Category Archives: Great Poems Online

New Poem by Conway: “Oak Leaf”


Oak Leaf

Beyond the certainty
   of a grave
or burdened song
   of a wandering star;
A firefly in flight–
  retains a tight grip,
on the approaching slip of dawn.

Dancing among ancient memories
   hidden in burgundy wine
coolly scissoring through air
   gliding to the tune of time
but seemingly going nowhere.

As an old note is struck
   from some familiar song of woe,
one that has clung to memory
  like an affectionate parasite
that wraps around its host,
   to strangle it in scorn,
stifling the unfulfilled dreams
   of an acorn…

********

My prison pen pal “Conway”, who’s serving 25-to-life under California’s “three strikes” law for receiving stolen goods, is facing unfair new restrictions on his status. Although his disciplinary record was clean, he was transferred from the prison where he was mentoring at-risk youth, as part of a prisoner trade arranged by officials. In his new location, officials are considering reassigning him to the segregated housing unit until he’s paroled, which could be years from now. In the SHU, he writes in his Nov. 27 letter, he will be limited to “window visits only, caged exercise, cuffs, kickers, no music and one 30 lb. package per year.”

Conway loves books; he’s reading Bleak House right now. He has adult children and grandchildren whose visits keep his spirits up. These lifelines are at risk if he’s permanently reclassified to the SHU. If you’ve been inspired by his poetry and letters on this blog, please email your testimonials to me at je***@************rs.com and I’ll pass them along.

Knowing that our family had suffered a loss this year, Conway sent me this quote from Dag Hammarskjold in his Christmas card:

A happiness within you–
   but not yours.
Only that can be really yours
   which is another’s,
for only what you have given,
   be it only in the gratitude
   of acceptance, is salvaged
   from the nothing, which
      some day
  will have been your life…

The Poet Spiel: “Odds”


My husband and I have just returned from the Soulforce Anti-Heterosexism Conference in West Palm Beach, where we met some of our favorite bloggers, heard a fantastic sermon by Rev. Deborah Johnson of Inner Light Ministries, and felt completely welcome as the token straight couple. I’ll be posting a complete report here after the holidays. Meanwhile, enjoy this poem from The Poet Spiel, whose new book is forthcoming from March Street Press in 2010.

Odds

Flesh-hued cotton panties over their heads,
    covering their ears
and topped off by orange and green party hats
    from that carousing
in 1944 on army leave in Paris where they were
    rightfully
thrilled at the revelation of one another in
    dark shadows.

Now these two old men are fixtures faded as
    wallpaper,
unable to recall why panties and hats had been
    so hilarious
in their steamy bathroom mirror one
    way-back-when drunken night;
only that the panties keep their ears warm,
    reason enough.

They piddle their aches from threadbare
    tapestried chairs,
facing so their feet meet to keep track of
    each other;
each half-deaf, fearing he cannot hear the
    other breathe.
Yet they also fear dead silence, so they kill it
    with classic vinyl,

spinning I get no kick from cocaine. But it’s
    not the lyric
that lulls their hearts, it’s the familiarity of
    old tunes;
how they used to hug-dance in their
    lard-laden kitchen,
brittle Woolworth’s shades drawn down
    against a world

that might not tolerate two such battle-weary
    soldiers,
peacefully withdrawn. Alone, together: Edward
    crocheting
dainty doilies to keep his knotted knuckles nimble,
    Rodney knitting
acres of the cutest afghans for those virile young
    boys in Iraq.

Long ago, they had to abandon thoughts of ever
    going back home,
just tucked them away in their root cellar to gather
    fungus and mouse turds,
but they agree noises rise from there, like sharp
    cracklings
of their battalion on the front lines of The Big War.

Karen Winterburn: “Aporia of the Gift”


Karen Winterburn is an emerging poet who’s won several awards from the Utmost Christian Writers site. In addition to the first prize in this year’s Novice Christian Poetry Contest, she took home the award for best rhyming poem for “Aporia of the Gift“, a polished yet natural-sounding piece of formal writing that blends Derrida’s philosophy with echoes of George Herbert’s “Love Bade Me Welcome“. She’s kindly permitted me to reprint it below. You can also read my critique of her poem “Call Out of Exile” at Winning Writers.

