Robert Bernard Hass: Oedipus in Thebes
When he left the palace, the streets were nearly empty
Save for the women wailing at the altar, rending air
With sobs and litanies, the smoke from their incense pots
Thick and fragrant, perfuming the shrouded dead.
Pauletta Hansel: Joy
When we finally sprung my father from the hospital
after days spent staring at the cardio unit’s
cinderblock walls the color of nothing
good, his joy could not be contained.
Rafael Cadenas: Beloved Country
So much of you remains unopened, like music lost inside me.
Country to which I return every time I go broke.
Martha Silano: Poem that Begins at the Core
A mother who lived to peel apples,
bake the most exquisite pies. Suffuse the air
with delicious love. A father gah-gah for fossils,
mummies, cow manure.
George Drew: The Sheryl Crow I Mean (with soundtrack)
the smokin’ hot honey dressed in skin
tight black leather pants and matching jacket
and wielding her six-string and harmonica,
meant Mr. Sin and his sidekicks were for
the moment muzzled
Bhikshuni Anyatara: Out in a Field
Then one morning, there I was, an old woman.
Where had I gotten in all those years on the Path?
That night I slept out in a field, and it rained.
Jose Padua: Green
I love how green moves when I’m
not watching, when I look down to my hands
to steady my direction and find the new
shapes it created when I meet it again with
my sleep deprived eyes.
Kaveh Bassiri: Afterword
In the Quran, God taught Adam the names of all things. Even the angels didn’t know the names. Do we carry the weight of these words with us? Do they hold us responsible?
Elizabeth Jacobson: There are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral
As a child
I combed black rocks of a jetty
prying starfish from pools
Doug Anderson: The Tyrant
The people beat him so badly
that afterward
they could not distinguish him
from the pigs the rebels slaughtered
Barbara E. Young: Blues for the Fisherman
Since the blues ought to be tall birds
wading and wailing
when the sun dies—
let the blues fill its lungs now
Federico García Lorca: New York (Office and Denunciation)
I know there are mountains and eyeglasses
And wisdom. But I didn’t come to see the sky.
I’m here to see the clouded blood,
the blood that sweeps machines over waterfalls
and the soul toward the cobra’s tongue.
Edgar Lee Masters: Archibald Higbie
I loathed you, Spoon River. I tried to rise above you,
I was ashamed of you. I despised you
As the place of my nativity.
David Adès: These Are the Men
Into the lush gardens of their hearts
they took me,
gardens of unexpected flowerings
amid bracken and tangles of vines
