Daily Poems
Thread Topic: Daily Poems
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Day 15 -- Great Ships
This is a poem about the great ships that wandered
the oceans
And groaned sometimes in deep voices, grumbling about fog
and submerged peaks,
But usually they sliced the pages of tropical seas
in silence,
Divided by height, category, and class, just like our communities
and hotels.
Beneath the deck poor emigrants played cards, and no one
won
While on the highest deck Claudel gazed at Ysé and her hair
glowed.
And toasts were raised to a safe trip, to coming
times,
Toasts were raised, Alsatian wine and champagne
from France's finest vineyards,
Some days were static, windless, when only the light seeped
steadily,
Days when nothing happened but the horizon, which traveled
with the ship,
Days of emptiness and boredom, playing solitaire, repeating
the latest news,
Who'd been seen with whom in a tropical night's shade, embracing
beneath a peach-colored moon.
But filthy stokers tirelessly tossed coal into open
flaming mouths
And everything that is now already existed then, but
in condensed form.
Our days already existed and our hearts baked
in the blazing stove,
And the moment when I met you may also have existed,
and my mistrust
Brittle as a faience plate, and my faith, no less frail
and capricious,
And my searches for the final answer, my
disappointments and discoveries.
Great ships: some sunk suddenly, arousing consciences
and fear,
Gaining deathless fame, becoming stars
of special bulletins.
Others went peacefully, waned without a word in provincial
ports, in dockyards,
Beneath a coat of rust, a ruddy fur of rust, a slipcover of rust,
and waited
For the final transformation, the last judgment of souls and
objects,
They wait as patiently as chess players in Luxembourg Garden
nudging pieces a fraction of an inch or so.
- Adam Zagajewski -
Day 16 — Earth Day
I am the Earth
And the Earth is me.
Each blade of grass,
Each honey tree,
Each bit of mud,
And stick and stone
Is blood and muscle,
Skin and bone.
And just as I
Need every bit
Of me to make
My body fit,
So Earth needs
Grass and stone and tree
And things that grow here
Naturally.
That’s why we
Celebrate this day.
That’s why across
The world we say:
As long as life,
As dear, as free,
I am the Earth
And the Earth is me.
- Jane Yolen -
Day 17 — In A Row
The mailman handing me a letter,
he paid a little. My daughter’s
third grade teacher, the electrician
putting a light over my back door:
they paid as well. The woman at the bank
who cashes my check. She paid a part of it.
The typist in my office, the janitor
sweeping the floor—they paid some too.
The movie star paid for it. The nurse,
the nun, the saint, they all paid for it—
a photograph from Central America,
six children lying neatly in a row.
One day I was teaching or I sold
a book review or I gave a lecture
and some of the money came to me
and some rolled off into the world,
but it was still my money, the result
of my labor, each coin still had my name
printed across it, and I went on living,
passing my days in a box with a tight lid.
But elsewhere, skulking through tall grass,
a dozen men approached a village. It was hot;
the men made no noise. See that one’s cap,
see the button on that other man’s shirt,
* * *
hear the click of the cartridge as it slides
into its chamber, see the handkerchief
which that man uses to wipe his brow—
I paid for that one, that one belongs to me.
- Stephen Dobyns -
Day 18 — The Garden By Moonlight
A black cat among roses,
Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon,
The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock.
The garden is very still,
It is dazed with moonlight,
Contented with perfume,
Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies.
Firefly lights open and vanish
High as the tip buds of the golden glow
Low as the sweet alyssum flowers at my feet.
Moon-shimmer on leaves and trellises,
Moon-spikes shafting through the snow ball bush.
Only the little faces of the ladies’ delight are alert and staring,
Only the cat, padding between the roses,
Shakes a branch and breaks the chequered pattern
As water is broken by the falling of a leaf.
Then you come,
And you are quiet like the garden,
And white like the alyssum flowers,
And beautiful as the silent sparks of the fireflies.
Ah, Beloved, do you see those orange lilies?
They knew my mother,
But who belonging to me will they know
When I am gone.
- Amy Lowell -
Day 19 — Some Feel Rain
Some feel rain. Some feel the beetle startle
in its ghost-part when the bark
slips. Some feel musk. Asleep against
each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there.
When it falls apart, some feel the moondark air
drop its motes to the patch-thick slopes of
snow. Tiny blinkings of ice from the oak,
a boot-beat that comes and goes, the line of prayer
you can follow from the dusking wind to the snowy owl
it carries. Some feel sunlight
well up in blood-vessels below the skin
and wish there had been less to lose.
Knowing how it could have been, pale maples
drowsing like a second sleep above our temperaments.
Do I imagine there is any place so safe it can’t be
snapped? Some feel the rivers shift,
blue veins through soil, as if the smokestacks were a long
dream of exhalation. The lynx lets its paws
skim the ground in snow and showers.