Aporia of the Gift

An “aporia” is a paradoxical impasse. The philosopher Jacques Derrida claims that true gift-giving is an aporia, an impossible contradiction in terms because it always implies self-interest and expects a return. A mere exchange of equally valued items is not true gift-giving. But God shows us what true gift-giving is. He is both the Giver and the Gift. It is impossible for us to reciprocate with a gift of equal value. But he doesn’t lavish us with gifts to shame our poverty. As long as we are trying to pay him back and settle the account, we cannot freely receive what he offers us. If we accept our poverty before him, we will see that his Gift to us is union with him: union of Giver and receiver and Gift. This union is the only solution to the aporia of the gift. And only by virtue of our union with God can we freely give to and receive from each other.

What I have owed in love I’ve always paid,
measured out in small change—nickel and dime.
I’m nothing if not just and fair in trade.
I am that woman holding up the line:
I calculate the cost of Bread and Wine,
exhaust my coin while still the Loaf expands;
Wine inundates and shifts the paradigm:
overflows it; elevates, countermands
and understates the debt it takes out of my hands.

I want to pay my bill! I estimate
it’s astronomical; it multiplies
as Love devises to inebriate
and fill me past my means to amortize
my liability. I agonize,
liquidate my estate, consign the lot
to such a Love: who does not itemize
or keep accounts or hold the Gift he’s got
on lay-away till I can pay sans caveate—

—to such a Love as this. No recompense
for such unheard-of Love is on report,
nor have I anything of consequence
to make return. My whole life comes up short:
my yearning is a poverty that thwarts
my moves, my airs, and leaves me impotent,
with bare and baffled heart. No speechless sort,
I stammer at the stop I’ve reached, consent
to yeild, receive the Feast—to eat and be outspent.

Love quiets me. Love sits me on his knee.
“You are yourself,” says he, “all I desire.”
Might Love be satisfied in colloquy?
We wink and whisper till my eyes acquire
his own spark. My darkened heart now afire
with borrowed Light bestows itself and—swift
to cede—receives itself! Might Love conspire
to grant affinity to me, uplift
this heart to make it one with Giver and the Gift?

New Poem by Conway: “See You Around”


In this new poem, my prison pen pal “Conway” speaks for all incarcerated men and women who don’t get to see their children and grandchildren growing up. Mary Oliver’s famous lines “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?”, often read as a call to personal growth, take on new political meaning for families like Conway’s. He has only one life, one chance to experience a daughter’s wedding, a grandchild’s birth. These children, too, will never get a second chance to grow up without the wounds of father loss. Do we, as a society, recognize that their lives are “wild and precious”, too, or do we throw them away with misguided tough-on-crime policies?

See You Around

Empty words, fanned out across the light
in their plight for communication
on the valley of my tongue.

You listened with a stern expression, drifting
without knowing exactly why your thoughts
would hang
like a kite, in the warm summer breeze.

A simple nod or bite of your knuckle
assured me, that we
were touching each other sufficiently
through the transparent partition.

Maybe, this is how our world was supposed to be
just maybe, that’s all we will ever know again.

I raise my hand-up slowly
like a child in class
eager to please the teacher
yet, unsure of an answer;
Place my aging palm onto the glass
then a smaller palm appeared
matched against mine.

Time was a singular straight line
that separated us, our hunger
unraveling like a plate of spaghetti.

Time was a calm sea
that floated over me,
that I drank thankfully
whenever you came to visit,
though the thought of waiting, another day
through this constant repetition
remains more terrifying than the emptiness.

My mind rewinds you walking away
replete again-n-again incomplete
when all that I’m allowed to do
is watch you leave.

For as long as we’ve been kept apart
is as long as I still have to stay…

****
In his latest letter, Conway also shared some thoughts about the meaning of his poems “Leap Frog” and “Proof of Perfection”, which I posted here last month:

Actually I feel that “Organized Religion” or at least the Hierarchy involved in running such an Oxymoron are very much to blame for the direction our Society is heading, or shall I say the Stance that our Society has adopted concerning “criteria for participation”.

Because of some over-zealot Scripture definitions of How to be “Correct” disciples of God, or the Religious Dogma being organized…

…[The poem] “Proof of Perfection” came first and then upon further reflection, I wrote “Leap Frog” to help continue the piece.

You hit the nail on the head as usual: Justice or Vengeance and which is really morally correct. Who has the Right to make that decision

Like when the Crucifixion was decided

After the warrant was written.

The Cross was burnished, as it is still being examined (carried around in effigy).

The Thorns (nettle) is wrapped around his head to Symbolize Constant pain or incite Thoughts of the Judgment, it is an outrageous reminder that we all have a brain and must use it.

