in this long season

This is my April 29 poem, because yesterday was a bad migraine day and I'm a day behind. That means two poems on this, the last day of April and poetry month (A SAD DAY), but I am posting one now and one later instead of posting them together. So here, per request of K, is Wendell Berry.

Shall we do without hope? Some days
there will be none. But now
to the dry and dead woods floor
they come again, the first
flowers of the year, the assembly
of the faithful, the beautiful,
wholly given to being.
And in this long season
of machines and mechanical will
there have been small human acts
of compassion, acts of care, work
flowerlike in selfless loveliness.
Leaving hope to the dark
and to a better day,
receive these beauties freely
given, and give thanks.

—Wendell Berry, "Shall we do without hope?" 2007. I got this poem from poetryisnotaluxury, but it's actually an excerpt from poem II in 2007 of "Sabbaths: 2005-2008" in Wendell Berry, Leavings (Counterpoint, 2010). Berry is highly excerptible, in my opinion, and this very much stands on its own. Also I love it, obviously.

wild iris, duff, waterfall, dew

Take me back to the woods, please. (But actually, I took two pretty nice walks today; could be worse.)

I like my body when I'm in the woods
and I forget my body. I forget that arms,
that legs, that nose. I forget that waist,

that nerve, that skin. And I aspen. I mountain.
I river. I stone. I leaf. I path. I flower.
I like when I evergreen, current and berry.

I like when I mushroom, avalanche, cliff.
And everything is yes then, and everything
new: wild iris, duff, waterfall, dew.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, "Yes, That's When," from hush (Middle Creek Publishing, 2020).

the rapture of being alive

This one goes out to loons and Shane Hollander and those middle-of-the-night moments of clarity.

Not quite four a.m., when the rapture of being alive
strikes me from sleep, and I rise
from the comfortable bed and go
to another room, where my books are lined up
in their nest and colorful rows. How

magical they are! I choose one
and open it. Soon
I have wandered in over the waves of the words
to the temple of thought.

                                        And then I hear
outside, over the actual waves, the small,
perfect voice of the loon. He is also awake,
and with his heavy head uplifted he calls out
to the fading moon, to the pink flush
swelling in the east that, soon,
will become the long, reasonable day.

                                                            Inside the house
it is still dark, except for the pool of lamplight
in which I am sitting.

                                    I do not close the book.

Neither, for a long while, do I read on.

—Mary Oliver (1935-2019), "The Loon," from What Do We Know: Poems and Prose Poems (Da Capo Press, 2002) and in my case from Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (Penguin, 2017).

the narrative burden of events

Fady Joudah is a Houston-based poet (and doctor) who I first learned about through his translations of Mahmoud Darwish—one of which I may post later in the month—and then because Brazos Bookstore, one of our favorite independent bookstores in town, always tries to highlight local authors. I picked up a copy of Joudah's 2024 poetry collection last year and was thinking about posting a couple of different poems, but then I read this earlier one on Poetry Foundation and couldn't stop thinking about it, so here we are. Still on the subject of the moon, sort of.

1.
Here, shooting stars linger
They give out
A sparkling trail like a cauterized incision

Silver, or amber
If the moon is low and rising red


2.
And the rain melts the roads
And the roads
Can rupture a spleen
Or oust a kidney stone

As for the heart
It needs a beginning
The narrative
Burden of events


3.
“Mize, zey eat mize”
The Frenchman exclaimed with a smile
“Rraized and shipped from za States”

We raise rats! I thought
That’s a lot of protein!

