Poem for the Day: November 23rd, 2021

Self-Compassion by James Crews

My friend and I snickered the first time
we heard the meditation teacher, a grown man,
call himself honey, with a hand placed
over his heart to illustrate how we too 
might become more gentle with ourselves
and our runaway minds. It’s been years
since we sat with legs twisted on cushions,
holding back our laughter, but today
I found myself crouched on the floor again,
not meditating exactly, just agreeing
to be still, saying honey to myself each time
I thought about my husband splayed
on the couch with aching joints and fever
from a tick bite—what if he never gets better?—
or considered the threat of more wildfires,
the possible collapse of the Gulf Stream,
then remembered that in a few more minutes, 
I’d have to climb down to the cellar and empty
the bucket I placed beneath a leaky pipe
that can’t be fixed until next week. How long
do any of us really have before the body
begins to break down and empty its mysteries
into the air? Oh honey, I said—for once
without a trace of irony or blush of shame—
the touch of my own hand on my chest
like that of a stranger, oddly comforting
in spite of the facts.

© 2021 James Crews. “Self-Compassion” was originally published by the Academy of American Poets for their Poem-a-Day series on November 17th, 2021. Crews is the editor of the forthcoming collection The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy, which is due to be released in April 2022 by Storey Publishing and is now available to preorder wherever books are sold.

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Poem for the Day: November 22nd, 2021

Wight by Stanley Plumly

In the dark we disappear, pure being.
Our mirror images, impure being.

Being and becoming (Heidegger), being and
nothingness (Sartre)—which is purer being?

Being alone is no way to be: thus
loneliness is the test of pure being.

Nights in love I fell too far or not quite
far enough—one pure, one impure being.

Clouds, snow, mist, the dragon's breath on water,
smoke from fire—a metaphor's pure being.

Stillness and more stillness and the light locked
deep inside—both pure and impure being.

Is is the verb of being, I the noun—
or pronoun for the purists of being.

I was, I am, I looked within and saw
nothing very clearly: purest being.

Stanley Plumly (1939-2019) was greatly influenced by his working-class background, a fact which is evident in his work. He earned his B.A. at Wilmington College in Ohio and his Ph.D. at Ohio University. During his long career, he taught at the University of Iowa, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the University of Maryland. He also served as the poet laureate of Maryland for several years. You can read more about his life and work here.

Poem for the Day: November 21st, 2021

Winter Journal: Threshed Blue, Cardings, Dim Tonsils by Emily Wilson

stripped batting of cloud
glimpsed ligaments
dusk coming up under
lithographic, nib-hatchings
       instruments click
       the fine-sprung locust
       replicate dinge along hill-lines
       tailings of umber, the rust smudge
There is still that hemmed ocean of oaks
       the various reds, the somehow
       silver cast over the brown-gold
       the under-brushed shadows
How can there be more of their dispensing
       into air?
The night-openings of the trees
The thousand clefts into
Their corridors shiver and merge and piece apart
There is no one beside what was once river
Only the carbons incoming
       accreting in leaves
Love of old oaks unencumbering
Root-beauties brought through
crude sieves of bare trees
the few fastened leaves
Those pods are like tongues or like sickles
The blades have been pulled from their sheaths
The backs of the clouds now upturned
They herd from pink seas
They make their untouchable stream
       through regions of steep emptiness
       against which the trees have their gestures
Drop down, drop down toward me
your little sleek scars
Make your bed in rough cedars
clangor of darks numbering in
clusters of trunks and spoked lungs
the thistles that work at the gums

© 2001 Emily Wilson and Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. “Winter Journal: Threshed Blue, Cardings, Dim Tonsils” originally appeared in Wilson’s collection The Keep, which was published in 2001 by University of Iowa Press.

Emily Wilson studied at Harvard University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has taught at the latter, as well as at Colby College, Grinnell College, and the University of Montana. Wilson is the author of four poetry collections: The Keep (University of Iowa Press, 2001); Morpho Terrestre (2006), a limited edition book featuring artwork by Sara Langworthy; Micrographia (University of Iowa Press, 2010); and The Great Medieval Yellows (Canarium Books, 2015).

Writing for Boston Review, James Galvin said of Wilson: “Generous in her spareness, clear in her complexity, matching wildness of diction with precision of sense, nervousness with nerve, her poems are not written for analysis, perhaps not even for approval. As we watch poetical heresies turn into orthodoxies, it becomes clear, especially in a poet like Wilson, that only originality, a signature style, remains steadfastly heretical.”

