poems for cento app

poems

Occasional Poem
BY JACQUELINE WOODSON
Ms. Marcus says that an occasional poem is a poem
written about something
important
or special
that's gonna happen
or already did.
Think of a specific occasion, she says—and write about it.

Like what?! Lamont asks.
He's all slouched down in his seat.
I don't feel like writing about no occasion.

How about your birthday? Ms. Marcus says.
What about it? Just a birthday. Comes in June and it ain't
June, Lamont says. As a matter of fact,
he says, it's January and it's snowing.
Then his voice gets real low and he says
And when it's January and all cold like this
feels like June's a long, long ways away.

The whole class looks at Ms. Marcus.
Some of the kids are nodding.
Outside the sky looks like it's made out of metal
and the cold, cold air is rattling the windowpanes
and coming underneath them too.

I seen Lamont's coat.
It's gray and the sleeves are too short.
It's down but it looks like a lot of the feathers fell out
a long time ago.
Ms. Marcus got a nice coat.
It's down too but real puffy so
maybe when she's inside it
she can't even tell January from June.

Then write about January, Ms. Marcus says, that's
an occasion.
But she looks a little bit sad when she says it
Like she's sorry she ever brought the whole
occasional poem thing up.

I was gonna write about Mama's funeral
but Lamont and Ms. Marcus going back and forth
zapped all the ideas from my head.

I guess them arguing
on a Tuesday in January's an occasion
So I guess this is an occasional poem.

Jacqueline Woodson, "Occasional Poem" from Locomotion. Copyright © 2003 by Jacqueline Woodson. Used by permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Source: Locomotion (Puffin Books)
//
Cordelia, or ‘A Poem Should Not Mean, But Be’
BY VERONICA FORREST-THOMSON
To those who kiss in fear that they shall never kiss again

To those that love with fear that they shall never love again

To such I dedicate this rhyme and what it may contain.

None of us will ever take the transiberian train

Which makes a very satisfactory refrain

Especially as I can repeat it over and over again

Which is the main use of the refrain.
 