The wildflowers scatter in warm tints until
the second they are plucked. You can wait
to scrape the ankle-burrs, you can wait until Mercury
the early star underdraws the night and its blackest
districts. And wonder. Why others feel
through coal-thick night that deeply colored garnet
star. Why sparring and pins are all you have.
Why the earth cannot make its way towards you.
- Joanna Klink -
Day 20 -- The Night of the Snowfall
Snow falls gently in the Hill Country
covering the meadows and the valleys.
The sluggish streaks of smoke climb quietly
from the roofs but fail to reach the lazy clouds.
On Alamo Plaza in the heart of the night
and under the flood of lights, the flakes float
like frozen moths and glow like fireflies.
They drop on the blades of dormant grass.
They alight on the cobblestones and live awhile
in silence, they dissolve before dawn.
The wet limestone walls of the mission
glow proudly after the night of snowfall.
- Mo H. Saidi -
Day 21 — No Day Has Been as Clear but We Keep Saying
There’s a slim enough chance
we’re edging our last century.
On its brink I sit or I think it.
Snow, white itself, whites itself
out and us along the way.
Words of no gravity kept floating
into water where a future perched
a comma between brackets
of waves: [Are we here] barely [Are we
not now] barely [Leave it] barely
[And leave] ... Or I think it.
Or feel it. Whichever is closer
to knowing. What do we know
after all. I mean—tell me
what aided you in your longest grief
as a glass of water.
- Suphil Lee Park -
Day 22 — The End of Landscape
There's a certain sadness to this body of water
adjacent to the runway, its reeds and weeds,
handful of ducks, the water color
manmade. A still life. And still
life's a cold exercise in looking back,
back to Florida, craning my neck
like a sandhill crane in Alachua Basin.
As for the scrub oaks,
the hot wind in the leaves was language,
Spanish moss—dusky, parasitic—
an obsession: I wanted to live in it.
(One professor in exile did,
covered himself in the stuff as a joke—
then spent a week removing mites.) That's
enough. The fields of rushes lay filled
with water, and I said farewell,
my high ship an old, red Volvo DL,
gone to another coast, another peninsula,
one without sleep or amphibious music.
Tonight, in flight from San Francisco—
because everything is truer at a remove—
I watch the man I love watch
the turn of the Sacramento River, then Sacramento,
lit city of legislation and flat land.
I think of Florida, how flat.
I think of forgetting Florida.
And then the landscape grows black.
- Randall Mann -
Day 23 — At Sunset
Your death must be loved this much.
You have to know the grief—now.
Standing by the water’s edge,
looking down at the wave
touching you. You have to lie,
stiff, arms folded, on a heap of earth
and see how far the darkness
will take you. I mean it, this, now—
before the ghost the cold leaves
in your breath, rises;
before the toes are put together
inside the shoes. There it is—the goddamn
orange-going-into-rose descending
circle of beauty and time.
You have nothing to be sad about.
- Jason Shinder -
Day 24 — Coming to This
We have done what we wanted.
We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry
of each other, and we have welcomed grief
and called ruin the impossible habit to break.
And now we are here.
The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.
The meat sits in the white lake of its dish.
The wine waits.
Coming to this
has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away.
We have no heart or saving grace,
no place to go, no reason to remain.
- Mark Strand -
Day 25 — Between Walls
the back wings
of the
hospital where
nothing
will grow lie
cinders
in which shine
the broken
pieces of a green
bottle
- William Carlos Williams -
(can you do a haiku)
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Day 26 — Lighting One Candle
The light of a candle
Is transferred to another candle—
Spring twilight
- Yosa Buson -
(cool)
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Day 27 — Origin
Through darkness they came,
covered in ash, scarred by depths
and distance, they bore salt and fire, breath steaming
at edges of decks, hands clutching
railings, their bodies dizzied by the lurching vessel,
trunks pulled by hand, Where are you from? I unwrapped
my legacy from cloth, the marble Buddha
from my grandfather, ancient
as the sea-stained covers of his sutras, the briny odor
of carp centuries old. What are you?
Not only where they were from but who they were
and would become. His strange
past and the mystery of my own face, American?
this question flawed as we all
appeared, my grandfather's birthplace the half of me
I lightened, bleaching my black hair
to reach my girlfriend Amber's blonde.
In her candlelit room, I touched
the mission photo of her
rubbing ointment on the burns
of a hibakusha. Where are
water-filled troughs and the horses' manes
my grandfather combed. The hay he bundled
in twine, you from? Could he have smoothed names
engraved in granite, the scars on the woman's skin, targets
raised on maps? In a light blast What are a city
of nips was erased, you? A blank scape, Go back
no trace of his childhood farm
in Hiroshima, to where I turned
away from the chalkboard scrawled
with Enola Gay, you are a button pushed,
from a bomb dropped, at Amber's picnic
they bowed over grace, and I looked up, didn't
say Amen. Everything rises
when the ground's skin is broken.
- Brian Komei Dempster
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