History

Linda Hogan

This is the word that is always bleeding.

You didn't think this

until your country changes and when it thunders

you search your own body

for a missing hand or leg.

In one country, there are no bodies shown,

lies are told

and they keep hidden the weeping children on dusty streets.

But I do remember once

a woman and a child in beautiful blue clothing

walking over a dune, spreading a green cloth,

drinking nectar with mint and laughing

beneath a sky of clouds from the river

near the true garden of Eden.

Now another country is breaking

this holy vessel

where stone has old stories

and the fire creates clarity in the eyes of a child

who will turn it to hate one day.

We are so used to it now,

this country where we do not love enough,

that country where they do not love enough,

and that.

We do not need a god by any name

nor do we need to fall to our knees or cover ourselves,

enter a church or a river,

only do we need to remember what we do

to one another, it is so fierce

what any of our fathers may do to a child

what any of our brothers or sisters do to nonbelievers,

how we try to discover who is guilty

by becoming guilty,

because history has continued

to open the veins of the world

more and more

always in its search

for something gold.

An American Sunrise

Joy Harjo

1951 –

We were running out of breath, as we ran out to meet ourselves. We

Were surfacing the edge of our ancestors’ fights, and ready to Strike.

It was difficult to lose days in the Indian bar if you were Straight.

Easy if you played pool and drank to remember to forget. We

Made plans to be professional—and did. And some of us could Sing

When we drove to the edge of the mountains, with a drum. We

Made sense of our beautiful crazed lives under the starry stars. Sin

Was invented by the Christians, as was the Devil, we sang. We

Were the heathens, but needed to be saved from them: Thin

Chance. We knew we were all related in this story, a little Gin

Will clarify the dark, and make us all feel like dancing. We

Had something to do with the origins of blues and jazz

I argued with the music as I filled the jukebox with dimes in June,

Forty years later and we still want justice. We are still America. We.

RANDOM ACTS OF POETRY DAY

"Imagine turning a corner on your daily walk and finding a haiku chalked on the sidewalk, or discovering a short verse tucked into a library book."

https://nationaldaycalendar.com/celebrations/random-acts-of-poetry-day-first-wednesday-of-october

You Go to My Head

BY Carole Boston Weatherford

I sang my songs so much

that they becamethe soundtrack for my dreams,

the melody of my moods,

a room I lived in,and a balm for my wounds. 

I sang my songs enoughto know them backwardand forward, enoughto wonder if they could lift mefrom hometown hauntsto center stage. 

I’d sung my songs enough

to think I could take on

Baltimore’s best talent

at the Harlem Theatre

Amateur Hourand maybe even win. 

If you sing a song enough,it can go to your head that way.

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

Wallace Stevens

1879 –1955

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

“The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens 

The Honey Alone

Bees come from out of the sun, God’s fevered eye. Any simple child can see. Tears are gifts from the mother of God, as are memory and imagination, as are seeing, hearing, breathing, thinking, and feeling. There’s nothing but gifts on this poor earth. But only the wise child realizes, after drowsing among the flowers, wasting an entire summer of his best hours, the bees are his earliest ancestors, and he is their honey-loving, venom-bearing, six-sided-dreaming, I Ching–reciting descendant and fellow minion of the sun, he with his pollen-dusted eyelashes and skullcap, he with his maps legible only to other murmuring, winged, round-bellied alchemists. As for the wicked child who can’t remember what Virgil said about the vanishing of the bees, he may have to witness sweetness disappear from the earth in his lifetime and never know why. And what about the child who doesn’t even know what questions to ask? Tell him bees feed on sweat running down the ribs and inner arms and thighs of the mother of God, and on Her tears, to make the honey which alone satisfies the daily hunger of God. Tell him, Her tears are for us to cry.

In Lieu of Flowers

BY Carolyn Forché

Appears

We weren’t told as children there is no going back.

But we are allowed to keep with us a few times and places 

thin as tissue paper in the mind.

Finding these in the mind is like moving through a forest at night.

We do this alone in our rooms in the dark by light of an open door.

Then a thought comes like a bird landing on a blanket.

Someone else’s papa coming toward us with his belt off.

“Ever since he came home from the war,” we would say of him.

While we children hid in the holes we had dug in the fields, 

in the houses we built in the trees.

This is a house of spider-lace and blankets filled with down 

from geese that once flew in the clouds.

In the carpenter’s atelier, there is the beginning of a boat that will 

someday move along the river.

It will take on water in the rain but will never sink. 

It will know what it is doing among the reeds. 

It will sail even in a heavy dew. As light a river as that.

Wondrous to be floating in a boat we have made from oaks sealed with pitch.

Wondrous to think that we are all floating in a boat we ourselves have made.

Our river, glazed with light, moves more swiftly for some than others.

It is not bottomless. Not without a vast sea into which it will vanish at the end.

Strange, after so many centuries, to be alive at the end.