Tuesday, April 16, 2024

Gratitude: April 16, 2024

An Old Story

We were made to understand it would be
Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,
Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. 
 
Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful 
Dream. The worst in us having taken over 
And broken the rest utterly down. 
 
                                                                 A long age 
Passed. When at last we knew how little 
Would survive us—how little we had mended 
 
Or built that was not now lost—something 
Large and old awoke. And then our singing 
Brought on a different manner of weather. 
 
Then animals long believed gone crept down 
From trees. We took new stock of one another. 
We wept to be reminded of such color. 

Tracy K. Smith
 

Friday, March 29, 2024

Instructions on Not Giving Up by Ada Limon

 

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Friday, March 22, 2024

Despite My Efforts Even My Prayers Have Turned into Threats by Kaveh Akbar

 

Holy father I can’t pretend
I’m not afraid to see you again
but I’ll say that when the time
comes I believe my courage
will expand like a sponge
cowboy in water. My earth-
father was far braver than me — 
coming to America he knew
no English save Rolling Stones
lyrics and how to say thanks
God. Will his goodness roll
over to my tab and if yes, how
soon? I’m sorry for neglecting
your myriad signs, which seem
obvious now as a hawk’s head
on an empty plate. I keep waking
up at the bottom of swimming
pools, the water reflecting
whatever I miss most: whiskey-
glass, pill bottles, my mother’s
oleander, which was sweet
and evergreen but toxic in all
its parts. I know it was silly
to keep what I kept from you;
you’ve always been so charmed
by my weaknesses. I just figured
you were becoming fed up with
all your making, like a virtuoso
trying not to smash apart her
flute onstage. Plus, my sins
were practically devotional:
two peaches stolen from
a bodega, which were so sweet
I savored even the bits I flossed
out my teeth. I know it’s
no excuse, but even thinking
about them now I’m drooling.
Consider the night I spent reading
another man’s lover the Dream
Songs in bed — we made it to
“a green living / drops
limply” before we were
tangled into each other, cat
still sleeping at our feet. Allow
me these treasures, Lord.
Time will break what doesn’t
bend — even time. Even you.


Monday, March 18, 2024

Gratitude: March 18, 2024

Our Nature 

The very flatness of portraits
makes for nostalgia
in the connoisseur.
 
Here’s the latest
little lip of wave
to flatten
and spread thin.
 
Let’s say
it shows our recklessness,
 
our fast gun,
 
our self-consciousness
which was really
 
our infatuation
with our own fame,
 
our escapes,
 
the easy way
we’d blend in
 
with the peasantry,
 
our loyalty
to our old gang
 
from among whom
it was our nature
 
to be singled out 

Rae Armantrout


Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Gratitude: February 21, 2021

It's All Right

Someone you trusted has treated you bad.
Someone has used you to vent their ill temper.
Did you expect anything different?
Your work--better than some others'--has languished,
neglected. Or a job you tried was too hard,
and you failed. Maybe weather or bad luck
spoiled what you did. That grudge, held against you
for years after you patched up, has flared,
and you've lost a friend for a time. Things
at home aren't so good; on the job your spirits
have sunk. But just when the worst bears down
you find a pretty bubble in your soup at noon,
and outside at work a bird says, "Hi!"
Slowly the sun creeps along the floor;
it is coming your way. It touches your shoe.

William Stafford


*

Mock Orange

It is not the moon, I tell you.
It is these flowers
lighting the yard.

I hate them.
I hate them as I hate sex,
the man’s mouth
sealing my mouth, the man’s
paralyzing body—

and the cry that always escapes,
the low, humiliating
premise of union—

In my mind tonight
I hear the question and pursuing answer
fused in one sound
that mounts and mounts and then
is split into the old selves,
the tired antagonisms. Do you see?
We were made fools of.
And the scent of mock orange
drifts through the window.

How can I rest?
How can I be content
when there is still
that odor in the world?

Louise Glück 

*

“We always dream of attention, but we rarely want the reality of it”