molecules bumping
and grinding with each other
here in my pepsi

(by me. this is not my favorite poem, i just felt inspired by your post to write a haiku. thanks for the thursday break. needed it.)

"Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug,
you raise your hands,
and it flows out of you
into everything you touch.

You are not responsible.
You take no credit,
as the night sky takes no credit for the moon,
but continues to hold it,
and share it,
and in that way be known."

naomi shihab nye

And into the garden stole,
When the night had veiled the pole,
In the morning glad I see,
My foe outstretched beneath my tree.

-"The Poison Tree" by William Blake

America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
-Allen Ginsberg, "America"

There is a charge
For the eying of my scars
-Sylvia Plath, "Lady Lazarus"

They wish to worship virgins
The images haunt their lives
A chaste meet of things doth make them wild
Awe of unblushing flesh, hue less nails
Even better! Carpet grazing dresses
and eyes that find the floor when passing males.
Smooth changeling, puberty's a while
Now cross legs to rouse the Fathers' smiles.
-Meg Frances
a little self promotion, no book yet though :(

First, from Lyn Hejinian's My Life, one of my favorite books of poetry (not my favorite section, but it was easy to find online):

As for we who "love to be astonished"
You spill the sugar when you lift the spoon. My father had filled an old apothecary jar with what he called "sea glass," bits of old bottles rounded and textured by the sea, so abundant on beaches. There is no solitude. It buries itself in veracity. It is as if one splashed in the water lost by one's tears. My mother had climbed into the garbage can in order to stamp down the accumulated trash, but the can was knocked off balance, and when she fell she broke her arm. She could only give a little shrug. The family had little money but plenty of food. At the circus only the elephants were greater than anything I could have imagined. The egg of Columbus, landscape and grammar. She wanted one where the playground was dirt, with grass, shaded by a tree, from which would hang a rubber tire as a swing, and when she found it she sent me. These creatures are compound and nothing they do should surprise us. I don't mind, or I won't mind, where the verb "to care" might multiply. The pilot of the little airplane had forgotten to notify the airport of his approach, so that when the lights of the plane in the night were first spotted, the air raid sirens went off, and the entire city on that coast went dark. He was taking a drink of water and the light was growing dim. My mother stood at the window watching the only lights that were visible, circling over the darkened city in search of the hidden airport. Unhappily, time seems more normative than place. Whether breathing or holding the breath, it was the same thing, driving through the tunnel from one sun to the next under a hot brown hill. She sunned the baby for sixty seconds, leaving him naked except for a blue cotton sunbonnet. At night, to close off the windows from view of the street, my grandmother pulled down the window shades, never loosening the curtains, a gauze starched too stiff to hang properly down. I sat on the windowsill singing sunny lunny teena, ding-dang-dong. Out there is an aging magician who needs a tray of ice in order to turn his bristling breath into steam. He broke the radio silence. Why would anyone find astrology interesting when it is possible to learn about astronomy. What one passes in the Plymouth. It is the wind slamming the doors. All that is nearly incommunicable to my friends. Velocity and throat verisimilitude. Were we seeing a pattern or merely an appearance of small white sailboats on the bay, floating at such a distance from the hill that they appeared to be making no progress. And for once to a country that did not speak another language. To follow the progress of ideas, or that particular line of reasoning, so full of surprises and unexpected correlations, was somehow to take a vacation. Still, you had to wonder where they had gone, since you could speak of reappearance. A blue room is always dark. Everything on the boardwalk was shooting toward the sky. It was not specific to any year, but very early. A German goldsmith covered a bit of metal with cloth in the 14th century and gave mankind its first button. It was hard to know this as politics, because it plays like the work of one person, but nothing is isolated in history--certain humans are situations. Are your fingers in the margin. Their random procedures make monuments to fate. There is something still surprising when the green emerges. The blue fox has ducked its head. The front rhyme of harmless with harmony. Where is my honey running. You cannot linger "on the lamb." You cannot determine the nature of progress until you assemble all of the relatives.

