The Poetry Playground

Housekeeping

We mourn the broken things, chair legs
wrenched from the seats, chipped plates,
the threadbare clothes. We work the magic
of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes.
We save what we can, melt small pieces
of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones
for soup. Beating rugs against the house,
we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading
across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw
the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs
out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie.
I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,
listen for passing cars. All day we watch
for the mail, some news from a distant place.

~ Natasha Trethewey

Consider the Hands that Write this Letter

Consider the hands
that write this letter.
Left palm pressed flat against paper,
as we have done before, over my heart,
in peace or reverence to the sea,
some beautiful thing
I saw once, felt once: snow falling
like rice flung from the giants’ wedding,
or strangest of strange birds. & consider, then,
the right hand, & how it is a fist,
within which a sharpened utensil,
similar to the way I’ve held a spade,
the horse’s reins, loping, the very fists
I’ve seen from roads through Limay & Esteli.
For years I have come to sit this way:
one hand open, one hand closed,
like a farmer who puts down seeds & gathers up;
food will come from that farming.
Or, yes, it is like the way I’ve danced
with my left hand opened around a shoulder,
my right hand closed inside
of another hand. & how I pray,
I pray for this to be my way: sweet
work alluded to in the body’s position to its paper:
left hand, right hand
like an open eye, an eye closed:
one hand flat against the trapdoor,
the other hand knocking, knocking.

~ Aracelis Girmay
after Marina Wilson

Goodbye, Lebanon

Goodbye, Lebanese mountains.

I’m going far
from your pink rose garlands,
your bright red satin strawberries.

Egypt called in a serious voice,
and already my rocking boat
bears new fruit –

But sea, whisper your lullabies
please, because I hurt so much.
Soft waves of home, sob for me.

Don’t go away so quickly, my love.
Leaving you, my chest is all wound,
wholly tender.

Lebanon,

you made me. Your moody nights
put the darkness in my eyes
and laid a vein of lightning in my soul.

Your white lace waterfalls wove
jasmine vines and oud serenades
all through me,

and my speech is the Spirit
murmuring in your woods.
My capricious seasons are yours:

my soul is sometimes wild,
an egret flying far
beyond the ocean’s edge,

and sometimes I curl up,
tender as an anemone when touched,
damp with seafoam tears.

Fading from sight, you’re a dream
that ends. But grief goes on.
Goodbye my nest.

I love you, Lebanon. I adore you.

Lebanon, goodbye.
My heart –

pink roses,
red strawberries

– turns to vapor with the word:

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

~ May Ziadeh

(translated from the French by Rose DeMaris)

The Obligation to Be Happy

It is more onerous
than the rites of beauty
or housework, harder than love.
But you expect if of me casually,
the way you expect the sun
to come up, not in spite of rain
or clouds but because of them.

And so I smile, as if my own fidelity
to sadness were a hidden vice –
that downward tug on my mouth,
my old suspicion that health
and love are brief irrelevancies,
no more than laughter in the warm dark
strangled at dawn.

Happiness. I try to hoist it
on my narrow shoulders again –
a knapsack heavy with gold coins.
I stumble around the house,
bump into things.
Only Midas himself
would understand.

~ Linda Pastan

Getting Older
The first surprise: I like it.
Whatever happens now, some things
that used to terrify have not:

I didn’t die young, for instance. Or lose
my only love. My three children
never had to run away from anyone.

Don’t tell me this gratitude is complacent.
We all approach the edge of the same blackness
which for me is silent.

Knowing as much sharpens
my delight in January freesia,
hot coffee, winter sunlight. So we say

as we lie close on some gentle occasion:
every day won from such
darkness is a celebration.

~ Elaine Feinstein

On Days Like This
On days like this . . .
Before the dawn ever happens
when the sky is still dark
and the morning star bright. It is
on days like this . . .
When the last of the night spills
into the ravine.
When my mind is filled with the
thoughts of smooth stones.
It is on days like this . . .
When the garden is damp
And the wind
still trapped
inside my ear.
And I find the same pebble twice
when my pocket it full
it is on days like this . . .
It is on days exactly like this . . .

~ Das Lanzillotti

Everyone Sang

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away . . . O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

~ Siegfried Sasson

Looking at the Sea
I have today and tomorrow,
I hear amplified voices,
The sun shines, the arbor
Shades, and people talk.

Actors write, writers act,
It can be the same or not,
And criticism can be praise,
But love can only be love.

Mysticism is obfuscation,
She explains to anyone,
The sea is salty, you taste
Your mouth and hurt feet.

Now it is the sunset they
Have come to see. Islands
Lying on the horizon.
We have today and tomorrow.

~ Vincent Katz