Poetry Month

As Poetry Month comes to a close, I thought I'd share a couple more poems I got in my inbox by signing up for Poem A Day. Most were actually pretty heavy and I didn't really "get" them. But I'm glad I was exposed to them nonetheless. After you read these, do me a favor and head over to Willikat. She shared a couple of her personal poems here, and they're fabulous.

Death Barged In
by Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

In his Russian greatcoat
slamming open the door
with an unpardonable bang,
and he has been here ever since.

He changes everything,
rearranges the furniture,
his hand hovers
by the phone;
he will answer now, he says;
he will be the answer.

Tonight he sits down to dinner
at the head of the table
as we eat, mute;
later, he climbs into bed
between us.

Even as I sit here,
he stands behind me
clamping two
colossal hands on my shoulders
and bends down
and whispers to my neck,
From now on,
you write about me.

Terezin *
by Taije Silverman

* a transfer [concentration] camp in the Czech Republic

We rode the bus out, past fields of sunflowers
that sloped for miles, hill after hill of them blooming.

The bus was filled with old people.
On their laps women held loaves of freshly baked bread.
Men slept in their seats wearing work clothes.

You stared out the window beside me. Your eyes
were so hard that you might have been watching the glass.

Fields and fields of sunflowers.

Arriving we slowed on the cobblestone walkway.
Graves looked like boxes, or houses from high up.

On a bench teenage lovers slouched in toward each other.
Their backs formed a shape like a seashell.
You didn't want to go inside.

But the rooms sang. Song like breath, blown
through spaces in skin.

The beds were wide boards stacked up high on the walls.
The glass on the door to the toilet was broken.
I imagined nothing.

You wore your black sweater and those dark sunglasses.
You didn't look at me.

The rooms were empty, and the courtyard was empty,
and the sunlight on cobblestone could have been water,
and I think even when we are here we are not here.

The courtyard was flooded with absence.
The tunnel was crowded with light.
Like a throat. Like a—

In a book I read how at its mouth they played music,
some last piece by Wagner or Mozart or Strauss.

I don't know why. I don't know
who walked through the tunnel or who played or what finally
they could have wanted. I don't know where the soul goes.

Your hair looked like wheat. It was gleaming.

Nearby on the hillside a gallows leaned slightly.
What has time asked of it? Nights. Windstorms.

Your hair looked like fire, or honey.
You didn't look at me.

Grass twisted up wild, lit gold all around us.
We could have been lost somewhere, in those funny hills.

And the ride back—I don't remember.
Why was I alone? It was night, then. It was still morning.

But the fields were filled with dead sunflowers.
Blooms darkened to brown, the stalks bowed.
And the tips dried to husks that for miles kept reaching.
Those dreamless sloped fields of traveling husks.

Poem A Day

Since it's National Poetry Month, I did sign up for A Poem A Day. After some of the comments left on my poetry post from earlier this month, I had to blog this poem I received last week. A couple comments were made in reference to feeling dumb when reading poetry. I admitted too, that sometimes I don't know what I'm reading about when it comes to poetry. This poem is a perfect response - and I totally understood it. :)

How to Read a Poem: Beginner's Manual
by Pamela Spiro Wagner

First, forget everything you have learned,
that poetry is difficult,
that it cannot be appreciated by the likes of you,
with your high school equivalency diploma,
your steel-tipped boots,
or your white-collar misunderstandings.

Do not assume meanings hidden from you:
the best poems mean what they say and say it.

To read poetry requires only courage
enough to leap from the edge
and trust.

Treat a poem like dirt,
humus rich and heavy from the garden.
Later it will become the fat tomatoes
and golden squash piled high upon your kitchen table.

Poetry demands surrender,
language saying what is true,
doing holy things to the ordinary.

Read just one poem a day.
Someday a book of poems may open in your hands
like a daffodil offering its cup
to the sun.

When you can name five poets
without including Bob Dylan,
when you exceed your quota
and don't even notice,
close this manual.

National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month (sign up to receive a poem a day in your e-mail), so I thought I'd take this post to honor poetry. I like poems, haikus, rhymes. Sometimes I may not get the deeper meaning, but I enjoy them nonetheless. I used to write little poems when I was younger, but they were teenage poems - nothing to really write home about.

So, I pulled out the Bible of poetry, at least in my opinion, Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. I've read these poems so many times since my childhood; the pages are dogeared to mark my favorites. So I share with you the title poem:

Where the Sidewalk Ends

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow.
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

And from the hubby who is a huge Smashing Pumpkins fan, a poem by Billy Corgan, from Blinking with Fists:

The Follies of Summer

Quicksand, ocean sky
Wondering, don't ask me why or how we got here
We just did
The most eternal sun-drenched kiss is locked in my mind as something I won't miss
Or even try to remember
Summer has come and gone so many times I've lost count
Endless, nameless, marked by time as nothing special
But the warmth is here, you see
In darling soliloquy
Hidden in the costume and fine-boned prose
Under canopies of sheltered light and life
Summer is here and it is all mine

Do you like poetry? Do you have a favorite poet or poem?