I with no middle flight intend the truth to speak out plain
Of honour truth and love gone by that has come back again
The fact is one grows weary of the love that comes again.
I may not know much about gods but I know that
Eros is a strong purple god.
And that there is a point where incest becomes
Tradition. I don’t mean that literally;
I don’t love my brother or he me.
We have been mutually avoiding each other
For years and will continue to do so.
Even I know about cross words—
Something. The word you want is Dante.
He said he loved Beatrice. Whatever he did
He didn’t love Beatrice. At least the
Beatrice Portinari whom history gives.
He knew her and the point about all these
Florentines is that they all were
Killing each other or dying of rapid
Consumption. Beatrice died; Rossetti painted her
Cutting Dante in the street. Botticelli
Painted the rest: Simonetta Vespucci
Died of a rapid consumption (age 23)
Giuliano dei Medici murdered by the altar rail (age 19)
Guido Cavalcanti died in exile (age 35)
Dante dei Aligeri died in exile (age 90)
Lorenzo dei Medici who lives for ever
Since he stayed there and commissioned
The paintings, and poems and statues
And if he also commissioned the deaths
I don’t blame him. He didn’t feel
Very magnificent when his brother
Was murdered in sanctuary.
Do you realise whoever did that
Would be excommunicated if, that is, if
He hadn’t also murdered the papal legate,
His best friend.
I have lived long enough having seen one thing;
That term has an end.
It was getting dark on the platform of nowhere
When I who was anxious and sad came to you
Out of the rain. Out of the sound of the cold
Wind that blows time before and time after
Even Provence knows.
And as for this line I stole it from T.S. Eliot
And Ezra Pound and A.C. Swinburne. All very good
Poets to steal from since they are all three dead.
The love that is must always just contain
The glory of the love that was whatever be the pain.
We played at mates and mating and stopped up the drain.
Hear me. O Mister Poster I know
You have burnt me too brown you must boil me again
You simply have no notion how delightful it will
Be when they pick us up and throw us with the lobsters out to sea.
It is the lark, my love, and not the nightingale.
None of us will ever take the trans-siberian train.
She wanted to and was collecting people who did
I thought I did but now I know I don’t.
It is the lark, my love, and not the nightingale.
In fact I’ve never heard either bird
But people say they sound very similar.
And what the devil were Romeo and Juliet
About wasting their last moments
Listening to birds. Hah.
I like kicking up larks or
Larking up kicks. So do most poets
Including J.H. Prynne, the memorable poet
Who is happy to say that the U.L.
Has got his middle name wrong.
He claims it stands for Hah
But there is a limit. I know it all.
Riddle me riddle randy ree
Round and round in the snotgreen sea
When they pick us up and throw us
With the Joyces out to sea.
Tell us tale of Troy’s downfall
We all would have liked to have been there.
The infernal Odyssos. He it was whose bile
Stirred up by envy and revenge destroyed
The mother of womankind. And Swinburne
Got a kick out of pain but I don’t
I just get kicked.
I wish I didn’t keep sounding like Richard the Third
Except that if I don't I tend to sound
Like Richard the Second. And who wants that.
I suppose I must sound like Richard the First.
What did he do?
Nothing I take it
I get a kick out of larking up nightingales.
Prynne says that if I don’t come back
Safe from Sicily by the thirtieth April
They will send a posse.
March is the cruellest station
Taking on bullying men
And were you really afraid they would rape you?
No. I thought there would be grave difficulties.
Not just that I was actively opposed
And so was every other man, woman and child
On that there train.
I was afraid they would kill me.
I may look stupid but I’m not
So simple as to think your name
Is Elizabeth Brown. Well. All right
My name is Veronica Forrest-Thomson.
Agamemnon was King of the Achaians at the time,
Priam, of the Trojans, Theseus, of the Athenians.
And like all Good Kings, they are dead.
In my day it was the done thing to side
With the Trojans for no better reason
Than that they lost. But me I back
Winners every time.
Mary Shelley may go to hell
As she thought she was going to anyway
And take Frankinsense with her.
I want her husband, alive and well.
Who, of course, also got killed.
Hardly surprising if he made a habit
Of reading Aiscylos while sailing.
He wasn’t reading Aiscylos when he drowned.
Got cremated like a pagan king.
Not Agamemnon who, as I said, was king at the time
And lost, murderer of his daughter
Killed by his wife and (other) daughter.
Killed by his death killing his life.
Stabbed in the back in his bath.
I think of it every time I have a bath.
Though I have no sympathy at all
For that daughter and son.
I think it is unfair that Helen
Had everything, immortal beauty,
Lovers, cities destroyed and battles
Fought about her. And she just came home
And calmly went around being Menelaus' wife
While her twin sister, Clytemnestra
Was murdered by her son and daughter.
And the Athenians acquitted them.
They would do, a nation of sophists.
Always betraying their allies and torturing
Women and children and enslaving people.
They even killed Socrates, their one good man,
Then Plato tried to be a philosopher king.
And got enslaved for his pains.
I wish they had kept him enslaved.
He escaped, of course, and wrote books
About how he would do it better
If he was in charge. All poets do that.
They are just as incompetent as the rest
If they try to organise things.
As witness my own efforts in that direction
Or those of my avatar, Agamemnon,
Who, as I say came home and was killed in his bath
Killing his wife and his daughter.
And if you don’t know about this you ought to.
Read it in the Iliad, read it in the Odyssey,
Do not read it in Freud who is always wrong
Although even Freud didn’t deserve a son like Lacan.
But first and last read me, the beloved
Who was killed in the general slaughter.
But rise again like John Donne
(read him too) I, Helen, I Iseult, I Guenevere,
I Clytemnestra and many more to come.
I did it, I myself, killing the King my father
Killing the King my mother, joining the King my brother.
It is the kick, my love, and not the nightingale
I like larking up kicks myself
But not kicking.
They that have power to hurt and do so
Should not be blamed by Shakespeare or anyone else
For hurting though such is the race of poets
That they will blame them anyway.
However it is a pretty productive process
Especially if one may be plumber as well as poet
And thus unstop the drain as well as writing
Poetic Artifice “Pain stopped play” and
Several other books and poems including
1974 and All That (seriously though)
I, Veronica did it, truth-finding, truth-seeking
Muck-raking, bringing victory.
It was a horse, of course, in which the warriors hid
Pretending to bring peace
And they wouldn’t speak to me, crouching in the dark
Like a lot of fools, hearing the voice of the goddess
In an alien city, I speak your tongue in my own city:
Cambridge or Camelot and you won’t listen to me
Advised, of course, by Odyssos, solicitor, betrayer.
And when they had killed all the men, raped all the women etc.
Agamemnon came home and, as I said, was stabbed by his wife
In his bath. Anyway it is the lark, my love,
And not the nightingale. I follow the sacred footsteps of
Hippolyta, the blest, the best
That has been said or spoken well in any tongue
Read John Donne—the memorable dun.
Don’t read Matthew Arnold; he’s a fool
I am not Prince Thomas Aquinas F.H. Eliot
I am not an attendant lord either.
I am the king who lives.
Spring surprised us, running through the market square
And we stopped in Prynne’s rooms in a shower of pain
And went on in sunlight into the University Library
And ate yogurt and talked for an hour.
You, You, grab the reins.
Drink as much as you can and love as much as you can
And work as much as you can
For you can’t do anything when you are dead.
 
