Reader's Place Online: April 2020
It’s National Poetry Month again, and here are samplings from some new poetry anthologies to consider:
Black Women for Beginners Pt. 1
Every time a hot comb simmers
we dread. We get hurt so often
we think it’s a nickname.
When we say we remember
we mean hurricane, hunt,
meadow, lust, duty, escape,
settle, mourn, birch, baptism,
tithe, kneel, Sphinx, throat,
offering, animal, deadwood.
We get hurt so often we never
run. Every time we lick our lips
the day obeys and repents.
Glory glory hallelujah.
Hot comb on the stove.
Train tracks in the weeds.
From Magical negro: poems, by Morgan Parker, 2019.
Looking back
Remember me before I was a heap of salt,
the laughing child who seldom did
as she was told or came when she was called,
the merry girl who became Lot’s bride,
the happy woman who loved her wicked city.
Do not remember me with pity.
I saw you plodding on ahead
into the desert of your pitiless faith.
Those springs are dry, that earth is dead.
I looked back, not forward, into death.
Forgiving rains dissolve me, and I come
still disobedient, still happy, home.
From So far so good. Final poems: 2014-2018, by Ursula K. Le Guin, 2018.
My favorite lies
(after Rodgers and Hammerstein)
Muslim festivities on 9/11,
Barring the Russians has screwed the G7,
China makes none of my cheap merchandise;
These are a few of my favorite lies.
Records were smashed at my inauguration,
I nailed Korean denuclearization,
I’ll be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize;
These are a few of my favorite lies.
……
When The Times bites,
When The Post stings,
When I’m feeling sad,
I simply remember my favorite lies
And then I don’t feel so bad.
From Dumpty: The age of Trump in verse, by John Lithgow, 2020.
The Flame
My guitar stood up today
My guitar stood up today
and leaped into my arms to play
a Spanish tune for dancers proud
to stamp their feet and cry aloud
against the fate that bends us down
beneath the thorny bloody crown
of sickness, age, and paranoid
delusions I, for one, cannot avoid
from The flame: Poems notebooks lyrics drawings, by Leonard Cohen, 2018.
BELIEVE, BELIEVE
Believe in this. Young apple seeds,
In blue skies, radiating young breast,
Not in blue-suited insects,
Infesting society’s garments
Believe in the swinging sounds of jazz,
Tearing the night into intricate shreds,
Putting it back together again,
In cool logical patterns,
Not in the sick controllers,
Who created only the Bomb.
Let the voices of dead poets
Ring louder in your ear
Than the screechings mouthed
In mildewed editorials.
Listen to the music of centuries,
Rising above the mushroom time.
From Collected poems of Bob Kaufman, 2019. Edited by Cherkovski et. al.
Compiled by Ina Rimpau