It's April & that means National Poetry Month! Ocean Vuong Reads with Camille Rankine at the Poetry Center on April 6th, 7pm!

Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong

Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry.
Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother’s shadow falls.
Here’s the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red tripwire.
Don’t worry. Just call it horizon
& you’ll never reach it.
Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not
a lifeboat. Here’s the man
whose arms are wide enough to gather
your leaving. & here the moment,
just after the lights go out, when you can still see
the faint torch between his legs.
How you use it again & again
to find your own hands.
You asked for a second chance
& are given a mouth to empty into.
Don’t be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer. Ocean. Ocean,
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. Here’s the room with everyone in it.
Your dead friends passing
through you like wind
through a wind chime. Here’s a desk
with the gimp leg & a brick
to make it last. Yes, here’s a room
so warm & blood-close,
I swear, you will wake—& mistake these walls
for skin.

Ocean Vuong

To the first day of March and wide open prairie ~

To make a prairie (1755)

To make a prairie it takes one clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Emily Dickinson
1830-1886

Poem for V-Day!

You, Therefore

You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:
if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost
radio, may never be an oil painting or
Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are
a concordance of person, number, voice,
and place, strawberries spread through your name
as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me
of some spring, the waters as cool and clear
(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),
which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:
and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium
or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star
in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving
from its earthwards journeys, here where there is
no snow (I dreamed the snow was you,
when there was snow), you are my right,
have come to be my night (your body takes on
the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep
becomes you): and you fall from the sky
with several flowers, words spill from your mouth
in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees
and seas have flown away, I call it
loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,
and free of any eden we can name

Reginald Shepherd
(1963-2008)

International Clash Day on my birthday! What could be better? RESIST and Know Your Rights!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lfInFVPkQs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15FfWj11uys

Happy 15th Birthday, Micah!

Elemental Phoenix

Ruler of the Scranamals

Look in the sky
it is a rare sighting of the
Elemental Phoenix

He flies around the sky with
magic wings
He searches around a forest
with his powers

He loves to play with squirrels

At the end of the day
he takes a nap or two
and does it all over again

Micah Bernard

(Age 10)

Here's to the celebration of the olfactory and the circular nature of memory and desire ~

Oracle of flame

How many lives

Echo within

The coiled histories

of

One

Rose

~ ~

At the lip of amber

Wet ink

Pools within the

Circular architecture

Of memory

Becoming

Aqueous

~ ~

Oval-Eye

Rosette of protection

House

The private

And resinous

Library of the soul

~ ~

After years

At sea

Arriving

On land

Touch me…

Almost

~ ~

To look back

One last time

Desire and memory

Ask us

To trust

Without knowing

~ ~

Quivering 

Leaf to leaf

Gather the

"Immeasurable endurance"

Of

Desire

Elizabeth Salper

This poetic concoction was inspired by a La Curie perfume

Artisan perfume ~ Tucson, Arizona

"Immeasurable endurance" from the poem The Roses XXVI

by Rainer Maria Rilke

After election heartbreak and outrage: 3 poems and a safety pin to offer my teenage son ~

When the Roses Speak, I Pay Attention

"As long as we are able to  
be extravagant we will be
hugely and damply
extravagant. Then we will drop
foil by foil to the ground. This 
is our unalterable task, and we do it
joyfully."

And they went on, "Listen,
the heart-shackles are not, as you think
death, illness, pain,
unrequited hope, not loneliness, but

lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety,
selfishness."

Their fragrance all the while rising
from their blind bodies, making me 
spin with joy."

Mary Oliver

  ***

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from  my children.
Life is short, and I've shortened mine 
in a thousand delicious ill-advised ways,
I'll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that's a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones:  This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

Maggie Smith
from Waxwing

  ***

Gate A-4

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement: “If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.” Well— one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help,” said the flight agent. “Talk to her . What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly. “Shu-dow-a, shu-bid-uck, habibti? Stani schway, min fadlick, shu-bit-se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late, who is picking you up? Let’s call him.”

We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies— little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts— from her bag and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single traveler declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo— we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

Then the airline broke out free apple juice and two little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they were covered with powdered sugar too. And I noticed my new best friend— by now we were holding hands— had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate— once the crying of confusion stopped— seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

Naomi Shihab Nye