The Bloody spear smeared on the doormat was sealing our fate because not a Soul Stood up to fight this travesty.

They were only “Whispered questions“.

Afraid to question “Authority/Dogma”.

Who will fight to change it, if nobody Speaks up or Takes the same punishment. “Ths twisted blow/We’ll never know.”

Then the “Pagan eclipse” labeled a heretic if you don’t agree fully to the sentence, the punishment. You become a the nonbeliever Pagan — the dark side locked out of the Church. So you “fall through the floor” — straight to Hell.

But, the Hollow reed is there, after its death. The reed is turned into a flute and so, its death has been turned into music which harvested the Sorrow. It remains alive. Metamorphosed into something glorious, except only from our living breathing life has placed holes in its carcass. Our lungs “Broken breath” bring it back to life. It “sings a satisfactory song”.

But this same instrument can be used as a Switch to cause pain — discipline. “Bent willows seeking flesh” verse — more the afterthought of the “Proof of Perfection” that connects to “Leap Frog” because of the explanation (hence the title). So, we can recognize reincarnation or life after death, in nature.

“Imagine, what His hand and throat began” —  Is He proud of his Creation? are we not being observed for our humanity, our free will to do great things, this Glorious Struggle.

The fluttering moths are of course metaphor and indicate our attraction to the source of our existence. The Truth, the turmoil, the strength.

“The Search for the crack in the Curtain’s narrow track.” Wizard of Oz reference to the person behind the Curtain. (is it real) is it faith

“The Tears diminish in the theft of a wilting Heart” “Bent willows” punishment — Rejection and pain from going against the grain. Not blindly following Mans/Authority boundaries/Rules.

Finally “to slit the throat of silent Sacrifice” “Toss the herded cross” — No longer Idolized or burnished but Rejected Ideologically. It becomes outright animosity, because if you are to believe the “Norm” the “Self appointed/anointed” Zealots Ideology then you have no other but “Trail to the bitter end”.

But the Truth is in the Hollow Reed still singing and that is the “Leap Frog” to the “Proof of Perfection”. The faith in forgiveness in the search. The Compliment [sic] that you are you and whichever path you are on is proof that God Loves your Choices and Continues to Bless your life with His Song. Your song’s like a beacon.


Amen, friend.

Online Literary Roundup: Stickman Review, The Post Office Poems


There’s no shortage of great contemporary writing online. Here are two sites I just discovered today:

Stickman Review, a biannual online literary journal edited by Anthony Brown, publishes memorable literary prose, poetry, and artwork. Their latest issue, Vol. 8 No. 2, features a powerful story by Leah Erickson. “Judy Garland” depicts the relationship between a pre-teen boy and his troubled, fragile mother, as they wait amid a crowd of fans at Grand Central Station for the movie star to arrive for the premiere of “The Wizard of Oz”. Erickson captures the psychological darkness and interiority of adolescence, with a sexual subtext that is never made crudely explicit, as the boy, like his fellow Americans on the cusp of World War II, struggles to distinguish hopeful fantasy from dangerous mania.

Other fine entries in this issue include poems by Gale Acuff and Jackie Bartley.

The Post Office Poems blog is an interactive, ongoing poetry project highlighting Fall City, Washington, and the Snoqualmie Valley, written by an anonymous author and posted weekly on the bulletin board at the Fall City Post Office.
The author explains:

The idea for the Post Office Poems began with a simple posting of a poem on the bulletin board at the Fall City Post Office on October 6, 2009 by an anonymous poet. Everyone in town has a post office box, there is no delivery within the city as it is pretty much out in the boonies, “rural”. When you pick up your mail after hours you enter the back door which is always unlocked. To the left on the wall is a large bulletin board with a typical assortment of small notices for rentals, items for sale, upcoming events and business cards. Once you read these, the next time you come in the reading selection becomes pretty boring. There is nothing else on the walls, though I’ve noticed lately as you come in the door the wind has blown a large handful of brilliant orange, red, yellow and brown leaves across the floor.

Thus an idea was born to enliven the lobby experience for townsfolk. Once a week a poem is posted on the board. The first was called “Four Feathers from Fall City”, it was posted on a Tuesday night about 9:30 pm with three white tacks, on a sheet of white typing paper. When I had just pushed in the last tack I heard a car pull up. I looked out the door and there was a cop car just outside. Was I breaking some unknown Postal Service rule or federal bulletin board law? As I walked out the door, an officer in full uniform walked in and said, “Hello there, how are you?”