Poem for the Day: November 20th, 2021

Chorus Attempting to Interpret Unearthed Fragments of Their Play by Carolina Ebeid

Can you let go the concern
for how it began      what happened

Here the word house remains
A reddening (      ) near house

To describe the sounds
coming in      A human voice
barks through the window

the same voice      like horsehair
stretched along the bow drawn
across the strings

Where the action is missing
we place (      ) A girl pours out

water from a pail flung up
so that the water      arches
into a sickle in an instant
of daylight

The word swallows      as a complaint
of swallows raiding the air
suddenly thick with gnats

When you notice the ash
you will mutter ash
& it will appear again: ash
on everything, behind the ears ash

Maybe this shadow belongs
to the house at 4:30
Shadow is a length of gauze
loosened over the garden

It began with blizzards
for nine hours

A cleft on the ceiling
or a cleft in the chest
No matter, a cleft let
the weather in

Here is a description
of a face in anger
a weather of arrows 

Instead of counting sheep
the injured man folds clothes
in his head into heaps

Separate what is missing
from what’s disappeared

(here has been eaten by silverfish)
We are left to think of (      )

as the space between falling
asleep & waking up
Swallow can be a passage

the gullet, throat,
a grave in the ground
We’re surrounded by swallows

that open (      ) so fluent with bodies
nobodies

Here there was a story
& we were part of the after-
waves in a disaster

braiding wreaths of roadside flowers

The violet ones we’ll call purple daughters
The white ones: asylum lights

Ebeid earned her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and is pursuing her Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Denver. She currently lives in Colorado where she teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. She also serves as poetry editor at The Rumpus and edits (with her husband, Jeffrey Pethybridge) Visible Binary, an online journal specializing in experimental poetics and avant-garde expression. She has been published in numerous journals both in print and online and has been awarded multiple fellowships, among them fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

*You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior* by Carolina Ebeid

She is the author of the poetry collection You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior, which was published in 2016 by Noemi Press and is available to purchase through Small Press Distribution.

Poem for the Day: November 19th, 2021

Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Public domain. “Nothing Gold Can Stay” was originally published in October 1923 in The Yale Review. It was also included in Frost’s collection New Hampshire, which was published that same year by Henry Holt and for which Robert Frost won the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Poem for the Day: November 18th, 2021

This Is Not a Small Voice by Sonia Sanchez

This is not a small voice
you hear               this is a large
voice coming out of these cities.
This is the voice of LaTanya.
Kadesha. Shaniqua. This
is the voice of Antoine.
Darryl. Shaquille.
Running over waters
navigating the hallways
of our schools spilling out
on the corners of our cities and
no epitaphs spill out of their river mouths.

This is not a small love
you hear               this is a large
love, a passion for kissing learning
on its face.
This is a love that crowns the feet with hands
that nourishes, conceives, feels the water sails
mends the children,
folds them inside our history where they
toast more than the flesh
where they suck the bones of the alphabet
and spit out closed vowels.
This is a love colored with iron and lace.
This is a love initialed Black Genius.

This is not a small voice
you hear.

Poem for the Day: November 17th, 2021

*A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems* by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

In Golden Gate Park That Day… by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

In Golden Gate Park that day
                           a man and his wife were coming along   
         thru the enormous meadow
                           which was the meadow of the world   
He was wearing green suspenders
                              and carrying an old beat-up flute
                                                                        in one hand   
      while his wife had a bunch of grapes
                                  which she kept handing out
                                                                         individually   
                                                      to various squirrels
                                                                           as if each   
                                                             were a little joke

      And then the two of them came on
                                                thru the enormous meadow   
which was the meadow of the world
                                                 and then
            at a very still spot where the trees dreamed
         and seemed to have been waiting thru all time
                                                                            for them   
             they sat down together on the grass
                                              without looking at each other   
                and ate oranges
                                    without looking at each other
                                                            and put the peels   
             in a basket which they seemed
                                       to have brought for that purpose   
                  without looking at each other

      And then
                  he took his shirt and undershirt off   
       but kept his hat on
                                    sideways
                                                and without saying anything   
             fell asleep under it
                                           And his wife just sat there looking   
at the birds which flew about
   calling to each other
                           in the stilly air
      as if they were questioning existence
                   or trying to recall something forgotten

But then finally
                   she too lay down flat
                                                and just lay there looking up   
                                                                               at nothing   
                        yet fingering the old flute
                                                                which nobody played
                            and finally looking over
                                                                at him
                  without any particular expression
                                                               except a certain awful look   
                        of terrible depression

© 1958 Lawrence Ferlinghetti. “In Golden Gate Park That Day…” first appeared in Ferlinghetti’s collection A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems, which was published in 1958 by New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Poem for the Day: November 16th, 2021

