like all the other women survivors,
me, walking free from the monster.
…bombs
explode in streets, on rooftops, through windows,
doorways. Statues have toppled.
The moon, lately, was a celebrity, full
and a few miles closer than usual, enough
to bring three neighbors outside near midnight.
now that I don’t have sex every night or carry two fat boys,
one on each hip, up small mountains,
I have to go to exercise class
When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,
Spare us all word of the weapons…
Wendell Berry, a quiet and humble man, has become an outspoken advocate for revolution. He urges immediate action as he mourns how America has turned its back on the land and rejected Jeffersonian principles of respect for the environment and sustainable agriculture.
No is not nothing. When everything has been taken from you, no is all you have left.
we’re afraid to look deprivation
in the eye, resent admitting our own dumb luck
Buncha monkeys
try to get along
where Route 100 meets School Street,
two cows graze.
When she closes her eyes, she sees the room’s ceiling
fill first with billowing shadows, then a pinpoint of
light that blooms into a blue-black shining, then
the brilliant blue of coronal plasma that could
be the widening eye of God.
If you cut off your right hand and bury it in the garden,
it will grow into a little daughter with wings instead of arms.
I’ll say it again and say it differently
because the horror of war must never be forgotten.
The boy hid beneath the stairs
when the Good Guys came to kill him.
Yusef Komunyakaa reads his poem “Facing It” about seeing the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial wall in Washington, D.C. through his eyes as a war veteran and contemporary poet.