted by permission from American Life in Poetry, a project of the Poetry Foundation. Read a sample from Lindsay’s first book, Lamb, on the website of Northampton’s own Perugia Press, a fine publisher of poetry books by women.

****

American Life in Poetry: Column 304

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

After my mother died, one of the most difficult tasks for my sister and me was to take the clothes she’d made for herself to a thrift shop. In this poem, Frannie Lindsay, a Massachusetts poet, remembers a similar experience.


The Thrift Shop Dresses

I slid the white louvers shut so I could stand in your closet
a little while among the throng of flowered dresses
you hadn’t worn in years, and touch the creases
on each of their sleeves that smelled of forgiveness
and even though you would still be alive a few more days
I knew they were ready to let themselves be
packed into liquor store boxes simply
because you had asked that of them,
and dropped at the door of the Salvation Army
without having noticed me
wrapping my arms around so many at once
that one slipped a big padded shoulder off of its hanger
as if to return the embrace.

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 ©2009 by Frannie Lindsay, from her most recent book of poems, Mayweed, The Word Works, 2009, and reprinted by permission of Frannie Lindsay and the publisher. The poem first appeared in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Vol. 34, no. 1, Winter 2009. Introduction copyright ©2010 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.

Two Poems by Thelma T. Reyna


Poet and fiction writer Thelma T. Reyna’s new chapbook Breath & Bone is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in April. I’ve already pre-ordered my copy; get yours from their New Releases page. (Books are listed alphabetically by author.) She kindly shares two poems from this collection below.

A childhood home marked by mental illness can sometimes be the crucible in which a writer is formed. Perhaps the need to make sense of the impossible hones one’s mental powers to find or invent extraordinary conceptual connections. There’s a fine line between the extreme coping strategy we call madness and the one we call art. That line, I think, is made of self-awareness and self-integration.

****

Quilts

Mother plugged up the coffee spout
  
with foil after dinner
to keep the cockroaches out
  and laid a pile
of patchwork quilts on the chilly floor
  
for us to sleep on and urinate.
She hung them on the doors
  
next morning,
colorful, stinky banners hanging
  
room through room
to dry—rearranging
  
them next night so the most pissed
would be on the bottom of the stack
  
and we could sleep without the stench
of too much wetness.

Her black
  
coffee sometimes had a baby cockroach
drowned in its bitters. Got through the foil, I guess,
  
damned little fool,
got through the plug to mess
  
her brew, as we messed her quilts—
growing kids lying shoulder to shoulder
  
on the floor,
growing older,
  
still peeing, still wrapped in each other’s arms
to keep warm.

****

How She Died

Who knew it would be like this?
Strong woman, monster lady, mover of monoliths,
she liked to say, not mountains, but monoliths.
Tough momma since thirteen: monster lady, she
called herself, woman who built our house,
   leather
hands cooking dinner for seven when the
   hammer stopped
pounding and the sky purpled. Tough cookie
   without
a man, welts hidden, legs scarred.

But in the end she moved molehills. Her brain
dumped her, one side crumpling, wetting, when
   the going got
too tough too long, the other side pumping her
   to be strong.
The wet one won.

With time, her visitors, airy visitors, came
in pairs, night or day, perched in corners,
   smirking in
the dusk. They took off their heads, she
   said, and
sat beneath her dining table. Her cloudy
eyes shooed them away, trembled when
   they moved
near her wooden knees. She cursed at them,
   tough
momma, made them know she wasn’t ready yet
   for death.

With time, others waited outside windows, came
softly in the brazen light of day, stood by her
   sheets, floated
by her stone hands from a far-off time beyond
recall. These she’d truly loved. Her brain burst one
day in a wetness of recognition. Who could’ve
known she’d die this way? Who could’ve
   guessed love
would take the monster?

Two Poems by Kenyan Writer Stephen Partington


Happy 2011! I thought I’d start off the new year with these poems by Kenyan writer Stephen Partington, containing a tale of new birth and a message of hope for a more peaceful world. They’re reprinted by permission from his collection How to Euthanise a Cactus (Cinnamon Press, 2010).

This collection was one of four books chosen by the influential magazine The Africa Report for their Best Books 2010 feature. (One of his fellow honorees was Nelson Mandela.) The editor’s review states: “The political crisis in Kenya triggered by the botched 2007 elections seems to have caught talented young writers off guard. As prose writers search for their voices, it has been the poets who have confronted the crisis and tried to find meaning through it. Partington’s new collection is a towering manifestation of poetry’s strident return to the literary mainstream. Using media accounts of the violence, Partington points a disturbing finger at the living who remained silent and took sides—and took sides in order to silence.”

Praise Poem

We praise the man who,
though he held the match between
his finger and his thumb,
beheld the terror of its tiny drop of phosphorus,
its brown and globoid smoothness
like a charred and tiny skull
and so returned it to its box.

So too, we hail the youth who,
though he took his panga on the march,
perceived it odd within his fist
when there was neither scrub
nor firewood to be felled,
so laid it down.

An acclamation for the man who,
though he saw the woman running, clothing torn,
and though he lusted,
saw his mother in her youth,
restrained his colleagues
and withdrew.

We pay our homage to the man who,
though his heart was like a stone
and though he took a stone to cast,
could feel its hardness in the softness of his palm
and grasped the brittleness of bone,
so let it drop.

We laud the man who,
though he snatched to scrutinise
the passenger’s I.D.,
saw not the name – instead, the face –
and slid it back
as any friend might slide his hand to shake a friend’s.

And to the rest of us,
a blessing:
may you never have to be that man,
but if you have to,
BE!

****

Present at the Keelhauling

Kenya, late December 2007
For Sophie Mwelu Partington

What could so tiny a sailor have done
to deserve such punishment?
Did you fall asleep on deck, steal lemons,
mutiny?
I stand here like some bleeding heart lieutenant,
at a loss until

the doctor pulls you sternly round your mother’s keel,
and here you come, full-bloodied,
slick as kelp, so much the doctor cannot hold you,
ribbed and gulping with the joyful joy of lungs.

Ten toes, ten fingers, you’re
statistically sublime.
Mum’s little stowaway for nine long months,
and just for now,
this instant as I swaddle you with all my hugs,
you’re mine.