Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Why I Stay Up Late Walking
Easier to be the one
who is gathered into
the field of darkness
by night’s great hands
Video: Naomi Shihab Nye reads her poem Gate A-4
I heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately.”
Jeffrey Harrison: Stalinesque
We don’t recognize our own country,
and our words don’t carry more than ten feet,
but the snippets that can still be made out
are all about the Emperor Felonius.
H.D: The Flowering of the Rod
O, give me burning blue
and brittle burnt sea-weed
above the tide-line,
as I stand, still unsatisfied,
under the long shadow-on-snow of the pine.
Edwin Arlington Robinson: Eros Turannos
She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him
Toi Derricotte: Not Forgotten
I love the way the black ants use their dead.
They carry them off like warriors on their steel
backs.
Majid Naficy: Ruthless Gods
I detest the world
Which has given its heart
To ruthless gods
Barbara Crooker: Cathedrale Notre-Dame de Paris
Nearly fifty years ago,
in the wreckage of my first marriage, I lit
a tall white taper, prayed that my husband
would return to himself, keep our family intact,
a prayer that disappeared in the dark vaults
James Crews: Two Poems
We keep going back to the rocky beach,
searching for the glint of sea glass
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Wilding
I crave it, this scraping away
of everything that isn’t
limb-thrash and lung-gasp
and skin-scream and heart-bang
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: The Parting
It was November outside–
the leaf-colored sofa inside
strangely vivid in the flickering
light
Betsy Sholl: Liminal
In Dante, some stanzas so blaze with light,
reading them, you feel your pupils constrict.
It’s like walking along the shore, ocean
flashing on your left, sun straight ahead
flooding your eyes
Fleur Adcock: Weathering
I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty,
nor anything but pretty enough to satisfy
men who need to be seen with passable women.
Sandy Solomon: Grief
I move back and forth
down the supermarket aisles,
the way I move back and forth
through grief’s famous stages.
