There Is A Light Within You

I've said many things, but at the heart
of them all is this: There is a light
within you, in your soul, uncreated
and uncreatable; it simply is. If you wish to know yourself,
look for this light in the dark;
it is ever present, even when
you've lost sight of it. Look
away from what you think
you are, and look deeper into
the darkness that is within. There you'll find that light
which is ever radiant,
even if no one—not
even you—notices.

--Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) German Dominican academic, theologian, preacher, and mystic, from Meister Eckhart's Book of Darkness & Light: Meditations on the Path of the Wayless Way, 2023, edited by Jon M. Sweeney and Mark S. Burrows.

Wonder as Wander

At dusk, on those evenings she does not go out,

my mother potters around her house.
Her daily helpers are gone, there is no one
there, no one to tell what to do,
she wanders, sometimes she talks to herself,
fondly scolding, sometimes she suddenly
throws out her arms and screams—high notes
lying here and there on the carpets
like bodies touched by a downed wire,
she journeys, she quests, she marco-polos through
the gilded gleamy loot-rooms, who is she.
I feel, now, that I do not know her,
and for all my staring, I have not seen her
—like the song she sang, when we were small,
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,
how Jesus, the Savior, was born for, to die,
for poor lonely people, like you, and like I
—on the slow evenings alone, when she delays
and delays her supper, walking the familiar
halls past the mirrors and night windows,
I wonder if my mother is tasting a life
beyond this life—not heaven, her late
beloved is absent, her father absent,
and her staff is absent, maybe this is earth
alone, as she had not experienced it,
as if she is one of the poor lonely people,
as if she is born to die. I hold fast
to the thought of her, wandering in her house,
a luna moth in a chambered cage.
Fifty years ago, I'd squat in her
garden, with her Red Queens, and try
to sense the flyways of the fairies as they kept
the pollen flowing on its local paths,
and our breaths on their course of puffs—they kept
our eyes wide with seeing what we
could see, and not seeing what we could not see

-- Sharon Olds (1942- ), American poet and teacher, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

OK Let's Go

Let’s go to Dawn School
and learn again to begin

oh something different
from repetition

Let’s go to the morning
and watch the sun smudge

every bankrupt idea
of nature “you can’t write about

anymore” said my friend
the photographer “except

as science”
Let’s enroll ourselves

in the school of the sky
where knowing

how to know
and unknow is everything

we’ll come to know
under what they once thought

was the dome of the world

-- Maureen N. McLane, American poet, professor, and academic

Meditation for the Silence of Morning

I wake myself imagining the shape

of the day and where I will find

myself within it. Language is not often
in that shape,

but sentences survive somehow
through the islands of dark matter,

the negative space often more important
than the positive.

Imagine finding you look at the world
completely different upon waking one day.

You do not know if this is permanent.
Anything can change, after all,

for how else would you find yourself
in this predicament or this opportunity,

depending on the frame? A single thought
can make loneliness seem frighteningly new.

We destroy the paths of rivers to make room for the sea.


--Adam Clay, American poet and professor at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Foster Care

Each house smells of strangers:
cabbage boiling on the stove,
harsh soap at the rim of the sink,
starched sheets that scrape
against the skin in bed,
hard pillows shaped
by someone else’s head,
rotting bananas, sweaty feet and dust.

Each time we come to a new place
I try to hide one shirt
beneath the mattress
just to keep the smell of home.
Sometimes they find it,
squeeze it through the wringer;
hid long enough, the cloth absorbs
the air around it, loses its memories.

My brother smells like sour milk,
unwashed armpits and the school paste
he eats. He cries
when they hit us; I never do.
Each night I hear
his sniffles soak the pillow.
Come morning, I grab the damp case,
hold it to my nose and breathe.

--Terry Wolverton (1954- ), American poet and LGBTQ activist, from Embers, 2003.

Image by Brian Jackson, from stock.adobe.com

Waking with Russell

Whatever the difference is, it all began

the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers
and his four-day-old smile dawned on him again,
possessed him, till it would not fall or waver;
and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin
but his own smile, or one I’d rediscovered.
Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the true path was as lost to me as ever
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran.
See how the true gift never leaves the giver:
returned and redelivered, it rolled on
until the smile poured through us like a river.
How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men!
I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.