I said, “Hello, fine thank you.” and nervously left. I wanted the poems to be anonymous. When people of Fall City read them, I want the poem and it’s images to be exerienced and enjoyed. This project is interactive. A piece of plain white paper, a poem, the quiet lobby, and then whatever happens next in the reading, the feelings of the reader, etc. will be a discovery. Something new. A gift.

I was particularly moved by the entry “Seven Pigeons and the White Angel”, a tribute to a young man who drowned in the river. The author handles a potentially sentimental subject with subtle yet deep emotion and a gift for describing the sublime landscape of the Northwest. 

William “Wild Bill” Taylor: “Bored in Sunday School”


Taylor, a Winning Writers subscriber, often emails me his poems about the spiritual disillusionment of the Vietnam generation. This latest entry is one of my favorites. Read my critique of his poem “Corpus Christi” on our website.

Bored in Sunday School

In better times,
we would have been best friends,

growing up with pals down the street,
with our Davy Crockett hats, and our Johnny
    Unitas helmets,

after school was our first attempts at understanding
the head and shoulder movements of the opposite sex,

such mysterious lamentations of nature,
we also were becoming bored in Sunday school,
figuring all this talk of morals was bad for our
    young souls,
we had worlds and mountains to conquer,
our chapter in history had yet to be written,
all of us could do it better than
it had been done before!

the afternoon matinee became the Saturday night
    chick
flick,
where we suddenly were consumed with our looks,
    and if our
hair and nose were the correct lengths for our species,

we did not care, in the beginning, that our lovers were
    the fruitful results
of aloofness, we held them secure in the dreamland
    epitaph of insecure country boys
who prayed, not to the Sunday god, but that deity who
    ran naked from

the Garden of Eden,

when these starlets whispered “I love you”, we were
    certain
our aging would stop,

those blue eyes held us dear,
their ample breastplate provided cover,
their legs, wrapped round us,

until the next sunlight
awakened the merging of passion,

and the future,
was a bitter cough drop,
yet, swallowed,

funny, the old drunk told me,
nothing stays wonderful, forever…

Poemeleon “Gender Issue” Now Online


Mystery boxes! Ironic diagrams! And at least one plastic vagina… It’s the latest issue of the online journal Poemeleon, the Gender Issue, with poems from award-winning authors including Rane Arroyo, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Jennifer Sweeney, and yours truly.

Other highlights include a review of Letters to the World: Poems from the Women’s Poetry Listserv. This lively and erudite online discussion group, better known as Wom-Po, was crucial in helping me transition from the 9-to-5 cubicle world to the more solitary and unstructured life of the writer-entrepreneur, back in 2003. Wom-Po demonstrates the potential of the Internet to create a community for women writers who may not have opportunities for face-to-face mentoring. (Be warned, though – the discussion is so active that reading and responding to the messages may consume your entire day.)

Gjertrud Schnackenberg: “Supernatural Love”


A good Christian poem and a good formal poem: rare accomplishments that the wonderfully named Gjertrud Schnackenberg combines in this piece, reprinted by permission from the blog of The Best American Poetry anthology series edited by David Lehman.

Supernatural Love

My father at the dictionary stand
Touches the page to fully understand
The lamplit answer, tilting in his hand

His slowly scanning magnifying lens,
A blurry, glistening circle he suspends
Above the word ‘Carnation’. Then he bends

So near his eyes are magnified and blurred,
One finger on the miniature word,
As if he touched a single key and heard

A distant, plucked, infinitesimal string,
“The obligation due to every thing
That’ s smaller than the universe.” I bring

My sewing needle close enough that I
Can watch my father through the needle’s eye,
As through a lens ground for a butterfly

Who peers down flower-hallways toward a room
Shadowed and fathomed as this study’s gloom
Where, as a scholar bends above a tomb

To read what’s buried there, he bends to pore
Over the Latin blossom. I am four,
I spill my pins and needles on the floor

Trying to stitch “Beloved” X by X.
My dangerous, bright needle’s point connects
Myself illiterate to this perfect text

I cannot read. My father puzzles why
It is my habit to identify
Carnations as “Christ’s flowers,” knowing I

Can give no explanation but “Because.”
Word-roots blossom in speechless messages
The way the thread behind my sampler does

Where following each X, I awkward move
My needle through the word whose root is love.
He reads, “A pink variety of Clove,