The motto of this poem heed
And do you it employ:
Waste not and want not while you’re here
The possibles of joy.
//


The Ragpickers' Wine
BY CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
TRANSLATED BY C. F. MACINTYRE
In the muddy maze of some old neighborhood,
Often, where the street lamp gleams like blood,
As the wind whips the flame, rattles the glass,
Where human beings ferment in a stormy mass,

One sees a ragpicker knocking against the walls,
Paying no heed to the spies of the cops, his thralls,
But stumbling like a poet lost in dreams;
He pours his heart out in stupendous schemes.

He takes great oaths and dictates sublime laws,
Casts down the wicked, aids the victims' cause;
Beneath the sky, like a vast canopy,
He is drunken of his splendid qualities.

Yes, these people, plagued by household cares,
Bruised by hard work, tormented by their years,
Each bent double by the junk he carries,
The jumbled vomit of enormous Paris,—

They come back, perfumed with the smell of stale
Wine-barrels, followed by old comrades, pale
From war, mustaches like limp flags, to march
With banners, flowers, through the triumphal arch

Erected for them, by some magic touch!
And in the dazzling, deafening debauch
Of bugles, sunlight, of huzzas and drum,
Bring glory to the love-drunk folks at home!

Even so, wine pours its gold to frivolous
Humanity, a shining Pactolus;
Then through man's throat of high exploits it sings
And by its gifts reigns like authentic kings.

To lull these wretches' sloth and drown the hate
Of all who mutely die, compassionate,
God has created sleep's oblivion;
Man added Wine, divine child of the Sun.
//
from   Citizen: “You are in the dark, in the car...” 
Launch Audio in a New Window

BY CLAUDIA RANKINE
/ 
 
You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there.
 
You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having.
 
Why do you feel okay saying this to me? You wish the light would turn red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into the car ahead of you, be propelled forward so quickly both your faces would suddenly be exposed to the wind.
 
As usual you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headache producing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now as the night darkens 
and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going.
 
/
 
When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists a medical term — John Henryism — for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the build up of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in 
silence you are bucking the trend.
 
/
 
When the stranger asks, Why do you care? you just stand there staring at him. He has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks as niggers. Hey, I am standing right here, you responded, not necessarily expecting him to turn to you.
 
He is holding the lidded paper cup in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. They are just being kids. Come on, no need to get all KKK on them, you say.
 
Now there you go, he responds.
 
The people around you have turned away from their screens. The teenagers are on pause. There I go? you ask, feeling irritation begin to rain down. Yes, and something about hearing yourself repeating this stranger’s accusation in a voice usually reserved for your partner makes you smile.
 
/
 
A man knocked over her son in the subway. You feel your own body wince. He’s okay, but the son of a bitch kept walking. She says she grabbed the stranger’s arm and told him to apologize: I told him to look at the boy and apologize. And yes, you want it to stop, you want the black child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet and be brushed off, not brushed off  by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself.
 