“Maize maize!” it was, after our chickens
Have had their fill


4.
She was the only nurse in town before the war
She spoke seven languages and died suddenly
He was a merchant
He’s a doorman now and buys us cigarettes


5.
Here we are with love pouring out of every orifice
Here they are dancing
Around the funeral pyre, the corpse in absentia


6.
One of the drivers ran over the neighbor’s ducks
The neighbor demanded compensation
For the post-traumatic stress disorder he accurately anticipates

Do you know what it’s like
To drive on roads occupied
By animal farms: you cannot tell
Who killed who or how
Many ducks were there to begin with


7.
In the morning, elephant grass moves the way
Mist is visible in the breeze but doesn’t dampen the skin


8.
Today, I yelled at three old women
Who wouldn’t stop bargaining for pills they didn’t need
One wanted extra
For her grandson who came along for the ride


9.
Like lip sores
The asphalt blisters in the rain

And the boys
Fill the holes with dirt and gravel
And broken green branches
Then wait:

No windex. No flowers or newspapers
And gratuity is appreciated


10.
“I have ants in my leg”
And “My leg went to sleep”
Are not the same thing!

The French argue
There is no sleep in a tingling numbness
The symptom of sluggish blood:

I agree. Me too my leg has been anted
And we are learning to reconcile
The dark with the electric


11.
Four days the river runs to the border
Nine days to learn it wasn’t the shape
Of your nose that gave you away
And debts are paid off in a-shelter-for-a-day

A pile of wood plus change in your pocket
Is a sack of potatoes and change in another’s


12.
No more running long or short distance
The old women
Snicker at me when I pass them by


13.
She was comatose post-partum
And the beekeeper
Bathed her in love everyday

When she recovered I gave up
What he’d promised me for the woman
Who took up nursing their newborn
Since as coincidence would have it
Her name was Om Assel — Mother of Honey


14.
The translation of a medical interview
Is not a poem to be written

Come recite a verse from childhood with me
I see you’re unable to weep, does love
Have no command over you?

The sea’s like the desert
Neither quenches the thirst


15.
Here, dry grass burns the moon
Here, a clearing of grass is a clearing of snakes


16.
And the rain has already been cleansed from the sky
The clinic is empty, soon
The earth will unseal like a jar
Harvest is the season that fills the belly


17.
Here, I ride my bicycle invisible
Except for a crescent shadow and the Milky Way
Is already past


18.
And a mirror gives the moon back to the moon
Home is an epilogue:

Which came first
Memory or words?

—Fady Joudah, "Moon Grass Rain" from The Earth in the Attic (Yale University Press, 2008).

hot as molten silver

Here is another poem about the moon. Also, cats.

The white cat is curled up in the sky
its cloudy tail drawn round its flanks.
Waking, it struts over the roofs singing
down chimneys, its claws clicking

on the roof tiles that loosen and fall.
Now it runs along the bare boughs of the oak.
Now it leaps to the beech and sharpens
its long yellow claws. Sparks fly out.

The moon is hungry and calls to be fed,
cries to come into the bedroom through
the skylight and crawl under the covers,
to curl up at your breast and purr.

The moon caterwauls on the back fence
saying I burn, I am hot as molten silver.
I am the dancer on the roof who wakes you.
Rise to me and I will melt you to silk dust.

I am the passion you have forgotten
in your long sleep, but now your bones glow
through your flesh, your eyes see in the dark.
On owl wings you will hunt through the night.

—Marge Piercy, "How the full moon wakes you," from Mars and Her Children (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), although my version is from The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010 (Knopf, 2012).

ask the moon

I asked my wife how many poems about the moon I was allowed to post this week, and she said "all of them?" So we may have a week or so of moon poems, for obvious reasons. Since I missed yesterday, here are two.

Isn't the moon dark too,
most of the time?

And doesn't the white page
seem unfinished

without the dark stain
of alphabets?

When God demanded light,
he didn't banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask
"Why are you sad so often?"

Ask the moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.

—Linda Pastan (1932-2023), "Why Are Your Poems So Dark?" originally published in Poetry (August 2003).

