Ma Yongbo: Three poems translated from Chinese
The horse drawn cart hasn’t gone far, it will carry away
the love of the land, and one or two shy grasshoppers.
At this moment, her hanging sickle
reflects the white light of winter arising in the distance.
Doug Anderson: The Wind Comes Up
…the soldiers
dismount and go
house to house,
come back out and sit
in the shade.
Kari Gunter-Seymour: To the Woman in Walmart Who Was Dancing to Shakira in the Pots and Pans Aisle
my own feet beginning to slide
and shuck, drawn into that vortex,
adding my own brand
of Arriba, Arriba to the mix
“Walking in Beauty”: Closing Prayer from the Navajo Blessing Way Ceremony
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.
James Crews: Losing Heart | Poem and reflection
You might be
driving to work one stormy morning,
scowling at every car that passes you
when it happens again—that sudden
leap in the chest as you see the rain
Beth Copeland: Pyre
Enough wood for a bonfire, I say, recalling the night
we torched a dead Christmas tree, drinking white wine and dancing
around the leaping blaze and the dark morning I burned your love
letters in a metal trash can outside, drunk and weeping, liar! liar!
David Kirby: Sex and Candy
Candy is to children what sex is to us, because when
you were a child, candy is what you thought about every
waking moment.
Diane di Prima: Revolutionary Letters
endless as the sea, not separate, we die
a million times a day, we are born
a million times, each breath life and death:
get up, put on your shoes, get
started, someone will finish
Chard deNiord: On Such An Evening
everything just gets sweeter as I sit under
the maple after working all day in the garden
and listen to the music of silence disguised
as birdsong and breeze in the overstory
Rachel Hadas: Two Poems
One sight that sticks with me is the tail
of a blue phoenix soaring on a tile
from fifteenth-century Turkey. I couldn’t draw it
worth a damn, but gazed until I knew it.
I used the pencil in my hand to see.
Kurt Brown: High Diver
Now she pivots like a dancer, gripping the board
with her toes, and rises as it quivers with her weight
then settles again. She waits until it stops,
until she gathers herself up to balance there,
tall and undeniable, her back to us in the withering light.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Doors Where I Have Knocked
Door of forgiveness that’s never locked.
Door of dreams. Door of god.
Door of contentment without a knob
that can only be entered with empty hands.
Sean Sexton: Herculaneum (audio and painting email to Robert Cording)
I’m reading Basho’s “Backroads to the North Country,” on my trip, an old, crumbling Penguin classics series that includes four separate journeys and a great intro. He conveys at one point how grateful he is to be on the road, Mt Fuji far away back home in Edo, so he needn’t ponder it in his life for awhile.
Dion O’Reilly: Subject C, the Numinous, and Ellen Bass’s ‘Gate C-22’
“…the pure pleasure of the numinous poem, which, in the final analysis, might contain our personal myths, successful in the way myths are successful, in their transmission of complexity, magic, and the paradoxes of this painfully-beautiful world.”
