Poem for the Day: September 18th, 2021

Miracle Removal by Kevin Young

                             i.m. Helen Hill 

This world is rigged
with ruin.

Rain,
and its remains.

In the yard drought
fills the empty jars—

houses on stilts
still lean.

Sweet as revenge, the grass
devours the abandoned

dream house, unfinished kitchen
where cows now graze.

What angels
I would wrestle.

Kevin Young currently serves as the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and has been the poetry editor at The New Yorker since 2017. He was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020. He previously served as the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His most recent collection, Stones: Poems, will be released on September 28th, 2021 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group and is now available to preorder wherever books are sold.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Poem for the Day: September 17th, 2021

won’t you celebrate with me by Lucille Clifton

won’t you celebrate with me 
what i have shaped into 
a kind of life? i had no model. 
born in babylon 
both nonwhite and woman 
what did i see to be except myself? 
i made it up 
here on this bridge between 
starshine and clay, 
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate 
with me that everyday 
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

Lucille Clifton was born exactly 64 days after my paternal grandmother, on June 27th, 1936. She was discovered by Langston Hughes, who was shown her poetry by Ishmael Reed, himself an acclaimed Black poet and novelist. Clifton was extremely prolific during her writing career, having more than thirty works published, including poetry collections, children’s books, and memoirs. In addition to many other accolades and awards, she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2007. The Book of Light, the collection from which today’s poem was taken, is available to purchase wherever books are sold.

Poem for the Day: September 16th, 2021

Mercy Invincibility by Vidyan Ravinthiran

“How often
have our lives known that brief
immunity – the crisis which emits
a stretch of ardent unreflective life?”

We’re playing Super Mario. This level’s
designed for one player and not two.
The quick-collapsing platforms mean one always falls.
But when he hits the spikes he starts to flash.
The plumber turns invincible as a firewalker.
A chance to extricate oneself. How often
have our lives known that brief
immunity – the crisis which emits
a stretch of ardent unreflective life?
It’s afterwards that hurts. Time salts all wounds.
You come to realise: that really happened.
But first there’s a quick flick of the stick
as you leap my glimmering sprite between the spikes
and urge me onwards through a wall of fire.

© 2018 Vidyan Ravinthiran. Mercy Invincibility was first published in the Summer 2018 issue of The Poetry Review. Vidyan Ravinthiran is the author of Grun-tu-molani, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize, and the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize; Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic, which won both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism; and The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here, which won a Northern Writers Award as well as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection and the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize.

Poem for the Day: September 15th, 2021

Someone Somewhere is Googling “Stonewall,” Inauguration Day 2013 by Stephen S. Mills

A screen is filling with black and white images:
police officers, drag queens, and a few actual 
stone walls. There are links to history pages, 
organizations that have taken the name,
and the website for the bar where it all began. 
A bar that now makes its money off of tourists 
paying homage to the riots, raising a gin 
and tonic to a movement that’s still not over,
but has changed direction. Today, people talk 
of marriage. Of becoming like everyone else. 
It’s cold outside and inside our Harlem 
apartment. A place that knows something 
about fighting, about surviving, about deciding 
how to be equal. Here on this day our computer 
screen is filled with a president taking a second 
term. A president we’ve fought to keep. 
A president willing to acknowledge our fight. 
We’ve learned to adapt, you and I. To find 
our own meaning. Our own way into love, 
sex, happiness. In the coming years, we’ll make 
choices, and yes, one day, we’ll probably be
legally tied to each other. Protected under 
the law. Written down in the history books. 
Two men. Two names. Two bodies. 
But that act, no matter how simple or elegant,
will never capture our lives, or our history,
or our desire to be undefined.

© 2013 Stephen S. Mills. Someone Somewhere is Googling “Stonewall,” Inauguration Day 2013 first appeared in the Summer 2013 issue of Referential Magazine. Stephen S. Mills is the author of He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices, which won the 2012 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry; A History of the Unmarried, which in 2015 was named to the American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow List; and Not Everything Thrown Starts a Revolution, which in 2019 was named to the American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow List. You can read more about Stephen and his work at his website.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Poem for the Day: September 14th, 2021

Note Home by Chloe Honum

Mother, you have never seen such snow, such emphasis on 
setting. So it is accurate to say my heart broke in the snow. 
One patient here is a Vietnam vet. His torso is hard like an 
old-fashioned suitcase. Kick my dog, he says, referring to his 
beloved animal over ten years dead, and I’ll kick your ass. The 
light is fluorescent. Everything hums. It is so important to go
on naming, even if all I said to you this winter was snow, snow,
snow.

Then Winter: Poems by Chloe Honum is available to order from Bull City Press.