The beautiful thing is that a group of men began to stand behind me like a fleet of  bodyguards, she says, like newly found uncles and brothers.
 
/
 
The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone. Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked.
 
At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house. What are you doing in my yard?
 
It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry.
 
I am so sorry, so, so sorry.

//
The Sadness of a Dog
BY VIVEK NARAYANAN
Somehow pesters the sadness of
                              a dog—that ungiven guardedness
                              at first report of day
               in a slyly chosen alley;
not the cat hidden in the bougainvillaea blossom,
not the bull barefaced into the lissome
 
highway, it’s a madness
                              less to do with mordant Englishness
                              in a glum phototropic
               teat, more a perky realpolitik
in over-familiar mottled skin. That hoarse howl
at the garden’s shrub-ridden edge, that shawl
 
a woman knits, waiting for a man
                              who’s not her man—not a man at all—then
                              crouching by the bedpost
               mewling.
 
                                              *
 
                              When to be tame is at most
a disavowal in proxy to the master’s unacknowledged
fear: knowing fear as part of privilege,
 
knowing privilege a state
                              infeasible, the amenable innate
                              animal to whom
               we assign the affectionate name
—Bango, Napoleon, Spot—bounding resolutely
into the black-red greenness of the middle sea—
 
 
believes itself to be human
                              in dogly garb, a non-veg incarnation
                              of mortal virtue, no less
               than a wife, child, comrade in armless
charms. We nurture this notion, lure it to the rug.
 
                                              *
 
So even if it steal to the street trailing a fog-
 
-dust deliberate, choosing mange
                              over matter to be free—deranged,
                              sheltering in a truck’s
               dappled shade, but dreading the hunger-dusk
or charity at noon—if it claim its independence
among curs, dodging some dog-chief, teeth clenched,
 
lurking in building societies—
                              it still will count the hand that carries
                              the house in a fist,
               or follow, for a glance, a humanist.
 
Paused between doorstep and forest, both gone;
kept in equilibrium, the sadness of a dog.
 

Vivek Narayanan, "The Sadness of a Dog" from Universal Beach.  Copyright © 2011 by Vivek Narayanan.  Reprinted by permission of the author.
Source: Universal Beach (ingirumimusnocte, 2011)
//
Becoming Seventy
BY JOY HARJO

Knoxville, December 27, 2016, for Marilyn Kallet’s 70th birthday.
This poem was constructed to carry any memory you want to hold close.

We
 
arrived
 
when the days
 
grew legs of night.
 
Chocolates were offered.
 
We ate latkes for hours
 
to celebrate light and friends.
 
We will keep going despite dark
 
or a madman in a white house dream.
 
Let’s talk about something else said the dog
 
who begs faithfully at the door of goodwill:
 
a biscuit will do, a voice of reason, meat sticks — 
 
I dreamed all of this I told her, you, me, and Paris — 
 
it was impossible to make it through the tragedy
 
without poetry. What are we without winds becoming words?
 
Becoming old children born to children born to sing us into
 
love. Another level of love, beyond the neighbor’s holiday light
 
display proclaiming goodwill to all men who have lost their way in the dark
 
as they tried to find the car door, the bottle hidden behind the seat, reason
 
to keep on going past all the times they failed at sharing love, love. It’s weak they think — 
 
or some romantic bullshit, a movie set propped up behind on slats, said the wizard
 
of junk understanding who pretends to be the wise all-knowing dog behind a cheap fan.
 