*

Forgive us, we blamed you
for floods, for the flush of blood,
for men who are also wolves, even
though you could pull the tide in
by her hair, we tell everyone
we walked all over you. We
blame you for the dark, as if you had
a choice, performing just beyond
the glass, distant and adored,
near but alone, cold and unimaginable
following us home. We use you
to see our blue bodies beneath
your damp light, we let you watch,
swollen against the glass as we move
against one another like fish.

—Warsan Shire, "Bless the Moon," from Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head: Poems (Penguin Canada, 2022).

swept our hearts clean

A little devotional-ish poetry for Easter Monday. I love Joy Harjo.

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear;
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

—Joy Harjo, "Eagle Poem," from In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), but in my case from a very lovely signed copy of Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: 50 Poems for 50 Years (Norton, 2023).

the same atoms

It's been a hard day, so here is a poem for that. Clint Smith simply never fails.

Some evenings, after days when the world feels
like it has poured all of its despair onto me,
when I am awash with burdens that rests atop
my body like a burlap of jostling shadows,

I find a place to watch the sun set. I dig
my feet into a soil that has rebirthed itself
a millions times over. I listen to the sound
of leaves as they decide whether or not

it is time to descend from their branches.
It is hard to describe the comfort one feels
in sitting with something you trust will always be
there, something you can count on to remain

familiar when all else seems awry. How remarkable
it is to know that so many have watched the same
sun set before you. How the wind can carry
pollen and drop it somewhere it has never been.
How the leaves have always become the soil

that then become the leaves again. How maybe
we are not so different from the leaves.
How maybe we are also always being reborn
to be something more than we once were.

How maybe that's what waking up each morning is.
A reminder that we are born
of the same atoms as every plant and bird
and mountain and ocean around us.

—Clint Smith, "For the Hardest Days," from Counting Descent (Write Bloody Publishing, 2016).

count my hopes

This is for Earth Day, but it also now makes me think about Maybe Happy Ending, which we saw in New York last week and absolutely loved. There are some parallels, although this is not (obviously) a poem about fireflies.

so I count my hopes: the bumblebees
are making a comeback, one snug tight
in a purple flower I passed to get to you;

your favorite color is purple but Prince's
was orange & we both find this hard to believe;
today the park is green, we take grass for granted

the leaves chuckle around us; behind
your head a butterfly rests on a tree; it’s been
there our whole conversation; by my old apartment

was a butterfly sanctuary where I would read
& two little girls would sit next to me; you caught
a butterfly once but didn't know what to feed it

so you trapped it in a jar & gave it to a girl
you liked. I asked if it died. you say you like
to think it lived a long life. yes, it lived a long life.

—Fatimah Asghar, "I Don't Know What Will Kill Us First: The Race War or What We've Done to the Earth," originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 8, 2019 (where you can listen to the poet read the poem), by the Academy of American Poets.

break open

It's the last Sunday in April. Here's some Mary Oliver.

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

—Mary Oliver (1935-2019), "Lead" from New and Selected Poems: Volume Two, 2005.

without a word

I couldn't decide which W. S. Merwin poem to post, so here are two, one for today and one to count for April 17. They're variations on a theme (it's a little weird to be back in Texas where it very much is already summer), and I really enjoy the way Merwin just doesn't use punctuation at all.

Late in May as the light lengthens
toward summer the young goldfinches
flutter down through the day for the first time
to find themselves among fallen petals
cradling their day's colors in the day's shadows
of the garden beside the old house
after a cold spring with no rain
not a sound comes from the empty village
as I stand eating the black cherries
from the loaded branches above me
saying to myself Remember this

—W. S. Merwin (1927-2019), "Black Cherries," from Garden Time, 2016.

*

The first hay is in and all at once
in the silent evening summer has come
knowing the place wholly the green skin
of its hidden slopes where the shadows will
never reach so far again and a few
gray hairs motionless high in the late
sunlight tell of rain before morning
and of finding the daybreak under green
water with no shadows but all still the same
still known still the known faces of summer
faces of water turning into the themselves
changing without a word into the themselves

—W. S. Merwin (1927-2019), "After the Spring," published in Poetry (June 1992).

so much to be done

It's very good to be home, and I am very tired. Here's a little Jane Kenyon on that theme.