And from Frank O'Hara's "Meditations in an Emergency":

I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

And here is the first section of Mark Strand's "The Next Time," from his Blizzard of One which won the Pulitzer a decade ago and is just gorgeous:

Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time
Is becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzle

Of light upon the waters is as nothing beside the changes
Wrought therein, just as our waywardness means

Nothing against the steady pull of things over the edge.
Nobody can stop the flow, but nobody can start it either.

Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled,

Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake,
And so many people we loved have gone,

And no voice comes from outer space, from the folds
Of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this

Is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew
How long the ruins would last we would never complain.

More Mary Oliver!!

"My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird —
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever."

-Mary Oliver, "Messenger"

I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

I really liked Nicole Blackman's "Daughter."

This is a stretch, but does anyone know of any anthologies of poetry that are feminist and about motherhood?

"when two violins are placed in a room
if a chord on one violin is struck
the other violin will sound the note
if this is your definition of hope
this is for you
the ones who know how powerful we are
who know we can sound the music in the people around us
simply by playing our own strings
for the ones who sing life into broken wings
open their chests and offer their breath
as wind on a still day when nothing seems to be moving
spare those intent on proving god is dead
for you when your fingers are red
from clutching your heart
so it will beat faster
for the time you mastered the art of giving yourself for the sake of someone else
for the ones who have felt what it is to crush the lies
and lift truth so high the steeples bow to the sky

this is for you

this is also for the people who wake early to watch flowers bloom
who notice the moon at noon on a day when the world
has slapped them in the face with its lack of light
for the mothers who feed their children first
and thirst for nothing when they’re full

this is for women

and for the men who taught me only women bleed with the moon
but there are men who cry when women bleed
men who bleed from women’s wounds
and this is for that moon
on the nights she seems hung by a noose
for the people who cut her loose
and for the people still waiting for the rope to burn
about to learn they have scissors in their hands"

Part of Andrea Gibson's 'say yes'.

...I don't want to eat my cake/ with a baby spoon to force small bites,/ as women's magazines suggest. And you/ don't want to either, do you? You want a big piece/ of this world. You would love to have the whole thing.

-Katrina Vandenberg, from 'Consuming Desire' (in 'Atlas')

I love Andrea Gibson!
I often think of Ginsberg's "Howl" lately:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix..."

Right To Life

A woman is not a pear tree
thrusting her fruit in mindless fecundity
into the world. Even pear trees bear
heavily in one year and rest and grow the next.
An orchid gone wild drops few warm rotting
fruit in the grass but the trees stretch
high and wiry gifting the birds forty
feet up among inch long thorns
broken atavistically from the smooth wood.

A woman is not a basket you place
your buns in to keep them warm. Not a brood
hen you can slip duck eggs under.
Not the purse holding the coins of your
descendants till you spend them in wars.
Not a bank where your genes gather interest
and interesting mutations in the tainted
rain, any more than you are.

You plant corn and you harvest
it to eat or sell. You put the lamb
in the pasture to fatten and haul it in to
butcher for chops. You slice the mountain
in two for a road and gouge the high plains
for coal and the waters run muddy for
miles and years. Fish die but you do not
call them yours unless you wished to eat them.

Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman.
You lay claim to her pastures for grazing,
fields for growing babies like iceberg
lettuce. You value children so dearly
that none ever go hungry, none weep
with no one to tend them when mothers
work, none lack fresh fruit,
none chew lead or cough to death and your
orphanages are empty. Every noon the best
restaurants serve poor children steaks.
At this moment at nine o'clock a partera
is performing a table top abortion on an
unwed mother in Texas who can't get
Medicaid any longer. In five days she will die
of tetanus and her little daughter will cry
and be taken away. Next door a husband
and wife are sticking pins in the son
they did not want. They will explain
for hours how wicked he is,
how he wants discipline.

We are all born of woman, in the rose
of the womb we suckled our mother's blood
and every baby born has a right to love
like a seedling to sun. Every baby born
unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come
due in twenty years with interest, an anger
that must find a target, a pain that will
beget pain. A decade downstream a child
screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,
a firing squad is summoned, a button
is pushed and the world burns.

