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.
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.
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.”
Jordan Smith: These Days
The danger of elegy is that it just tells us what we already know: we lose and suffer and become the subject of the loss and suffering of others. Liam had no patience for what he called the “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed” school of poetry.
Charles Harper Webb: Bad Dog
Bad Dog licks killers’ bloody hands,
leaps with joy for rapists, fawns at politicians’
crooked feet. “He’s an awful judge
of character,” the owner tells kind-hearted
strangers who scuttle past
Cynthia Kaufman: Jewish Safety and the Weaponization of Antisemitism
The conflation of criticisms of Israel with antisemitism makes Jews less safe.
Baruch November: After Bracha
A blessing for just being able
to arise in early pink-blue light.
A blessing for when lightning veins
a cloud or strikes the oak into flames.
A blessing for when the earth quakes
Byron Hoot: The Mind in the Wind Seeing Where Things Lie
What I need are nights
of deep sleep; this riding the wind is not as easy
as it would seem to be.
Octavia E. Butler: Kindness eases change / Love quiets fear
In order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn.
Barbara Hamby: Mockingbird on the Buddha
The mockingbird on the Buddha says, Where’s my seed,
you Jezebel, where’s the sunshine in my blue sky,
where’s the Hittite princess, Pharaoh’s temple, where’s the rain
for the misery I love so much?
Chana Bloch: Memento Mori
Unblessed in a downburst, I lost
my leafy summer, my lovely,
my crest, my crown.
Robert Cording: New Morning
Always that moment
when I wake up
in the dark
before dawn
and the first birds
Baron Wormser: What Nurtures Us, What Diminishes Us
Poetry is the remembrance and avowal of loss and is accordingly pushed aside.
Amy Lowell: Lilacs
The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs
Peer restlessly through the light and shadow
Of all Springs.
