I leave you to your ceremony of grieving
Which is also of celebration
Given when an honored humble one
Leaves behind a trail of happiness
In the dark of human tribulation.
None of us is above the other
In this story of forever.
Though we follow that red road home,
one behind another.
There is a light breaking through the storm
And it is buffalo hunting weather.
There you can see your mother.
She is busy as she was ever—
She holds up a new jingle dress, for her youngest beloved daughter.
And for her special son, a set of finely beaded gear.
All for that welcome home dance,
The most favorite of all—
when everyone finds their way back together
to dance, eat and celebrate.
And tell story after story
of how they fought and played
in the story wheel
and how no one
was ever really lost at all.
~~ 'The Story Wheel' by Joy Harjo from 'An American Sunrise'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poem @poetry

Once we had the world backwards and forwards:
—it was so small it fit in two clasped hands,
so simple that a smile did to describe it,
so common, like old truths echoing in prayers.

History didn’t greet us with triumphal fanfares:
—it flung dirty sand into our eyes.
Ahead of us lay long roads leading nowhere,
poisoned wells and bitter bread.

Our wartime loot is knowledge of the world,
—it is so large it fits in two clasped hands,
so hard that a smile does to describe it,
so strange, like old truths echoing in prayers.
~~ by Wisława Szymborska from 'Map', trans. Clare Cavanagh & Stanisław Barańczak (an early poem from the 1940s)

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

“The blow fell from the most unlikely corner…”

So might begin the account
of life’s origins on earth
or any other irreversible event
~~ 'Blow' by Ryszard Krynicki, trans. by Clare Cavanagh from 'Magnetic Point'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry #books

No longer at home in the world
and I imagine
never again at home in the world.

Not in cemeteries or bogs
churning with bullfrogs.
Or outside the old pickle shop.
I once made myself
at home on that street,

and the street after that,
and the boulevard. The avenue.
I don’t need to explain it to you.

It seems wrong
to curl now within the confines
of a poem. You can’t hide
from what you made
inside what you made

or so I’m told.

~~ 'Curl' by Diane Seuss from 'Modern Poetry'
#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry #books

Checkout, by Caroline Bird

#VerseThursday

If i can't do
what i want to do
then my job is to not
do what i don't want
to do
It's not the same thing
but it's the best i can
do

If i can't have
what i want...then
my job is to want
what i've got
and be satisfied
that at least there
is something more to want

Since i can't go
where i need
to go... then i must... go
where the signs point
though always understanding
parallel movement
isn't lateral

When i can't express
what i really feel
i practice feeling
what i can express
and none of it is equal
I know
but that's why mankind
alone among the animals
learns to cry
-- 'Choices' by Nikki Giovanni

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

(Art credit: Natalia Esanu)

—Early September

scatters beneath
the box elder

like a spilled
alphabet

-- by Robin Walter from 'Little Mercy'
#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

They have carried the mahogany chair and the cane rocker
out under the lilac bush,
and my father and mother darkly sit there, in black clothes.
Our clapboard house stands fast on its hill,
my doll lies in her wicker pram
gazing at western Massachusetts.
This was our world.
I could remake each shaft of grass
feeling its rasp on my fingers,
draw out the map of every lilac leaf
or the net of veins on my father's 
grief-tranced hand. 

Out of my head, half-bursting,
still filling, the dream condenses--
shadows, crystals, ceilings, meadows, globes of dew.
Under the dull green of the lilacs, out in the light
carving each spoke of the pram, the turned porch-pillars,
under high early-summer clouds,
I am Effie, visible and invisible,
remembering and remembered.

-- 'Mourning Picture' by Adrienne Rich (written in response to Elmer's painting)
#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

(Art credit: Edwin Romanzo Elmer)

I read your poetry once more,
poems written by a rich man, knowing all,
and by a beggar, homeless,
an emigrant, alone.

You always wanted to go
beyond poetry, above it, soaring,
and also lower, to where our region
begins, modest and timid.

Sometimes your tone
transforms us or a moment,
we believe—truly—
that every day is sacred,

that poetry—how to put it?—
makes life rounder,
fuller, prouder, unashamed
of perfect formulation.

But evening arrives,
I lay my book aside,
and the city’s ordinary din resumes—
somebody coughs, someone cries and curses.