We turned into the drive,
and gravel flew up from the tires
like sparks from a fire. So much
to be done—the unpacking, the mail
and papers; the grass needed mowing...
We climbed stiffly out of the car.
The shut-off engine ticked as it cooled.

And then we noticed the pear tree,
the limbs so heavy with fruit
they nearly touched the ground.
We went out to the meadow; our steps
made black holes in the grass;
and we each took a pear,
and ate, and were grateful.

—Jane Kenyon (1947-1995), "Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer," from Poetry magazine (February, 1983).

answer

I unfortunately can't read this poem (or post it) in the original Chinese, but I love it in translation. Like a lot of the Li Bai poetry I've read, it's short and gorgeous. Unlike some of the Li Bai poetry I have read, it is not about drinking. Poetry can be about so many things!

You ask me why I stay up here
    alone on the green mountain.
I smile, but give no other answer—
    and yet, my heart's at leisure.

The peach blossom floats away on the stream,
    carried far by the water.
Here, apart from the human world,
    I have heaven and earth together.

—Li Bai (701-762), "Question and Answer on the Mountain," translated by Keith Holyoak, and in this case from Facing the Moon: Poems of Li Bai and Du Fu (Oyster River Press, 2007).

doing what she can to survive

For K, who loves Ada Limón just as much as I do, and also for the raccoon I saw sneaking behind a car in the parking lot next to my building yesterday.

I thought it was the neighbor's cat back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog
slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still
green in the morning's shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.

—Ada Limón, "Give Me This," from The Hurting Kind, 2022, but originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 16, 2020.

blossoms begin

I've been doing a lot of spring things this week while the weather has been good, and today I went to the New York Botanical Gardens with a friend to see the daffodils and cherry blossoms. We also went to the orchid show, which wasn't part of the original plan (the original plan was mainly to go stare at Daffodil Hill and then get lunch at the cafe), but was a great addition. This is not a poem about cherry blossoms or daffodils or orchids, but I think it's thematically appropriate, and flowering trees are very important. (If you want daffodils, there's always Wordsworth.)

One evening in winter
when nothing has been enough,
when the days are too short,

the nights too long
and cheerless, the secret
and docile buds of the apple

blossoms begin their quick
ascent to light. Night
after interminable night

the sugars pucker and swell
into green slips, green
silks. And just as you find

yourself at the end
of winter’s long, cold
rope, the blossoms open

like pink thimbles
and that black dollop
of shine called

bumblebee stumbles in.

—Susan Kelly-DeWitt, "Apple Blossoms," from To a Small Moth (Poet's Corner Press, 2001).

there is only one question

I went out for a walk this evening, and while I was walking through the park during golden hour, looking at the spring flowers and enjoying both the gorgeous weather and being out of my house for the first time in a week, I thought, "today is a Mary Oliver day." But the truth is that I try to live every day of my life as though it's a Mary Oliver day.

Somewhere
    a black bear
        has just risen from sleep
            and is staring

down the mountain.
    All night
        in the brisk and shallow restlessness
            of early spring

I think of her,
    her four black fists
        flicking the gravel,
            her tongue

like a red fire
    touching the grass,
        the cold water.
            There is only one question;

how to love this world.
    I think of her
        rising
            like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
    the silence
        of the trees.
            Whatever else

my life is
    with its poems
        and its music
            and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
    coming
        down the mountain,
            breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her—
    her white teeth,
        her wordlessness,
            her perfect love.