--Don Paterson (1963- ), Scottish poet, writer musician, and winner of the T. S. Eliot prize.

For a discussion of this poem, see here.

"Mezzo del Cammin" means middle aged and lacking direction.

Adoption

I stitched us together by night 

in the rocking chair, marveled 

at your fingers, the foreign navel, 

memorized the sweep of your eyebrows,
unraveled your language. 

Having accepted the unfamiliar,

I kept watch
for proof of our union. 

Tonight I inhale as I kiss 

your perfect face, moist 

from busy dreaming. Your fragrance 

marks me-that fingerprint
only a parent can read. 

I crawl in beside you, grateful 

and patient, to dip us 

with even breath
in this night's ink.

-- Alison Kolodinsky, American/Canadian poet and translator, from Poetry magazine, June 1992

Image: Katie Page of Colorado, who discovered that the baby girl she was getting ready to adopt was also the biological sister of her newly adopted son,

Poems

I am hardly ever able
to sort through my memories
and come away whole
or untroubled.
It is difficult
to sift through the stones,
the weighty moments and know
which is rare gem,
which raw coal,
which worthless shale or slate.
So, one by one,
I drag them across the page
and when one cuts into the white,
leaves a trail of blood,
no matter how narrow the stream,
then I know
I’ve found the real thing,
the diamond,
one of the priceless gems
my pain produced.
“There! There,” I say,
“is a memory worth keeping.”

--Nikki Grimes (1950- ), poet, author, and writer for children, from Poetry magazine.

On the Adoption of Sons: An Anniversary

I stand and watch them, feeling awkward and glad
Like any supernumerary Joseph.
They both are kneeling, the woman and the child,
Their heads together. The closed window makes me
         deaf

But I can see them talking over the bud
Or bug in the summer grass. I watch and love her
For the son I love but never gave her.
She carried him in her prophetic blood

Through ages. And I too suffered the love she suffered
For all the children in all the strangers' houses.
I ached with her meek envy of the mothered
World. And still the little outcast Moses

Lay hidden until one day our telephone
Rang bells from a distant city and sudden flesh
Was made of abstract faith. There we shone
With alarming haloes, standing inside the crèche

And trembling before the baby whose large brown eyes
Accused our ignorance by what he understood.
We saw and marvelled how fingers of this toy-size
Could bless all children with crosses of brotherhood.

Our lilting Ford escaped the city of signs
And fearful joys, and swung him with us home
To Nazareth. But always, always shines
In our known street and house that Bethlehem.

Of course this story, our story, is travesty
And passers-by may joke in fun or guile.
But when we look at them, the authentic three,
They are not laughing, not frowning; we see them
         smile.




--Ernest Sandeen (1909-1997), poet and professor at the University of Notre Dame, from Poetry magazine, February 1955

The Pool

Are you alive?
I touch you.
You quiver like a sea-fish.
I cover you with my net.
What are you—banded one?

-- H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961), American poet, novelist, essayist, and translator.; LGBTQ pioneer. This poem was written while she was expecting her first child with husband Richard Aldington.

Miscarriage

When I was a month pregnant, the great
clots of blood appeared in the pale
green swaying water of the toilet,
Dark red like black in the salty
translucent brine, like forms of life
appearing, jelly-fish with the clear-cut
shapes of things.

That was the only appearance made by that
child, the dark, scalloped shapes
falling slowly. A month later
our son was conceived, and I never went back
to mourn the one who came as far as the
sill with its information: that we could
botch something, you and I. All wrapped in
purple it floated away, like a messenger
put to death for bearing bad news.

--Sharon Olds (1942- ), American poet and professor at NYU, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the T. S. Eliot prize, from The Dead and the Living (1984). 

The Value of Sparrows

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?”- Matthew 10:29

The Almighty, and my professor,
have enticed me to commit
to thirty minutes of daily unstructured prayer.
For Episcopalians, this may almost
sound heretical, but I put away
my prayerbooks and liturgies, and sit in silence
at dawn, to discern the tender voice of God
in whatever guise she assumes
by this pond
in the middle
of this campus
on this rainy mountaintop,
clouds above, clouds below.

