Poem of the Day

Another one shared by my poetry pal.

Redaction
By Carmen Giménez Smith

We make dogma out of letter writing: the apocryphal story
of Lincoln who wrote angry letters he never sent. We wait for letters
for days and days. Someone tells me I’ll write you a letter
and I feel he’s saying you’re different than anyone else.
Distance’s buzz gets louder and louder. It gets to be a blackest hole.
I want the letter about the time we cross the avenue, and you reach
for my hand without looking—I am afraid I’m not what you want.
We float down the street as if in the curve of a pod
and the starry black is like the inside of a secret. We’re drunk.
The streetlight exposes us which becomes the deepest
horror. Yes. End the letter like that, so it becomes authorless.
Then the letter might give off secrets: acid imbalances that detonate.

I’m going out of town for the weekend (and supposed to be running out the door now), and will likely not have time to post poems. I’m sorry I’m so inconsistent lately.

I love learning new words. I came across this poem in the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and it had the following note from the author regarding the title: “A cobble of stone laid on steep slick rock to make a trail for horses in the mountains”.

Riprap
By Gary Snyder

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
        placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
        in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
        riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
        straying planets,
These poems, people,
        lost ponies with
Dragging saddles—
        and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
        four-dimensional
Game of Go.
        ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
        a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
        with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
        all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

I’m currently reading A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. It’s about a boy whose best friend (Owen Meany) accidentally kills his mother by hitting a foul ball in Little League. (Of course there’s more to it than that, being an Irving novel, but let’s keep it simple for now.) Anyway, I thought I’d post this poem, not because it has anything to do with the book, but because the mother/son relationship made me think of it.

To My Mother
By Wendell Berry

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.

Regrettably the PotD will be sporadic at best for a while because I am overwhelmed at the moment. Hopefully this will only last a couple weeks. In the meantime might I suggest Poetry Daily, Poetry 180, and American Poems if you need a fix. I’ve actually never consulted the first two options, but they came up at the top of my Google search for “poem of the day.” If you come across anything you really like, feel free to share it with me (and/or your flist)! Also, there are 692 693 poems in my archives (by author and title). Happy reading!

I found this on Ted Kooser's (the U.S. poet laureate) website.

The Peace of Wild Things
By Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.