I will choose what enters me, what becomes
of my flesh. Without choice, no politics,
no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield,
not your uranium mine, not your calf
for fattening, not your cow for milking.
You may not use me as your factory.
Priests and legislators do not hold shares
in my womb or my mind.
This is my body. If I give it to you
I want it back. My life
is a non-negotiable demand.

Marge Piercy (one of my all time favorites)

I also love performance poetry and my favorite poet is Suheir Hammad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5OBiQv-cSw

"In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."
from "Musee des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden

AND

"And here is love
like a tinsmith’s scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the metal - bin."
from Seamus Heaney

"In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."
from "Musee des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden

AND

"And here is love
like a tinsmith’s scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the metal - bin."
from "Sunlight" by Seamus Heaney

How is there not any Sharon Olds yet?!

I Go Back to May 1937
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

Oh and this is the poem I was really looking for from Suheir Hammad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkylZEgsY8

They flew all day across
the country to the hospital for hard cases.
The night before Jane
entered isolation in Seattle for chemo,
TBI, and a stranger's
bone marrow -for life or death- they slept
together, as they understood,
maybe for the last time. His body
curved into Jane's,
his knees tucked to the backs of her knees;
he pressed her warm soft thighs,
back, waist, and rump, making the spoons,
and the spoons clattered
with a sound like the end of man's bones.

-Donald Hall (one of my favorite poets I love his book about dealing with his wife's illness and death)

Coal

I
is the total black, being spoken
from the earth's inside.
There are many kinds of open
how a diamond comes into a knot of flame
how sound comes into a words, coloured
by who pays what for speaking.

Some words are open like a diamond
on glass windows
singing out within the crash of sun
Then there are words like stapled wagers
in a perforated book - buy and sign and tear apart -
and come whatever will all chances
the stub remains
an ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.
Some words live in my throat
breeding like adders. Other know sun
seeking like gypsies over my tongue
to explode through my lips
like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Some words
bedevil me

Love is word, another kind of open.
As the diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am Black because I come from the earth's inside
Now take my word for jewel in the open light.

And of course the great Audre Lorde

I LOVE this post!!! My favorite poem is by Nikki Giovanni and it really resonates with me, for some reason.

Just A New York Poem
Nikki Giovanni

i wanted to take
your hand and run with you
together toward
ourselves down the street to your street
i wanted to laugh aloud
and skip the notes past
the marquee advertising "women
in love" past the record
shop with "The Spirit
In The Dark" past the smoke shop
past the park and no
parking today signs
past the people watching me in
my blue velvet and i don't remember
what you wore but only that i didn't want
anything to be wearing you
i wanted to give
myself to the cyclone that is
your arms
and let you in the eye of my hurricane and know
the calm before
and some fall evening
after the cocktails
and the very expensive and very bad
steak served with day-old baked potatoes
after the second cup of coffee taken
while listening to the rejected
violin player
maybe some fall evening
when the taxis have passed you by
and that light sort of rain
that occasionally falls
in new york begins
you'll take a thought
and laugh aloud
the notes carrying all the way over
to me and we'll run again
together
toward each other
yes?

I thought of another one:

"I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers."
Langston Hughes ... "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (so much of his stuff is great)

A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them

a woman "in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles"

in her 98 years to discover
8 comets

she whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled
in those spaces of the mind
-Adrienne Rich, "Planetarium"

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"
-Sylvia Plath, "Mad Girl's Love Song"

Einsamkeit is wie ein Regen
sie steigt vom Meer den Abenden entgegen,
von Ebenen, die fern sind und entlegen
geht sie zur Himmel, wer sie immer hat
und erst vom Himmel fällt sie auf die Stadt

Regnet hernieder in den Zwitterstunden
wenn nach Morgen wenden alle Gassen
und wenn die Leiber, welche nichts gefunden
enttaüscht und traurig voneinander lassen
und wenn die Menschen, die einander hassen
in einem Bett zusammen schlafen müssen

Dann geht die Einsamkeit mit den Flüssen...

