Waiting for January 21

I found this poem leafing through a book today, and it seemed like an appropriate poem for our current age of anxiety. I don't know what keeps you up at night, but if you are anything like me, it's probably quite a list. This poem is called "Listen" by Charles Simic. It captures the feeling I have about life right now.


Everything about you,
my life, is both
make-believe and real.
We are like a couple
working the night shift
in a bomb factory.


Come quietly, one says
to the other
as he takes her by the hand
and leads her
to a rooftop
overlooking the city.


At this hour, if one listens
long and hard,
one can hear a fire engine
in the distance,
but not the cries for help,


just the silence
growing deeper
at the sight of a small child
leaping out of a window
with its nightclothes on fire.

Lunar Eclipse This Morning

A lunar eclipse this morning
running muddy red to smoke gray
tracked across a black sky
and an earth so dark
that you couldn't see a thing
by looking at it
only by looking near it.

Riding my bike in the morning
is the only time I really feel
in the moment
during the whole day.
I focus on my breathing
and my pedaling
how do my legs feel?
what's in front of me?
That's the way life
should be
all the time.

(Totally cool lunar eclipse photo from TurboSpaz on Flickr.)

There Will Be Music Despite Everything

NPR gave us a wonderful little feature on one of my favorite poets, Jack Gilbert.

Last week, my daughter read a Gilbert poem at her elementary school poetry slam. Hope you like it:

Horses at midnight without a moon
by Jack Gilbert

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
Can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on the top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

Thinking of Walt Whitman

April is National Poetry Month and I am looking for a poem for my daughter to read at her elementary school poetry slam. And I stumbled on a poem by that grand old man of American poetry, Walt Whitman. It's totally not appropriate for the occasion but thought provoking nonetheless, especially the end:

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Not Staying On Top of Things

Today is Texas Independence Day, which I usually celebrate by not celebrating at all. It's usually something along the lines of, "Oh, today is March 2. Texas Independence Day."

Anyway, I wanted to write about Black History Month, not Texas Independence Day, so bear with me. My daughter read the following poem from Robert Hayden poem "Frederick Douglass" at her school assembly. She's a very articulate, confident reader for an 8-year-old, which is why they asked a blonde-haired white girl to read a poem for Black History Month. And this poem is amazing:

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

For a thoughtful examination of this poem, read the Say Something Wonderful Blog.

Escapism

Believe it or not, I have been spending my time hiding from politics as much as possible because the never-ending grind of bad news from the world weighs on me too much.

I’ve tried to spend more time reading poetry and soaking up the beauty. There’s a book -- Poems of the American West -- that I had been avoiding because I figured it wouldn’t amount to any more than Woody Guthrie songs and Indian chants. Well, it’s a little more expansive than that. I found a devastating group of poems from a poet named Joe Bolton that have stayed with me for weeks now. Here’s one:

The Lights at Newport Beach
If there were time for everything
(And there is); if that phosphorescent light
Stunning the Pacific meant anything
(And it does); if all this world of worlds might
Become something more than a museum for something
We have lost (and it will) … but not tonight.
Tonight, love, Newport Beach is simply on fire,
The buildings blazing up under the sky,
The streets running headlong into the sea.
If we were not more than the sum of our desire
(But we’re not); if there were a language I
Could find to get beyond the opacity
Of zero…. But I’m tired of words and all we turn
Away from. I just want to watch it burn.