I think this poem is gorgeous: it fills me with such peace and hope. I especially like that he has placed “others like myself” between “plants and animals” and “ships and buildings.” I also think the semicolon, the only one in the poem, is perfectly placed, and the title is perfect, too, sitting as it does atop the poem — and reappearing as its last line.
poetry
“The Mower” (Philip Larkin)
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
“Home”
by Warsan Shire
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbours running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough
the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here.
“Good Bones”
by Maggie Smith
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
October
I will tell you about the naked oak in our yard and about
my dead robin, June, who couldn’t fly south for winter
and about the Cooper’s hawk that swooped down to eat
the poor thing, pecking first at a dull eye, while close by
two cracked eggs, each the size of a large jelly bean,
lay oozing yolk and about the cold sky pulled thin and
plumed across my low horizon and about Hyena, with
his pail full of silver buckshot, who shouted from across
the avenue, “Wanna lick my lollipop, pancake tits?”
while behind him two fat boys cackled, with Br’er
Rabbit, the older by some years, in Daddy’s pink shirt
and about mother leaving for the City, her thin
lips painted plump, and about my gray lunch
congealing in a tin pan that sat on the top rack of a
cold oven and about the canned peaches she dumped
into a tea cup and placed on a shelf in her
refrigerator. But not yet and not here
…
Colder stars
Where do we go from here,
when it is nightfall,
when soon the cold stars will spin,
the moon will die again,
and the marsh peeper
will call out to his coy lover,
who may or may not appear?
Must I beg for that last drink of you,
that spilling grace,
or for the touch of
a cool hand?
Longing can become a dark dog
awakening briefly to an emptied bowl.
If I leave here tonight unwhole,
will a smaller god follow me,
whining,
back home?
Star stuff
A thin, naked
branch scraping
her lacquered nails down
and up the bedroom
window like a pointless
backscratch reminds
me we are the same
star stuff the same
sorrow the same
sackcloth of bones
and wails the same
hunger and heat
we hide from
the one
who says,
“You know we love you. Right?”
…
Alone in her bedroom a young mother shouts,
“Don’t pretend you can’t hear me!” and smirks,
those teeth, front-gapped,
those eyes, dark and empty—
on the walnut nightstand sits
a drained bottle of bourbon,
beneath it an oval
burn mark the size of a
child’s scabbed knee.
…
By the pond a peeper
announces the arrival of
spring, his biology
unhiding a loin-longing
he cannot escape.
…
baby’s bones daddy’s dust
Try to hide sorrow in a dry poem
and all you’ll get is a line arrow
of razzle-dazzle pique
pointing down, down deep,
towards a brown road in
a flat state where the sky there
hangs half dull half billow
and no one gets up before noon
or goes out before the moon
rises over a straw-colored cat
stretched sleepless across
the lid of a metal can half filled
with balled-up paper and gristle scraps.
Baby tried not to cry,
her eyes still bulgy from a ten-day
binge on gin and tears
and sex with an uptown pimp
we’ll call Joe, who promised
a generous wad
of cash each week, a sapphire
ring, a Chevy Impala, a trip
to Acapulco, and back,
plus a condo with deck just outside Coral Gables
in exchange for a lie-down wherever and whenever he said
so. Seemed a better option, by miles,
than a tenement on the lower east side.
While her daddy diddled every big-breasted, boy-hipped secretary he
could get his hands on but married himself off to a little, brittle
chickadee from across the pond, who herself
had a taste for gin and also for Vegas craps
and kidney-shaped pools but not for the small dark girl
who followed her everywhere, nut-scampering and twitchy,
and dogged the silky retriever pup that ate soft sweaters,
then piddled in circles beneath the stairs.
Under a scorching sun they came from far flung
for daddy’s burning, the jackass penguins and their lah-de-dah crows,
but baby’s bones just got tumbled in,
with only a parched girl in black jeans, a lunatic aunt, and a few sparrows looking on.
Someone touches daddy’s coffin and sobs.
I throw a few rose petals into baby’s open grave.
Wondering where the music up and went?
You can still enjoy the music/dance videos after I remove them from the home page. I’ve put them all in one place. Just click on the “music/dance videos” tab at the top of the page — and ta-da. My poems are all in one place, too. Simply click on the “poems” tab, which is to the left of the “prose” tab.
Discernment
A golden eagle glides
down a mountainside & midair
drops the oily serpent
she has been holding in her talons.
This is God telling us to worship the unseen.
A young man with black eyes removes his two shoes,
throws them into the street,
& gets down on his knees.
This is God saying that our fear will be our death.
A husband beats his bride because
she will not sleep in their bed.
This is God telling us our dark thoughts
will create a dark world for our children.
A moth beats its wings against a backdoor screen
& plummets to the pavement, exhausted:
There is no way in or out.
This is not God speaking.