R.M Rilke "Einsamkeit"

Roughly this translates

Loneliness is like a rain
Climbing towards evening from the ocean plains,
from flat places, olling and remote, it climbs
to Heaven, its old abode
and leaving Heaven, drops upon the city

It rains in the twittering hours
when the streets turn their faces towards morning
and when two bodies who have found nothing,
disappointed and depressed, roll over
and when two people who hate each other
must sleep together in a single bed

Then loneliness receives the rivers....

You don't have to understand German to hear what a beautiful poem this is... just try saying it aloud to yourself.

Einsamkeit is wie ein Regen
sie steigt vom Meer den Abenden entgegen,
von Ebenen, die fern sind und entlegen
geht sie zur Himmel, wer sie immer hat
und erst vom Himmel fällt sie auf die Stadt

Regnet hernieder in den Zwitterstunden
wenn sich nach Morgen wenden alle Gassen
und wenn die Leiber, welche nichts gefunden
enttaüscht und traurig voneinander lassen
und wenn die Menschen, die einander hassen
in einem Bett zusammen schlafen müssen

Dann geht die Einsamkeit mit den Flüssen...

R.M Rilke "Einsamkeit"

Roughly this translates

Loneliness is like a rain
Climbing towards evening from the ocean plains,
from flat places, rolling and remote, it climbs
to Heaven, its old abode
and leaving Heaven, falls upon the city

It rains in the twittering hours
when the streets turn their faces towards morning
and when two bodies who have found nothing,
disappointed and depressed, roll over
and when two people who hate each other
must sleep together in a single bed

Then loneliness receives the rivers....

You don't have to understand German to hear what a beautiful poem this is... just try saying it aloud to yourself.

i believe in myself slowly.
it takes all the doubt i've got.
it takes my wonder.
-primus st.john

First, some Ogden Nash:

"Behold the duck!
It does not cluck.
A cluck it lacks; it quacks.
It is especially fond
of a puddle or pond;
when it dines or sups,
it bottoms ups!"

and:

"The cow is of the bovine ilk;
one end is moo, the other, milk."

And now, some Edna St. Vincent Millay:

"Was it for this I uttered prayers?
And cried, and cursed, and kicked the stairs?
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half past eight?"

^_^

Never a day goes by when this site doesn't expand my mind, I looked up Andrea Gibson and listened to her "I do", and I sobbed my eyes out.

Basically all of The Beautiful by Michelle Tea but it's really long so I'd have to say my favorite passage is:

can i process my bad relationship with america,
can we go to couple’s counseling
can we sit down and talk about all this bad energy.
oh america i love you i just want to go on a date with you
and you won’t even give me the time of day
stuck up bitch– think you’re too good for me
america i could have anyone
canada london amsterdam is in love with me
but it’s you i want america. what could i do to impress you
i could write you an anthem but you have so many
fuck you america you’re just so emotionally unavailable
you act like it’s everyone else’s fault you’re just a really bad
communicator and you have serious boundary issues.
i think you’re really fucked up america
i think you’ve got a lot of problems.

Is the boss in?
Could he give us
a yard of tow,

the engine's after
collapsin' on me again,
she is, the bitch

- Misogynist, Rita Ann Higgins

the birds appear from a dream
in the sky and overtake the
night and my ritual ride
through the air which seems
white with their wings and sings
with the sounds of their
flight and the pounds of my chest

that are stifled by the weight
on my breast and the
chill in my limbs but held here
still by the memories held dear
to my lips and my skin

i smiled
i thought of her hands in my hair
but i was just standing there
feeling so very far
from the places i’ve been and
shielding a grin as she looked at her shoes

i think who we are
is everything we fear
and fear to lose
but she is everywhere
and i’m just standing here
and i choose to give in
when i can’t even pretend
that i know where this ends
and where she begins

when nothing is clear
but the weakness within
when she’s standing too close
when she’s lying so near
with her hands in my hair
and her taste on my lips
her scent takes me in
as her sighs meet my ears
and her hands brush my thighs
she is drowning my eyes
in the shadows and curves
of her mortal disguise
and i tremble to find my face
covered in tears