Retired Ballerinas, Central Park West by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Retired ballerinas on winter afternoons   
          walking their dogs
                      in Central Park West
    (or their cats on leashes—
       the cats themselves old highwire artists)   
The ballerinas
                leap and pirouette
                           through Columbus Circle   
         while winos on park benches
               (laid back like drunken Goudonovs)   
            hear the taxis trumpet together
               like horsemen of the apocalypse   
                               in the dusk of the gods   
It is the final witching hour
                when swains are full of swan songs   
    And all return through the dark dusk   
                to their bright cells
                                  in glass highrises
      or sit down to oval cigarettes and cakes   
                              in the Russian Tea Room   
    or climb four flights to back rooms
                                 in Westside brownstones   
               where faded playbill photos
                        fall peeling from their frames   
                            like last year’s autumn leaves

© 1981 Lawrence Ferlinghetti. “Retired Ballerinas, Central Park West” appears in Ferlinghetti’s collection These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems, which was published in 1993 by New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Poem for the Day: November 15th, 2021

[you fit into me] by Margaret Atwood

you fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

© 1971 Margaret Atwood. “you fit into me” originally appeared in Atwood’s collection Power Politics, which was published in 1971 by House of Anansi Books. Margaret Atwood (1939-) is one of the world’s most beloved writers with more than seventy published works to her credit. You can find a full bibliography of her works here.

Poem for the Day: November 14th, 2021

Lines Written Near San Francisco by Louis Simpson

I wake and feel the city trembling.
Yes, there is something unsettled in the air   
And the earth is uncertain.

And so it was for the tenor Caruso.
He couldn’t sleep—you know how the ovation   
Rings in your ears, and you re-sing your part.

And then the ceiling trembled
And the floor moved. He ran into the street.   
Never had Naples given him such a reception!

The air was darker than Vesuvius.   
“O mamma mia,”
He cried, “I’ve lost my voice!”

At that moment the hideous voice of Culture,   
Hysterical woman, thrashing her arms and legs,   
Shrieked from the ruins.

At that moment everyone became a performer.   
Otello and Don Giovanni   
And Figaro strode on the midmost stage.

In the high window of a burning castle   
Lucia raved. Black horses
Plunged through fire, dragging the wild bells.

The curtains were wrapped in smoke. Tin swords   
Were melting; masks and ruffs
Burned—and the costumes of the peasants’ chorus.

Night fell. The white moon rose   
And sank in the Pacific. The tremors   
Passed under the waves. And Death rested.


2
Now, as we stand idle,
Watching the silent, bowler-hatted man,
The engineer, who writes in the smoking field;

Now as he hands the paper to a boy,
Who takes it and runs to a group of waiting men,   
And they disperse and move toward their wagons,

Mules bray and the wagons move—
Wait! Before you start
(Already the wheels are rattling on the stones)

Say, did your fathers cross the dry Sierras   
To build another London?
Do Americans always have to be second-rate?

Wait! For there are spirits
In the earth itself, or the air, or sea.   
Where are the aboriginal American devils?

Cloud shadows, pine shadows
Falling across the bright Pacific bay ...   
(Already they have nailed rough boards together)

Wait only for the wind
That rustles in the eucalyptus tree.   
Wait only for the light

That trembles on the petals of a rose.
(The mortar sets—banks are the first to stand)   
Wait for a rose, and you may wait forever.

The silent man mops his head and drinks   
Cold lemonade. “San Francisco   
Is a city second only to Paris.”


3
Every night, at the end of America
We taste our wine, looking at the Pacific.   
How sad it is, the end of America!

While we were waiting for the land   
They’d finished it—with gas drums
On the hilltops, cheap housing in the valleys

Where lives are mean and wretched.   
But the banks thrive and the realtors   
Rejoice—they have their America.

Still, there is something unsettled in the air.   
Out there on the Pacific   
There’s no America but the Marines.

Whitman was wrong about the People,
But right about himself. The land is within.
At the end of the open road we come to ourselves.

Though mad Columbus follows the sun   
Into the sea, we cannot follow.
We must remain, to serve the returning sun,

And to set tables for death.
For we are the colonists of Death—
Not, as some think, of the English.

And we are preparing thrones for him to sit,   
Poems to read, and beds   
In which it may please him to rest.

This is the land
The pioneers looked for, shading their eyes   
Against the sun—a murmur of serious life.

© 1988 Louis Simpson. “Lines Written Near San Francisco” first appeared in Simpson’s Collected Poems, which was published in 1988 by Paragon House. Louis Simpson (1923-2012) was born in Kingston, Jamaica and moved to the United States when he was 17 years old to study at Columbia University. Though his studies were briefly interrupted by military service, he eventually returned to New York and worked for a time as an editor before earning his Ph.D. A contemporary of poets like Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, Simpson won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1964 for his collection At the End of the Open Road.

Tag: daily poems