Update

I had trouble getting today’s poem to format the way the author originally intended, so for clarity’s sake and to preserve the integrity of the line breaks, I am including an image of the poem taken by @ChelsDingman on Twitter, to whom I am indebted. Thank you, Chelsea!

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Poem for the Day: September 13th, 2021

Katrina by Patricia Smith

Weather is nothing until it reaches skin,
freezes dust, spits its little swords.
Kept to oceans, feeding only on salted water,
I was a rudderless woman in full tantrum,
throwing my body against worlds I wanted.
I never saw harm in lending that aches.
All I ever wanted to be
was a wet, gorgeous mistake,
a reason to crave shelter.

Her words are alchemical, an accelerant to the fire already burning inside my chest.

I love the way Patricia Smith uses the imagery of a hurricane as a metaphor for the ways in which she herself has embodied fury, longing, and destruction. I’ve never read any of her work that wasn’t breathtaking and even that seems too cheap a word to describe the effect her poetry has on me. Her words are alchemical, an accelerant to the fire already burning inside my chest. If you’ve not yet read any of her collections, today is the perfect day to start.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Poem for the Day: September 12th, 2021

Of The Empire by Mary Oliver

We will be known as a culture that feared death 
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity 
for the few and cared little for the penury of the 
many. We will be known as a culture that taught 
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke 
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a 
commodity. And they will say that this structure 
was held together politically, which it was, and 
they will say also that our politics was no more 
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of 
the heart, and that the heart, in those days, 
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

No one saw the world as clearly as did Mary Oliver, and no one loved it as fiercely as she did. She would hate what we’re continuing to do to our planet and to each other. What is wrong with a world in which people care more about lining their pockets with more money than they’ll ever need than they do about their fellow humans who are poor and hungry? What beats strangely in our hearts, that makes them so small, and hard, and full of meanness?

I think blind optimism is worse than cruel indifference. It sustains objections to the worst forms of suffering with a simpleton’s simper and the decontextualized murmurings of a seasoned gaslighter.

I won’t pretend to know the answers to these questions. I think blind optimism is worse than cruel indifference. It sustains objections to the worst forms of suffering with a simpleton’s simper and the decontextualized murmurings of a seasoned gaslighter. We are not without hope, but that hope must be doused with passion, and seasoned with care.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Quote for the Day: September 12th, 2021

You have so much potential within you. So many
gifts, it will blow your mind
So stop landfilling your soul. Stop overcrowding
your genius
Get naked with yourself. Look at your nakedness in
the mirror
This is it
Be naked. Live naked. Thrive naked. Fly naked.
Jessica Semaan, Child of the Moon

Poem for the Day: September 11th, 2021

Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats

I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.


II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.


III

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.


IV

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Eternal Summer

Eternal Summer by Fred Slusher

they only know what they have been given, which is a land maligned, a land deprived of its beasts of change.

sometimes i can just feel it:
warmth & all the other things 
i’ve never asked for seeping
into me, a violation to the x 
degree. what is wrong in a
world where one can’t shed 
the shackles of summer & 
sink into the blissful autumn 
like a child into a mountain of 
leaves? these children don’t
know the seasons. they only 
know what they have been 
given, which is a land maligned,
a land deprived of its beasts of 
change. if i had been told i’d 
be forced to live in an eternal 
summer, i would have remained 
in embryo, in ectoplasm, in
a dream had right before waking. 
when i see someone wearing a 
coat it pisses me off. i want to 
ask them what it is that chills 
them in a world on fire? i want to 
slap their smug self-satisfied grins 
until their ears ring. is speaking 
the truth now an act of unspeakable 
violence?

Haiku season is (temporarily) over, so I’m back to posting original non-haiku poetry on here. I wrote Eternal Summer in a fit of rage. I was sitting in my living room reading reports of the devastation caused by Hurricane Ida alongside reports about record-breaking temperatures on the West Coast and the increasing likelihood of more wildfires. We are seeing the first waves of the effects of climate change on our ecosystems, and some days I can’t help but feel a sense of utter despair over it.

We are seeing the first waves of the effects of climate change on our ecosystems, and some days I can’t help but feel a sense of utter despair over it.

Rather than acting expeditiously to help the world reach net zero carbon emissions, most governments, municipalities, and MNCs seem content to pay lip service to sustainability and clean energy initiatives while acting as if they have decades to figure this out—they don’t. Others seem to be banking on nascent carbon capture technologies to act as their get out of jail free card when what we really need is aggressive action now. Not tomorrow. Not in the next decade. Now. Our lives quite literally depend on it.

Wow, so this post is a prime example of how my ADHD brain works. I started off sharing a poem and ended on an urgent call-to-action on curbing the effects of climate change. All in a day’s work, my reader-friends.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.