Carnatio, the Latin, meaning flesh.”
As if the bud’s essential oils brush
Christ’s fragrance through the room, the iron-fresh

Odor carnations have floats up to me,
A drifted, secret, bitter ecstasy,
The stems squeak in my scissors, Child, it’s me,

He turns the page to “Clove” and reads aloud:
“The clove, a spice, dried from a flower-bud.”
Then twice, as if he hasn’t understood,

He reads, “From French, for clou, meaning a nail.”
He gazes, motionless,”Meaning a nail.”
The incarnation blossoms, flesh and nail,

I twist my threads like stems into a knot
And smooth “Beloved”, but my needle caught
Within the threads, Thy blood so dearly bought,

The needle strikes my finger to the bone.
I lift my hand, it is myself I’ve sewn,
The flesh laid bare, the threads of blood my own,

I lift my hand in startled agony
And call upon his name, “Daddy Daddy” –
My father’s hand touches the injury

As lightly as he touched the page before,
Where incarnation bloomed from roots that bore
The flowers I called Christ’s when I was four.

New Poems by Conway: “Leap Frog” and “Proof of Perfection”


My prison pen pal “Conway” has been experimenting with the prose-poem format while continuing to develop his gift for lyric poetry. I’ve been writing to him about my struggles with religious concepts of sacrifice and submission as I see them being misused in the church. I see those discussions reflected in his latest offerings, below.

Leap Frog

Imagine, what His hand and throat began
through all of the silences we chopped out
in front of our father’s shining eyes.

I’ve no need to sing it anymore
or finish the melted words melody.
We can all see & smell around the burning nights nettle,

as fluttering moths fill this scene’s backdoor screens
tendering an irresistible invitation to attack
in search of a crack in the curtains’ narrow track.

While chance packs another perishable skull
tight enough to subsist, in the spiritual
shimmering lushness, of dawn’s faithful light.
 
The tears diminish in the theft of a wilting heart
bent willows seeking flesh, have wrought
every salt-sprinkled drop on our pillows;

To slit the silent throat of sacrifice,
tossed the herded cross, lost in prayers petition.
But it was broken breath,

following the trail to the bitter end
of this deep ravine, winding its way
south of Heaven…

****

Proof of Perfection

Do you ever stare at your finger
wonder,
if it could pull the trigger
or write the warrant
for the Judge’s execution

Imagine
when a melting word
had burnished the herded cross

His head, was wrapped in nettle
from ear to ear
But,
who really smeared the bloody spear
all over the doormat of our existence?

whispered questions
what is this shimmering silence,
this twisted blow, we’ll never know

the pagan eclipse, locked us all
out of an over-exercised church door
falling through the floor
unsure of our homeland,
of a hollow reed
still singing a satisfactory song

long after its death
dancing among the barbed smiles
that stole our breath…

Wednesday Random Song: “Brighten the Corner Where You Are”


Ina Duley Ogdon was a Midwestern wife and mother and Sunday School teacher during the early 20th century. Ogdon had ambitions of becoming a preacher but family responsibilities intervened. Her poem “Brighten the Corner Where You Are” was written in 1912 while she was caring for her sick father. Set to music by Charles H. Gabriel, the tune became a nationwide hit after evangelist Billy Sunday made it a staple of his revival meetings.

I first heard it this week on Enlighten 34, the Southern gospel station on XM Radio, in a lively rendition by The Statesmen which I wasn’t able to find on YouTube. (It’s featured on this album.) Instead, enjoy this old-school version by the Criterion Quartet:

This interesting 10-minute video tells the story of Ina’s life and the inspiration for the song, as well as its subsequent cultural reception.

1. Do not wait until some deed of greatness you may do,
Do not wait to shed your light afar;
To the many duties ever near you now be true,
Brighten the corner where you are.

* Refrain:
Brighten the corner where you are!
Brighten the corner where you are!
Someone far from harbor you may guide across the bar;
Brighten the corner where you are!

2. Just above are clouded skies that you may help to clear,
Let not narrow self your way debar;
Though into one heart alone may fall your song of cheer,
Brighten the corner where you are.

3. Here for all your talent you may surely find a need,
Here reflect the bright and Morning Star;
Even from your humble hand the Bread of Life may feed,
Brighten the corner where you are.

Lyrics courtesy of the Timeless Truths free online library. (Click the “midi” music note icon on their website to hear the tune.)