At first all you can hear
are the intrusions crafted by humans:
the ringing of an unattended telephone, the
garbage men greeting one another, heavy
machinery belching diesel fumes aloft,
revving engines, egad--
and it’s not even six a.m.

Re-center, the wind murmurs,
stippling the face of the pond like hammered silver,
and the poplar leaves flash pale
as they shrug over in unison,
hands cupped in gratitude to midwife the coming rain.

But then, the voice of God hovers
just behind my ear:
fish crows chiding “ah ah” just over my shoulder;
Carolina wrens’ liquid song arrowing from the underbrush
as Bachman’s sparrow—named after a preacher-- trills;
a red-winged blackbird’s alarm whistle
blending perfectly into the sound
of the garbage truck reversing,
upending any smug certainty
of the comparative value of sparrows.

-- Leslie Barnes Scoopmire; this was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on June 22, 2023.

Image: the pond at which I was praying at Sewanee during my summer school session there.

To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now

Though I never saw you, only your clouds,

I was afraid of you, of how you differed
from what we had wanted you to be. And it's as if
you waited, then, where such waiting is done,
for when I would look beside me--and here
you are, in the world of forms, where my wifehood
is now, and every action with him,
as if a thousand years from now
you and I are in some antechamber
where the difference between us is of little matter,
you with perhaps not much of a head yet,
dear garden one, you among the shovels
and spades and wafts of beekeeper's shroud
and sky-blue kidskin gloves.
That he left me is not much, compared
to your leaving the earth--you shifting places
on it, and shifting shapes--you threw off your
working clothes of arms and legs,
and moved house, from uterus
to toilet bowl and jointed stem
and sewer out to float the rivers and
bays in painless pieces. And yet
the idea of you has come back to where
I could see you today as a small, impromptu
god of the partial. When I leave for good,
would you hold me in your blue mitt
for the departure hence. I never thought
to see you again, I never thought to seek you.

-- Sharon Olds (1942- ), American poet and professor at NYU, winner of the Pulitzer and T. S. Eliot prize for this volume, Stag's Leap, 2012.

To Our Miscarried One, Age Fifty Now

Every twenty years, I turn 

and address you, not knowing who you were 

or what you were. You had been three months
in utero, when our friend came to visit
with her virus which I caught and you died—or it may be
your inviableness had been conceived with you—
you might have been, all along, going to
last fourteen weeks, though I had felt,
as we lay on the living-room floor, the couch
pushed in front of the door at the pure gold
hour at the core of your big sister’s
nap, that you had taken deep.
I kept my feet up on the couch an hour—there was a
recipe, for a boy, then:
abstain until the egg emerges, then
send the long-tailed whippersnapper, the
boy-making sperm, in, to get there
before the girls, who are slow but if they
get there early can wait. The boy
we conceived a month after you died
made, years later,
an ink X
on a cushion of that sofa, as if to declare
war on sisters and mothers, the oppressors
of the male. Hello, male, or female,
or both, or neither. Hi mystery,
hi matter, hi spirit moving through matter.
Twenty years ago, when your father
left me, I wanted to hold hands with you,
my friend in death, the dead one
I knew best—and not at all—
who had deserted this life or been driven from it,
I your garden, oasis, desert.
And I’d never laid down a stone for you,
you seemed like a byway on the path from your sister
to your brother. What was half-formed
in you, what was partial—how close I could have
felt to you if I had known what a hidden
story I still was to myself. Dear one,
I feel as if now you are my elder, having died—
though without having breathed—so much earlier than I.
By the time I saw you, you were in the water
already, the sacred toilet-water green
of your grave. Let me call you kin, lost one,
let me call you landsman.