It’s in the plan for the new world straining to break through the floor of this one, said the Angel of
 
All-That-You-Know-and-Forgot-and-Will-Find, as she flutters the edge of your mind when you try to
 
sing the blues to the future of everything that might happen and will. All the losses come tumbling
 
down, down, down at three in the morning as do all the shouldn’t-haves or should-haves. It doesn’t matter, girl —
 
I’ll be here to pick you up, said Memory, in her red shoes, and the dress that showed off brown legs. When you met
 
him at the age you have always loved, hair perfect with a little wave, and that shine in your skin from believing what was
 
impossible was possible, you were not afraid. You stood up in love in a French story and there fell ever
 
a light rain as you crossed the Seine to meet him for café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. You wrote a poem beneath the tender
 
skin from your ribs to your hip bone, in the slender then, and you are still writing that song to convince the sweetness of every
 
bit of straggling moonlight, star and sunlight to become words in your mouth, in your kiss — that kiss that will never die, you will all
 
ways fall in love. It doesn’t matter how old, how many days, hours, or memories, we can fall in love over and over
 
again. The Seine or Tennessee or any river with a soul knows the depths descending when it comes to seeing the sun or moon stare
 
back, without shame, remorse, or guilt. This is what I remember she told her husband when they bedded down that night in the house that would begin
 
marriage. That house was built of twenty-four doves, rugs from India, cooking recipes from seven generations of mothers and their sisters,
 
and wave upon wave of tears, and the concrete of resolution for the steps that continue all the way to the heavens, past guardian dogs, dog
 
after dog to protect. They are humble earth angels, and the rowdiest, even nasty. You try and lick yourself like that, imagine. And the Old
 
Woman laughed as she slipped off her cheap shoes and parked them under the bed that lies at the center of the garden of good and evil. She’d seen it all. Done it
 
more than once. Tonight, she just wanted a good sleep, and picked up the book of poetry by her bed, which was over a journal she kept when her mother was dying.
 
These words from May Sarton she kept in the fourth room of her heart, “Love, come upon him warily and deep / For if he startle first it were as well / to bind a fox’s
 
throat with a gold bell /As hold him when it is his will to leap.” And she considered that every line of a poem was a lead line into the spirit world to capture a
 
bit of memory, pieces of gold confetti, a kind of celebration. We all want to be remembered, even memory, even the way the light came in the kitchen
 
window, when her mother turned up the dial on that cool mist color 
of a radio, when memory crossed the path of longing and took 
mother’s arm and she put down her apron
 
said, “I don’t mind if I do,” and they danced, you watching, as you began your own cache of remembering. Already you had stored the taste of mother as milk, father as a labor
 
of sweat and love, and night as a lonely boat of stars that took you into who you were before you slid through the hips of the story. There are no words when you cross the
 
gate of forbidden waters, or is it a sheer scarf of the finest silk, or is it something else that causes you to forget. Nothing is ever forgotten says the god of remembering
 
who protects the heartbeat of every little cell of knowing from the Antarctic to the soft spot at the top of this planetary baby. Oh baby, come here, let me tell you the story
 
of the party you will never forget, no matter where you go, where you are, or where you will be when you cross the line and say, no more. No more greedy kings, no more disappointments, no more orphans,
 
or thefts of souls or lands, no more killing for the sport of killing. No more, no more, except more of the story so I will understand exactly what I am doing here, and why, she said to the fox
 
guardian who took her arm to help her cross the road that was given to the care of Natives who made sure the earth spirits were fed with songs, and the other things they loved to eat. They like sweets, cookies, and flowers.
 
It was getting late and the fox guardian picked up her books as she hurried through the streets of strife. But it wasn’t getting late. There was no late, only a plate of tamales on the counter waiting to be
 
or not to be. At this age, said the fox, we are closer to the not to be, which is the to be in the fields of sweet grasses. Wherever you are, enjoy the evening, how the sun walks the horizon before cross
 
sing over to be, and we then exist under the realm of the moon. There’s where fears slay us, in the dark of the howling mind. We all battle. Befriend them, the moon said as a crab skittered under her skirt, her daughter in
 
the high chair, waiting for cereal and toast. What a girl she turned out to be, a willow tree, a blessing to the winds, to her family. There she is married, and we start the story all over again, said her father
 
in a toast to the happiness of who we are and who we are becoming as Change in a new model sedan whips it down the freeway toward the generations that follow, one after another in the original
 
lands of the Mvskoke who are still here. Nobody goes anywhere though we are always leaving and returning. It’s a ceremony. Sunrise occurs everywhere, in lizard time, human time, or a fern uncurling time. We
 
