Poetry

In the Oct. 21st issue of the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof  (with the help of the Poetry Society of America) announced the winners of his Trump poetry contest:

Richard Kenney, a published poet from Port Townsend, Wash., offered “A Prayer”:

Dear Generals Three:
If he asks for The Football,
Link arms: Take a knee.

Lisa Grunberger, an associate professor at Temple University who is Jewish, wrote about the vandalism of her house in Philadelphia. An excerpt:

A “J” spray-painted on my olive green house in South Philly,
Its white-hooked tail grazes my daughter’s head.

A skinhead, says my neighbor Jorge,
Un racist blanco, no entiendo,

Holding my hand inside his hand
Far longer than any gringo would.

He smells of sawdust and cologne.
I shoot a picture with my phone

Of my daughter underneath the “J.”
Evidence is always good to gather.

She traces the letter with her small finger.
She’s just learning about how letters

Make words, and words make sentences.
Doesn’t yet know sentences can kill:

Arbeit macht frei. Sentences can lie:
Make America Great Again. Sentences

Can heal: I have a dream. She’s fished
A pen from my bag and draws a “K” beside the “J.”

Advanced Placement students at Pittsburg High School in a high-poverty part of the San Francisco Bay Area offered several excellent poems. Natalie Calderon, a 17-year-old Latina student, wrote “Deception”:

America, the so-called land of the free
But is it still free if I take a knee?
Our president wants to “Make America Great Again”
But keeps putting roadblocks in the path of equality
I’m worried things will only get worse from here
I adjure to feel secure but how can I when
My so-called leader is acting so immature
My hope in humanity is fading
Because of all the degrading
My heart hurts as racism is pervading
I feel anger in my soul as it anchors my stomach
My spirit is damaged by the baggage of hate I carry
But I must stay strong for the struggles to come
I just hope my pride doesn’t go numb

Many entries attacked Trump, but not all. John Zengel of Asbury, N.J., says he’s a conservative who disagrees with Trump but thinks Democrats need to drop the condescension. He wrote this poem, “Perspective From a Hard-Working American,” to reflect the thinking of his father:

What the liberal elite don’t get
Is that Trump speaks my language.
If that makes me a racist, so be it.
I’m a hard-working American.

You say you love the poor,
But your sympathy goes to Africa,
And my taxes are given to takers.
What about hard-working Americans?

Your tree-huggers are after our jobs;
Your “values” are after our families;
Your diversity is after our God
Threatening hard-working Americans.

So go ahead, ignore us “deplorables”
And laugh at his scandals, his stupidity, his immorality, his hair.
But who will be laughing in ’20?
Us hard-working Americans.

Some of the verse was despairing, but Michael Collins of Salem, Ore., wrote about making a difference in “No Matter How Small”:

I’m sorry for my tone, of late.
It’s tiring, decrying hate,
And likely tiresome as well
But ever since the hammer fell
And Trump ascended to the throne
I’ve told myself my voice alone
Won’t make a difference, but that I
Should not interpret that: Don’t try.
The Whos that only Horton hears
In Dr. Seuss’ book reached ears
Besides the elephant’s when they
Cried all together, so, O.K.,
I’ll keep on shouting, We are here!
A waste? Perhaps, but it’s sincere.

In a similar vein, Lee Robinson, a retired lawyer in Comfort, Tex., ended her elegy on an uplifting note. Her poem, condensed here, is called “Who Says Trump and Poetry Are Incompatible?”

We know a poem can be maniacal, the best ones
Always unpredictable. Don’t poets sometimes rave?
Pound for example: profound, but mad as the Hatter,
And maybe a traitor. As for the tweets, if Dylan Thomas
Were still with us, might not he tweet his late-night sullen art?
Perhaps only poetry, after prose has failed us,
Is brave and big enough for this Trumpian time.
Think of Wordsworth, The world is too much with us,
Or Arnold: And we are here as on a darkling plain.
Dickinson would tell us to turn the TV off, the phone
And iPad too: The Soul selects her own Society.
Did Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock foretell our president
Come whiffling through the tulgey wood, and burbling…

But if I had to choose one poem to give to him,
I’d give him Angelou: You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

 

And before culture is de-funded in the U.S., some great poetry from Sharon Olds Odes (available through Knopf Poem-a-day):

Secondary Boycott Ode
I had never seen anything like it. I was
walking
out of the office of the braces doctor,
in the same building as the acne doctor,
I was on my way to the lunch counter
that had sandwiches on soft bread
with the crusts cut off—& people were
blocking
the doors, following each other around
in a circle, like our junior high marching
band,
& they were in the way, between me
& my sandwich. I went up to a lady who
was watching,
& asked her what was happening,
& she told me about the segregated
lunch counters in the South—this was
a secondary boycott, of Woolworth’s. & I
asked,
how do they choose who walks, & she said,
Anyone can. I had never seen anyone
saying no with their body, with their feet.
When I stepped toward the circle, a man
walked a little
faster, & a woman walked a little slower,
& there was a space for me, to sing
without making a sound, at last to be
unfaithful to my family,
stepping out on silence.

SWIMMING AFTER ELECTION NIGHT 11/8/16
On this morning the sun rises as they said it would. It does not seem possible on
this day that the body still floats. But as I get into the pool and push off from
concrete, my heavy heart doesn’t take me to the bottom. I’m buoyant in an
unexpected way. The warm water is welcoming as bathing after a day of
tumultuous sledding.

I thank the body for its resilience in the face of what is frightening and intolerable
today. In spite of its vulnerability, the mish-mash of skin and bone and messy
rivers of blood, it is resilient, it floats. It can breathe both on land and in water,
can kick, crawl, stroke, propel itself forward and today its motion is a kind of
cradle and the water a blanket tucking up against me.
Back and forth, lap after lap, and amazing to see sunlight still filters down to the
floor of the pool and shifts and shimmers there unperturbed and yes, even
glorious.

And the body doesn’t sink, no matter how the heart is burdened, no matter if the
heart is without hope, no matter if the world feels weighted in its blues and reds
of opinions and the hard rock of hate.
The body knows what the mind knows, and yet, miraculously, it swims. It swims
in confusion and despair and it floats, as if held up by the shimmering light
springing up from the bottom of the pool

By B. Chilcote

November Quake

I stay up late to hear news of the quake
It has left shattered dreams and debris
Across half the country

I try to sleep but dreams shake my bed
There is a new fault line raging down
My half of the country

I cover my head, afraid to face the day
Dawn intrudes with an offering of sweet
Sad little bird songs

My husband brings hot coffee in a mug
I wrap my hands around its kind warmth
And his

*    *    *

The harsh aftershocks still come daily
Gone now our solid ground, leaving
No safe place or time
To hide and be silent

We are awake here among the broken
Who take to the noisy streets, learning
Now what we must
To stand and rebuild

C. Beaty
2017

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

BY MAGGIE SMITH

 

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye