Poker

There were five of us playing that night,
Padge, Kieran, Neal and me --
and, stretched out in his coffin, Uncle Charlie.
We dealt him a hand each time
and took turns to bet for him,
waiving his losses, pooling his wins,
for what good were coins to him?
What could he win but his life?
Still, five of us played that night
and when we stopped it was daylight.
We left the cards with him
to remind him, forever, of that game
and Padge, Kieran, Neal and me
went up the road to our beds
and slept until we buried him,
then played until we had to agree
the good hands had gone with Uncle Charlie.

--Matthew Sweeney [Nora O'Connor]

The Tree and the Garden

There was an oak tree
In the front of the house
Which blazes forth in spring and is
Struck by changing colors as though
It was lightning instead of time
Which brought the fall
It’s known to all rememberers
Who have ever
Suffered its shade

While out the back
There is a garden, which
With an unassuming, steady gait
Filled plates
And beds of marigolds
Accompanied tomatoes
In a forever dance
Keeping pace, without rest
With never a fallow season blessed

And as for time and passers-by
Who could know? that it was
Neither the sun nor water
Nor seeds nor spring that gave it such
Plenty while
Dispensing safety
But rather
The hoe and rake
And touch
And grace
And give and take
And tender love
Of the gardener’s hand.


Michael O'Connor

The Change

The season turned like the page of a glossy fashion magazine.
In the park the daffodils came up
and in the parking lot, the new car models were on parade.

Sometimes I think that nothing really changes -

The young girls show the latest crop of tummies,
and the new president proves that he's a dummy.

but remember the tennis match we watched that year?
Right before our eyes

some tough little European blonde
pitted against that big black girl from Alabama,
cornrowed hair and Zulu bangles on her arms,
some outrageous name like Vondella Aphrodite -

We were just walking past the lounge
and got sucked in by the screen above the bar,
and pretty soon
we started to care about who won,

putting ourselves into each whacked return
as the volleys went back and forth and back
like some contest between
the old world and the new,

and you loved her complicated hair
and her to-hell-with-everybody stare,
and I,
I couldn't help wanting
the white girl to come out on top,
because she was one of my kind, my tribe,
with her pale eyes and thin lips

and because the black girl was so big
and so black,
so unintimidated,

hitting the ball like she was driving the Emancipation Proclamation
down Abraham Lincoln's throat,
like she wasn't asking anyone's permission.

There are moments when history
passes you so close
you can smell its breath,
you can reach your hand out
and touch it on its flank,

and I don't watch all that much Masterpiece Theatre,
but I could feel the end of an era there

in front of those bleachers full of people
in their Sunday tennis-watching clothes

as that black girl wore down her opponent
then kicked her ass good
then thumped her once more for good measure

and stood up on the red clay court
holding her racket over her head like a guitar.

And the little pink judge
had to climb up on a box
to put the ribbon on her neck,
still managing to smile into the camera flash,
even though everything was changing

and in fact, everything had already changed -

Poof, remember? It was the twentieth century almost gone,
we were there,

and when we went to put it back where it belonged,
it was past us
and we were changed.

Tony Hoagland


Note: You can hear this poem read aloud by Garrison Keillor by clicking here and scrolling down a bit.

Make the Pie Higher

A poem in honor of our 43rd President made up entirely of his quotes.


I think we all agree, the past is over.

This is still a dangerous world.

It's a world of madmen and uncertainty

And potential mental losses.



Rarely is the question asked

Is our children learning?

Will the highways of the Internet

Become more few?



How many hands have I shaked?

They misunderestimate me.

I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.



I know that the human being

And the fish can coexist.

Families is where our nation finds hope,

Where our wings take dream.



Put food on your family!

Knock down the tollbooth!

Vulcanize society!

Make the pie higher!

I am the Decider!

The Geese Cry Out

Tares make their own way

squeeze into each furrow sown

Wheat,

Rye,

Alfalfa,

Corn, Beets, Spuds.

Uranium,

rich and dangerous,

cuts veins through

Schist, Shale,

Sandstone, Slate.

Irrigation ditches divide pastures

dug at right angles to fences,

laid out just so by pioneer fathers,

demarcate that which concerns us,

from that which does not.

The left hand knows not

what the right hand has wrought:

Things knew their places,

Until my generation.

We cry out in confusion as we migrate,

East to Massachussetts,

South to California.

Like so many geese flying overhead,

Cousins honk out secrets,

one did not know that the other didn’t know:

"Honk!...Gave them nothing!"

"Honk!...Died destitute!"

"Honk!... Thru the window!"



Forgive us–we did not,

do not, know the lay of this land.

The clan’s unmentioned names,

the Dead,

furtive amid late

Great Grandmother’s letters,

whisper,

so we did not hear them:

"You kin come home now--

He did not die."



Andrea L. Seek 5/23/2007

The Heart Asks Pleasure First

The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering,

And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.

The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering,

And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.

Emily Dickinson

Wild Nights! Wild Nights!

WILD nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,—
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!

Emily Dickinson

P&S 2007

Standing Tall

In honor of Martin Luther King

Some kings rule their kingdoms sitting down
Surrounded by luxury, soft cushions and fans
But this King stood strong
stood proud
stood tall
When the driver told Rosa
"Move to the back of the bus!"
When the waiter told students
"We don't serve your kind!"
When the Mayor told voters
"Your vote don't count!"
And when the sheriff told marchers
"Get off our streets!"
using fire hoses, police dogs and cattle prods
to move them along
This King stood strong
stood proud
stood tall
Speaking of peace
of love
and children
hand in hand
free at last
free at last
When some yelled for violence
For angry revenge
An eye for an eye
And a tooth for a tooth
He stood his ground
Preaching peace
And when some spat out hate
He stood there smiling
Spreading love
Until it rolled like the sea across the land
Sweeping away Jim Crow
Breaking down the walls
Ringing the bell
Joyfully
For Freedom
Until
Standing on the mountain top
They shot him
Coldly
Hoping to see him fall
Hoping to put him away
To bring him low
But this King
even in death
even today
stands strong
stands proud
stands tall
And we remember

Jamie McKenzie [Megan Gillis]

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

Frank O'Hara

Video Cuisine

They are weighing the babies again on color television.
They are hanging these small bags of bones up in canvas slings
to determine which ones will receive the dried-milk mush,
the concentrate made out of ground-up trash fish.


For years we have watched them, back-lit by the desert,
these miles of dusty hands holding out goatskins or cups,
their animals dead or dying of rinderpest,
and after the credits come up I continue to sit


through Dinner with Julia, where, in a French fish
poacher big enough for a small brown baby, an
Alaska salmon simmers in a court bouillon.
For a first course, steak tartare to awaken the palate.


With it Julia suggests a zinfandel. This scene
has a polite, a touristy flavor to it,
and I let it play. But somewhere Oxfam goes on
spooning gluey gruel between the parched lips


of potbellied children, the ones who perhaps can be saved
from kwashiorkor—an ancient Ghanaian word—
though with probable lowered IQs, the voiceover explains,
caused by protein deficiencies linked to the drought


and the drought has grown worse with the gradual increase in herds
overgrazing the thin forage grasses of the Sahel.
This, says the voice, can be laid to the natural greed
of the nomad deceived by technicians digging new wells


which means (a slow pan of the sand) that the water table has dropped.
And now to Julia’s table is borne the resplendent fish.
Always the camera is angled so that the guests look up.
Among them I glimpse that sly Dean, Jonathan Swift.


After the credits come up I continue to sit
with those who are starving to death in a distant nation
squatting, back-lit by the desert, hands out, in my head
and the Dublin Dean squats there too, observing the population


that waits for too little dried milk, white rice, trash fish.
Always the camera is angled so they look up
while their babies are weighed in slings on color television,
look into our living rooms and the shaded rooms we sleep in.

Maxine W. Kumin

How it Is

Shall I say how it is in your clothes?
A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.
The dog at the center of my life recognizes
you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic.
In the left pocket, a hole.
In the right, a parking ticket
delivered up last August on Bay State Road.
In my heart, a scatter like milkweed,
a flinging from the pods of the soul.
My skin presses your old outline.
It is hot and dry inside.


I think of the last day of your life,
old friend, how I would unwind it, paste
it together in a different collage,
back from the death car idling in the garage,
back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced,
reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish
into a ceremony of sandwich,
running the home movie backward to a space
we could be easy in, a kitchen place
with vodka and ice, our words like living meat.


Dear friend, you have excited crowds
with your example. They swell
like wine bags, straining at your seams.
I will be years gathering up our words,
fishing out letters, snapshots, stains,
leaning my ribs against this durable cloth
to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.

Maxine Kumin

The Best of Poems

I once fashioned myself a poet
But then I started kindergarten
So I put dreams on hold.

Until senior year, when the
University was
Forced to admit me to a
Poetry composition seminar.
Like poetry, there were
Rules and
They had no choice.
Neither did the Professor,
Nor my fellow serious students.

I was serious too.
Although I didn't dress all in
Black - more likely all purple,
And I didn't
wear Prominent Glasses
Despite having 20/20 vision,
And nor did I smoke
Clove cigarettes,
I was a serious poet
About to
Spew forth unimaginable
Poetic delights.

I labored and
Labored and
Labored to
Translate
Transcendent
Thoughts into
Fragmented sentences;
Searching to find the
Unfamiliar to
Capture the
Simple;
Seeking to
Distinguish the
Absurdit from the
Sublime.

The first time, and
Only time,
I shared
A carefully constructed
poem, I
Experienced the
Fulfilling, albeit
Fleeting,
Euphoria of my
Tangled and
Disjointed consciousness
Resonating with others.

Before I uttered the
Penultimate poetic
Word, twelve hands
Flew up in the air to
Comment and
Construct.

"She was angry at him for
not loving her,
And he was angry at her
for loving him."

Eureka! My
Favorite passage...the
Climax.
I couldn't wait to send the
poem to my
Kindergarten teacher.
At last,
Redemption.
Next hand?

Indeed, a
Powerful
Emotion.
I had struck a chord and
Provided
Nourishment for
Thought.
Next hand?

"She was angry at him for
not loving her,
And he was angry at her
for loving him."

Indeed -- my words
Even
More
Profoundly
Brilliant than I,
Myself, could
Comprehend.
Next hand?

"She was angry at him for not loving
her,
And he was angry at her for loving
him."

This must be my fuure: a
Budding
Poet Lauriat's cross to bear --
"Our"
Trifling woes...
Politely thanking Readers for
Sharing Their
Relational and Reflective experiences
No matter how Repetitive or
Redundant or
Recurring.
Next hand?

"She was angry at him for not loving
her,
And he was angry at her for loving
him."

Perhaps,
Patience not my virtue and
Paradoxically antithetical to
Practice,
What about the o
Other
Twenty-three pages of the
Poem?
Next hand?

"She was angry at him for not loving
her,
And he was angry at her for loving him."

An Authentic Anglophile -- my first
AA Group,
What about my
Subtle literary references to
Barrett Browning's How Do I Love
Thee?Chaucer's The Love Unfeigned?Finch's The Apology?
Keats' To Hope?
Marlowe's Who Ever Loved, That
Not Loved at First Sight?
Rossetti's Bride Song?
Tennyson's Marriage Morning? and
Sid Vicious' My Way?
Next hand?

"She was angry at him for not
loving her,
And he was angry at her for loving
him."

Yo!
What about the
Allegories
Analogies and
Alliterations
And my late-blooming
Sophomoric,
Jejune and
Puerile
Life-questions?
Next hand?

"She was angry at hinm for not
loving her,
And he was angry at her for loving
him."

Sisters and Brothers 0
What about the
Tug, pull and sway of the
Iambic pentameter?
The reminiscient
Choppy rhythms of
Classical
Composers lacking
Consonants:
Chopin, Devorak, Rachmaninov,
Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky, to
Name many.
Next hand?

