The Poetry Playground

In the Company of Women

Make me laugh over coffee,
make it a double, make it frothy
so it seethes in our delight.
Make my cup overflow
with your small happiness.
I want to hoot and snort and cackle and chuckle. Let your laughter fill me like a bell.
Let me listen to your ringing and singing
as Billie Holiday croons above our heads.
Sorry, the blues are nowhere to be found.
Not tonight. Not here.
No makeup. No tears.
Only contours. Only curves.
Each sip takes back a pound,
each dry-roasted swirl takes our soul.
Can I have a refill, just one more?
Let the bitterness sink to the bottom of our lives. Let us take this joy to go.

~ January Gill O’Neill

Holding the Light
for Kait Rhoads

Gather up whatever is
glittering in the gutter,
whatever has tumbled
in the waves or fallen
in flames out of the sky,

for it’s not only our
hearts that are broken,
but the heart
of the world as well.
Stitch it back together.

Make a place where
the day speaks to the night
and the earth speaks to the sky.
Whether we created God
or God created us

it all comes down to this:
In our imperfect world
we are meant to repair
and stitch together
what beauty there is, stitch it

with compassion and wire.
See how everything
we have made gathers
the light inside itself
and overflows? A blessing.

~ Stuart Kestenbaum

Every Poem Was a Secret

Every poem was a secret
struggle with himself,
every secret was a struggle,
a handwritten scrawl,
something joyous
or terrible,
a fragmentary
blood-soaked message
wrenched out of his body,
a longing for
some impossible harmony
tucked into a bottle
and tossed off the side of a cliff.
Reckless love poems, shocked elegies
drafted against death
looking for God–
some of them shattered
in desperation
on the rocks below,
but others, like this one,
bobbed away
on surging blue waves
for someone to find them.

~ Edward Hirsch

Since You Asked
(for a friend who asked to be in a poem)

Since you asked, let’s make it dinner
at your house – a celebration
for no reason, which is always
the best occasion. Are you worried
there won’t be enough space, enough food?

But in a poem we can do anything we want.
Look how easy it is to add on rooms, to multiply
the wine and chickens. And while we’re at it
let’s take those trees that died last winter
and bring them back to life.

Things should look pulled together,
and we could use the shade – so even now
they shudder and unfold their bright new leaves.
And now the guests are arriving – everyone
you expected, then others as well:

friends who never became your friends,
the women you didn’t marry, all their children.
And the dead – didn’t I tell you
but they’re always included in these gatherings –
hesitant and shy, they hang back at first

among the blossoming trees.
You have only to say their names,
ask them inside. Everyone will find a place
at your table. What more can I do?
The glasses are filled, the children are quiet.

My friend, it must be time for you to speak.

~ Lawrence Raab

The Grave-Digger
Once, as I was burying one of my dead selves, the grave-digger came by and said to me,
“Of all those who come here to bury, you alone I like.”

Said I, ” You please me exceedingly, but why do you like me?”

“Because, said he, “They come weeping and go weeping —
you only come laughing and go laughing.”

~ Kahlil Gibran

In Praise of My Bed

At last I can be with you!
The grinding hours
since I left your side!
The labor of being fully human,
working my opposable thumb,
talking, and walking upright.
Now I have unclasped
unzipped, stepped out of.
Husked, soft, a be-er only,
I do nothing, but point
my bare feet into your
clean smoothness
feel your quiet strength
the whole length of my body.
I close my eyes, hear myself
moan, so grateful to be held this way.

– Meredith Holmes

What We Want

What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names-
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don’t remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.

~ Linda Pastan