—Mary Oliver (1935-2019), "Spring," from House of Light, 1990.

your one wild and precious life

Today is April 30, and to close us out—on what was an absolutely stunningly gorgeous spring day—is a poem I had to check my spreadsheet and my archive four separate times to be sure I hadn't posted before. It's a classic. Thank you for reading with me, friends. See you next year. ♥

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver (1935-2019), "The Summer Day," from House of Light, 1990. I have closed five out of sixteen years with Mary Oliver, and I have no regrets.

like the garden

A poem for the last night of vacation, and also, because it is Amy Lowell, for lesbians everywhere.

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 (1874-1925), "The Garden by Moonlight," from Pictures of the Floating World, 1919. (Also, I miss my black cats.) 

hushed

My brother died in 2011. On April 5, about 10 days after he died, we held a memorial service—some of you were there, in fact—and because it was the fifth year I'd posted poems for National Poetry Month, I posted a poem about loss. (I posted several poems about loss, that year.) Then I started posting poems that had something to do with death or grief or loss on April 5 each year, as a kind of continued memorial. The poetry helped, that first year (and later), although I had other anchors, too: friends and family and My Chemical Romance, which I mention now because I am ostensibly supposed to see them again this fall for the first time since the week my brother died. What a world we live in.

Being past the decade mark since my brother died is a weird feeling, not because grief goes away—it doesn't—but because the way you feel it changes. Most often, now, I see something or read something or watch something and think, "God, Pete would love this," or "I wish I could talk to Pete about this," and it hits me with sadness but also a bittersweet sort of happiness when things remind me of him. I miss him, but it's less devastating now (mostly), and even when it hurts, I like to be reminded that I carry him with me.

All of which is to say that Pete did not give one single shit about poetry, so the poems I post are for me, not him. But I love him, and I miss him, and I think the fact that poetry offers so many different ways to look at grief and loss and life and death and love is pretty awesome. Here is a poem about a tree.

...and a decrepit handful of trees.
—Aleksandr Pushkin

And I matured in peace born of command,
in the nursery of the infant century,
and the voice of man was never dear to me,
but the breeze’s voice—that I could understand.
The burdock and the nettle I preferred,
but best of all the silver willow tree.
Its weeping limbs fanned my unrest with dreams;
it lived here all my life, obligingly.
I have outlived it now, and with surprise.
There stands the stump; with foreign voices other
willows converse, beneath our, beneath those skies,
and I am hushed, as if I’d lost a brother.

—Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), "Willow," translated by Jennifer Reeser and published in Poetry magazine in December, 2005. Translations of Akhmatova vary pretty widely and I often really dislike them, but I love this one.

face to face with the sun

It's an absolutely gorgeous (cold) spring day in New York, and I went to the farmers market and got coffee and walked around a little and felt deeply in charity with the world. I had some other poems up my sleeve this morning, but then my girlfriend sent me this one, and you know, yeah. This is a good one. (Among other things, I like that it has a little of the spirit of a sonnet without being anything like a sonnet, and a tiny shout-out to Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.)

Above a pond, I sit on a wooden bench
and throw pebbles into the willows.

A rush of sunlight and wind creates a path in a channel of water, dances
between the melting ice and brown islands of bulrush.

The resident osprey, its eyes the color of yellow grass,
follows my tossing hand.

Love is a diorama of inner life in an outer world.

I look down and find a chunk of fossilized rock
with an entire Paleozoic shell sticking out.

I am not afraid of love, but terrified of how it is my steady guide.

Once, when tired, I wandered off the trail and crawled under a tree to rest.

I woke to a young brown bear licking my boot.
Nothing had ever felt that good.

When I say I love you, what I mean is I wouldn’t leave you.

Even if love is not loved back it doesn’t go away,
although it may become a black hole.

Could this be what it’s like for trees to lose the green from their leaves?

At noon the light shifts and the pond turns
into a mosaic of opaque green ice.

Orange carp rise in these cold watery chambers to breathe at the surface.

Always I am in love. Face to face with the sun. Face to face with the moon.

—Elizabeth Jacobson, "14 Love Songs" from Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air (Parlor Press, 2019).