"She was angry at hinm for not
loving her,
And he was angry at her for loving
him."

Oy Vey!
What about the
Overwhelming,
Overpowering,
Overstated,
Overloaded,
Overworked and
Overkill
Omnipresence of
Onomatopoeias?
Next hand?

"She was angry at hinm for not
loving her,
And he was angry at her for loving
him."

Knock,knock - is anyone
Home?
what about the
Right-side in,
Right-side out,
Right-side in and
Shake-it-all-about
Hokey-Pokey
Punctuation?
Next hand?

"She was angry at hinm for not
loving her,
And he was angry at her for loving
him."

Blimey!
What about the
Intelligently
Interspersed foreign
language
Refrains -- most notably,
the
Literary renowned
Dithers,
Hithers,
Thithers,
Quivers,
Withers and,
Of course,
Gods and Goddesses of the
Guinness
Induced
Poetry of the
Stout Irish?
Next hand?

Ah, finally, the
Esteemed Professor --
Thirteen had always been my
Lucky
Number.

"She was angry at hinm for not
loving her,
And he was angry at her for loving
him."

Damn.
Damnation.
Damn it All.
Damn Yankees.

The next day I applied to law school
in
Red Sox Nation.

Maybe I should have written:

"She was angry at hinm for not
loving her,
And he was angry at her for loving
him."

Then again,
Maybe
Not.

Sea Green [C. Greene]

Peace

Why oh why
Must the world be with?
anger and hatred
filling the atmosphere
Guns always killing
Hearts always breaking
Beauty constantly being destroyed
The days become short
The nights become longer
Staying awake, to stay
Safe, sheltered, protected
From the hostility
Only in the night
Then the day
Brings the news
The deadly news
Where is grandma?
She is on the news
A tear I shed
So don’t you see?
What a fist can bring
One little threat can cause some ones life to end
Emotionally and physically
If you take a moment to be patient and kind
Or stop and smell the flowers
A person’s life will be saved
From destruction of fervor or deep desire

Sally + Megan Gillis

A Helping Hand

People say that the sun will come out tomorrow,
others disagree.

They think it will be dark
stay dark
the dark of forever
but I think that can be changed
if one person takes a step up and lends a hand
to charity,
the needy
reaching out
a helping hand can be held
with every tear that reaches the ground,
with every house that is destroyed,
a helping hand can be held
with every natural or not
disaster that strikes upon the earth
we can help
reaching out
helping with hands
those hands
these hands
a difference is made
me, you ,us, them
they, we , us, she, I
can help
with one or more
Helping hands


Megan + Sally Gillis

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"


Emma Lazarus [Maggie O'Connor]

Overdues

What do I do?
What do I do?
This library book is 42
Years overdue.
I admit that it's mine
But I can't pay the fine--
Should I turn it in
Or hide it again?
What do I do?
What do I do?
Current Mood: school tomorrow, oughtta be sleeping

Shel Silverstein [Owen Kuklinski]

The Mehoo with an Exactly Watt

Knock knock!

Who's there?

Me!

Me who?


That's right!

What's right?

Meehoo!

That's what I want to know!


What's what you want to know?

Me, who?

Yes, exactly!

Exactly what?

Yes, I have an Exactlywatt on a chain!


Exactly what on a chain?

Yes!

Yes what?

No, Exactlywatt!


That's what I want to know!

I told you - Exactlywatt!

Exactly what?

Yes!

Yes what?


Yes, it's with me!

What's with you?

Exactlywatt - that's what's with me.

Me who?

Yes!


Go away!


Knock knock...

Shel Silverstein [Nora O'Connor]

Roses are Blue!

Roses are blue,
Violets are red.
Hats cover feet,
Socks cover head.

Trees grow short,
Flowers tall.
Mice are big
Hippos small.

Boxes are circles,
Balls are squares.
Eyes are alone,
Noses in pairs.

Chickens roar,
Lions cheep.
Children awake-
Parents asleep!

Author Unknown (to me), [Peninah Hodin]