instinctually reach for light food, we digest it, make love, art or 
trouble of it. The sun crowns us at noon. The whole earth is a queen. Then there are always goodbyes. At sunset say goodbye to hurt, to suffering, to the pain you caused others,
 
or yourself. Goodbye, goodbye, to Carrie Fisher, the Star Wars phenomenon, and George Michael, the singer. They were planets in our emotional universe. Some of my memories are opened by the image of love on screen in an
 
imagined future, or broken open when the sax solo of “Careless Whisper” blows through the communal heart. Yes, there’s a cosmic consciousness. Jung named it but it was there long before named by Vedic and Mvskoke scientists. And, there is
 
a cosmic hearteousness — for the heart is the higher mind and nothing can be forgotten there, no ever or ever. How do I sing this so 
I don’t forget? Ask the poets. Each word is a box that can be opened or closed. Then a train of words, phrases
 
garnered by music and the need for rhythm to organize chaos. Like right here, now, in this poem is the transition phase. I remembered it while giving birth, summer sun bearing down on the city melting asphalt but there we were, my daughter
 
and I, at the door between worlds. I was happier than ever before to welcome her, happiness was the path she chose to enter, and 
I couldn’t push yet, not yet, and then there appeared a pool of the 
bluest water. We waited there for a breath
 
to catch up, and then it did, and she took it that girl who was beautiful beyond dolphin dreaming, and we made it, we did, to the other side of suffering. This is the story our mothers tell but we couldn’t hear it in our ears stuffed with Barbie advertising,
 
with our mothers’ own loathing set in place by patriarchal scripture, the smothering rules to stop insurrection by domesticated slaves, or wives. It hurt everybody. The fathers cannot know what they are feeling in such a spiritual backwash. Worship
 
boxes set into place by the need for money and power will not beget freedom. Only warships. For freedom, freedom, oh freedom sang the slaves, the oar rhythm of the blues lifting up the spirits of peoples whose bodies were worn out, or destroyed by a man’s slash,
 
hit of greed. This is our memory too, said America. Heredity is a field of blood, celebration, and forgetfulness. Don’t take on more than you can carry, said the eagle to his twin sons, fighting each other in the sky over a fox, dangling between
 
them. It’s that time of the year, when we eat tamales and latkes. We light candles, fires to make the way for a newborn child, for fresh 
understanding. Demons will try to make houses out of jealousy, anger, 
pride, greed, or more destructive material. They place them in a
 
part of the body that will hold them: liver, heart, knee, or brain. So, my friend, let’s let that go, for joy, for chocolates made of ashes, mangos, grapefruit, or chili from Oaxaca, for sparkling wine from Spain, for these children who show up in our dreams and want to live at any cost because
 
we are here to feed them joy. Your soul is so finely woven the silkworms went on strike, said the mulberry tree. We all have mulberry trees in the memory yard. They hold the place for skinned knees earned by small braveries, cousins you love who are gone, a father cutting a watermelon in the summer on the porch, and a mother so in love that her heart breaks — it will never be the same, yet all memory bends to fit. The heart has uncountable rooms. We turn to leave here, and so will the hedgehog who makes a home next to that porch. We become birds, poems.
Source: Poetry (September 2017)
//
Perhaps the World Ends Here 
Launch Audio in a New Window

BY JOY HARJO
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

"Perhaps the World Ends Here" from The Woman Who Fell From the Sky by Joy Harjo. Copyright © 1994 by Joy Harjo. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., www.wwnorton.com.
Source: The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1994)


"Are you the new person drawn toward me?"
BY WALT WHITMAN
Are you the new person drawn toward me? 
To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose; 
Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal? 
Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover? 
Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy’d satisfaction? 
Do you think I am trusty and faithful? 
Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me? 
Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man? 
Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion? 
//
The morns are meeker than they were - (32)
BY EMILY DICKINSON
The morns are meeker than they were - 
The nuts are getting brown -
The berry’s cheek is plumper -
The rose is out of town. 
 
The maple wears a gayer scarf -
The field a scarlet gown -
Lest I sh'd be old-fashioned 
I’ll put a trinket on.