-- 'Reading Milosz' by Adam Zagajewski, trans. Clare Cavanagh from 'The FSG Poetry Anthology' edit. by Jonathan Galassi, Robyn Creswell
#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

(Art credit: Giancario Manneschi)

Rain has eaten 1/4 of me

yet I believe
against all evidence

these raindrops
are my letters of recommendation

here is a man worth falling on.
-- 'Letters' by Ilya Kaminsky from 'You Are Here', edit. by Ada Limón

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air--
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat--
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.
-- 'Heat' by H.D.

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @bookstodon

(Art credit: Twyla Gettert)

At thirty-six
I finally stopped wanting to shower—
a caricature,
convinced I couldn’t do that right,
either.

#VerseThursday

I expect you’ve seen the footage: elephants,
finding the bones of one of their own kind
dropped by the wayside, picked clean by scavengers
and the sun, then untidily left there,
decide to do something about it.

But what, exactly? They can’t, of course,
reassemble the old elephant magnificence;
they can’t even make a tidier heap. But they can
hook up bones with their trunks and chuck them
this way and that way. So they do.

And their scattering has an air
of deliberate ritual, ancient and necessary.
Their great size, too, makes them the very
embodiment of grief, while the play of their trunks
lends sprezzatura.

Elephants puzzling out
the anagram of their own anatomy,
elephants at their abstracted lamentations—
may their spirit guide me as I place
my own sad thoughts in new, hopeful arrangements.
-- 'A Scattering' by Christopher Reid from 'The FSG Poetry Anthology'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

Called after summer and the deep river,
there among us cool
and shallow others,
when I said we are all kings, you
shook your fierce kingly head, denying.
No kings any more! you said.
I keep seeing what you were saying
and that you led
clear free of rule
to our own where,
across the river in the summer,
that far shore,
nobody ever, nobody ever
singing of war.
-- 'For June Jordan' by Ursula K. Le Guin from her Collected Poems

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

You give me cloudberry jam from Lapland,
Bog amber, snow-line tidbits, scrumptious
Cloudberries sweetened slowly by the cold,
And costly enough for cloudberry wars
(Diplomatic wars, my dears).
Imagine us
Among the harvesters, keeping our distance
In sphagnum fields on the longest day
When dawn and dusk like frustrated lovers
Can kiss, legend has it, once a year, Ah,
Kisses at our age, cloudberry kisses.
--'Cloudberries' by Michael Longley

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

(Art credit: Elisaveta Ilieva)

make small steps.
in this wild place
there are signs of life
everywhere.
sharp spaces, too:
the slip of a rain-glazed rock
against my searching feet.
small steps, like prayers—
each one a hope exhaled
into the trees. please,
let me enter. please, let me
leave whole.
there are, too, the tiny sounds
of faraway birds. the safety
in their promise of song.
the puddle forming, finally,
after summer rain.
the golden butterfly
against the cave-dark.
maybe there are angels here, too—
what else can i call the crown of light
atop the leaves?
what else can i call
my footsteps forward,
small, small, sure?
-- 'Lullaby for the Grieving' by Ashley M. Jones from 'You Are Here'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

Don’t call it an affliction—
call it affection. I’d stay under
the sun all day, never hiding
under a copse of trees if I knew

I wouldn’t burn, but isn’t it
more accurate—that I burn
for the sun? To be pulled to the light
is nothing to be ashamed of: look

at flowers, butterflies, seals lounging
on a rock. Rhubarb sings in dark gardens
but truth be told it sounds more like
a wet cracking and popping. I think

it secretly counts the hours till it can turn
towards the sun again. For me, the sun
has always been easy to love, as easy
as it is to love whatever small light

bees bestow on fallen leaves—easy
to love the light they give just before
they crawl into a honey-hungry sleep,
just before the first fall of snow.
-- 'Heliophilia' by Aimee Nezhukumatathil from 'You Are Here' ed. by Ada Limón

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

(Art credit: Zakhar Shevchuk)

for #VerseThursday, here’s another poem from last year’s chapbook

saw this poem recently and remembered that I haven't done a #VerseThursday in a while

In Those Years, by Adrienne Rich

2 years ago, almost to the day, I posted this:

#VerseThursday

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Cold toilet seats away from home are ok with me, I can imagine no recent sitters,
How about you?