Happy World Poetry Day!!

Oh, what a fine day indeed! It's almost spring (although you wouldn't know it in Finland), health care reform is on the verge back home and it's World Poetry Day. As such, it's only proper that I present you with some terrific poetry to bring the day's festivities into full swing. I'll post a few gems from my most favorite poets, and then you can peruse them at your leisure.

**Note: For some reason, Blogger is being difficult...Olds's and Collins's poems are not formatting correctly. However, both of these poems can be found in their correct form on poets.org.

The First Night

The worst thing about death must be
the first night.
—Juan Ramón Jiménez

Before I opened you, Jiménez,
it never occurred to me that day and night
would continue to circle each other in the ring of death,

but now you have me wondering
if there will also be a sun and a moon
and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set

then repair, each soul alone,
to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.
Or will the first night be the only night,

a darkness for which we have no other name?
How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,
How impossible to write it down.

This is where language will stop,
the horse we have ridden all our lives
rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff.

The word that was in the beginning
and the word that was made flesh—
those and all the other words will cease.

Even now, reading you on this trellised porch,
how can I describe a sun that will shine after death?
But it is enough to frighten me

into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon,
to sunlight bright on water
or fragmented in a grove of trees,

and to look more closely here at these small leaves,
these sentinel thorns,
whose employment it is to guard the rose

~ Billy Collins

Voices

Our voices race to the towers, and up beyond

the atmosphere, to the satellite,

slowly turning, then back down

to another tower, and cell. Quincy,

Toi, Honoree, Sarah, Dorianne,

Galway. When Athena Elizalex calls,

I tell her I'm missing Lucille's dresses,

and her shoes, and Elizabeth says "And she would say,

"Damn! I do look good!'" After we

hang up, her phone calls me again

from inside her jacket, in the grocery store

with her elder son, eleven, I cannot

hear the words, just part of the matter

of the dialogue, it's about sugar, I am

in her pocket like a spirit. Then I dream it —

looking at an illuminated city

from a hill, at night, and suddenly

the lights go out — like all the stars

gone out. "Well, if there is great sex

in heaven," we used to say, "or even just

sex, or one kiss, what's wrong

with that?!" Then I'm dreaming a map of the globe, with

bright pinpoints all over it —

in the States, the Caribbean, Latin America,

in Europe, and in Africa —

everywhere a poem of hers is being

read. Small comfort. Not small

to the girl who curled against the wall around the core

of her soul, keeping it alive, with long

labor, then unfolded into the hard truths, the

lucid beauty, of her song.

~ Sharon Olds

When the Storm is Forgotten 

When the storm remains distant
We are heroes of complacency
Puffed chest and swollen pride
We hate ourselves in ways
Only the deepest love could recognize

When the storm remains distant
There is no such thing as us
There is only dollar and dynamite
Gunpowder and fiery God
The churches are filled with women and children
The men pray only in case of emergency
We worship a foreign truth
And only death will stamp our passport

When the storm remains distant
There is no afterlife
Most die unborn
Most live unloved
Disappointment takes on new names and costumes
The future is stillborn and disfigured
The womb becomes an airtight safe
Darkness swallows darkness

When the storm remains distant
Nothing is as is
Songs are opiates
Sleep is the burial ground of dreams
Happiness is a lie
Sex is where love is not

When the storm remains distant
We are unreminded and dare to forget
School is a fashion show
Violence is comfort food
Family is nothing
And nothing is real

When the storm remains distant
Niggas are free to be Niggas
Niggers, Black, you name it

Anything but one thing
Everything but nothing
Even with a shitload of platinum
Wrapped around his neck
Like a southern tree gone petrified
Screw face pearly gate-mouth
Tangled nectar of the stars

When the storm remains distant
Stars are retired drug dealers nicknamed God
Rapists with pretty voices
And anyone but anyone who shines

When the storm remains distant
The sun is flawless in its magnitude
The heavens reflect breath of angels
The people bask in themselves
The storm is forgotten

When the storm is forgotten
The waters, 'though they rise,
Fail to threaten
The people march backwards
from ashes to ashen,
Whiplash, car crash, Cash Money,
Some Niggas eat diamonds for breakfast
Pursue cheap labor, Enslave God

When the storm is forgotten
Poets are meteorologists
Behold, the farmers almanac
The sheep wake up and congregate
The litany begins

When the storm is forgotten
The struggle ends

May the storm never be forgotten.


~ Saul Williams
Famous


The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,   
which knew it would inherit the earth   
before anybody said so.   

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds   
watching him from the birdhouse.   

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.   

The idea you carry close to your bosom   
is famous to your bosom.   

The boot is famous to the earth,   
more famous than the dress shoe,   
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it   
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.   

I want to be famous to shuffling men   
who smile while crossing streets,   
sticky children in grocery lines,   
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,   
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,   
but because it never forgot what it could do.  
  

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

St. Francis and the Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow. 

~ Galway Kinnell

The Great Fires

Love is apart from all things.
Desire and excitement are nothing beside it.
It is not the body that finds love.
What leads us there is the body.
What is not love provokes it.
What is not love quenches it.
Love lays hold of everything we know.
The passions which are called love
also change everything to a newness
at first. Passion is clearly the path
but does not bring us to love.
It opens the castle of our spirit
so that we might find the love which is
a mystery hidden there.
Love is one of many great fires.
Passion is a fire made of many woods,
each of which gives off its special odor
so we can know the many kinds
that are not love. Passion is the paper
and twigs that kindle the flames
but cannot sustain them. Desire perishes
because it tries to be love.
Love is eaten away by appetite.
Love does not last, but it is different
from the passions that do not last.
Love lasts by not lasting.
Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire
for his sins. Love allows us to walk
in the sweet music of our particular heart.

~ Jack Gilbert