-- Sharon Olds (1942- ), American poet and professor at NYU, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, from The Sewanee Review, Fall 2018.

the lost baby poem

the time i dropped your almost body down
down to meet the waters under the city
and run one with the sewage to the sea
what did i know about waters rushing back
what did i know about drowning
or being drowned

you would have been born into winter
in the year of the disconnected gas
and no car      we would have made the thin
walk over genesee hill into the canada wind
to watch you slip like ice into strangers’ hands
you would have fallen naked as snow into winter
if you were here i could tell you these
and some other things

if i am ever less than a mountain
for your definite brothers and sisters
let the rivers pour over my head
let the sea take me for a spiller
of seas      let black men call me stranger
always      for your never named sake

--Lucille Clifton (1936-2010), African American poet, children's book author, professor of humanities, three time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Poet Laureate of Maryland 1974-1985, from good woman: poems and a memoir, 1969-1980.

Image: Marika Reinke, Goodbye Adrian: A Story of Miscarriage, 2013.

Leaving the Old Gods

I.
The people who watch me hang my coat
on a peg at the office don't even know
about that other life,
the life when there was you, it,
however briefly. To them my body
is a fact casual as the weather.
I could tell them:
That day it rained
the way it rains in the New World.
Leaves struck the window like daggers.
I didn't think about God
but the ones we used to worship
the ones who want your heart still
beating, who load you with gold
and lure you to sleep
deep in the cenote.

II.
A girl, he said, and I nodded
though we couldn't have known.
I would have left him then
for ten thousand pesos.
I don't know what world you inhabit,
swimming there, baby, not-baby,
part of my body, not me,
swept aside like locks of hair
or toenail parings.
It's ten years today
and you who were never alive
pull a face in the leaves
of jacaranda, the only tree
that lives outside my window.
It must be your voice
whistling through the office window,
though I can't understand your words.
Comfort or accusation,
I can't understand your words.

-- Janet McAdams (1957-  ), Scottish, Irish, and Muskogee (Creek) poet, novelist, professor of poetry at Kenyon College, and editor-at-large of the Kenyon Review. From The Island of Lost Luggage, 2001, which received an American Book Award.

Image: Sarah K Reece, "Waiting for You," ink drawing, 2014, found here.

On the Beach at Night

On the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.

Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.

From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,
Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,
Watching, silently weeps.

Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears,
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.

Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter?
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.

--Walt Whitman (1819-1892), one of America's pre-eminent poets, printer, teacher, editor and clerk whose innovations and subject matter both shocked and influenced the writing scene of his lifetime to today.

Lullaby

The upland falls behind the house, 

live and scrub oak, barbed wire 

firmly implanted stringing unlikely 

trees together, terrace by terrace, 

down and down, white rock
gleaming through the green. 

The art of memory, they say, 

is to forget. So sleep now, 

smile and sleep and let me 

think, sleep past the molecules 

of grief, let me kneel and believe,

believe and submit. 

Soon enough you'll know hunger, 

then sweetness, then a sweet 

hunger for what reaches 

out to touch. Soon, too, 

those poor, nerveless times,

those times when you curse 

and strike out at yourself, 

when you count up wrongs 

and feed them as if they were 

one prairie fire. As I sit 

and watch you sleep,
I grow angry, too, 

at my abstraction of your sorrow, 

at its necessity, at the very idea 

of what I cannot speak,
it's so unspeakable.

So sleep and smile,
sleep deep.

--Ralph Burns (1949- ), Oklahoma-born American poet and former professor at the University of Arkansas- Little Rock, from Poetry magazine, November 1988.

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                                         i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

--e. e. cummings ( ) from Complete Poems: 1904-1962

Image: Heart, Soul, Rainbow, Gold, mixed media, Traci McCombs

Stillborn Elegy

We can't remember her name, but we remember where
we buried her. In a blanket the color of a sky that refuses birds.

The illiterate owls interrogate us from the trees, and we answer,
We don't know. Maybe we named her Dolores, for our grandmother,

meaning sadness, meaning the mild kisses of a priest.
Maybe we called her Ruth, after the missionary who gave us

a rifle and counterfeit wine. We blindfolded our sister and tied
her hands because she groped the fence looking for the rabid fox

we nailed to a post. Katydids sang with insistent summer urge
and the cavalier moon grew more slender. In the coyote hour,

we offered benedictions for a child we may have named Aja,
meaning unborn, meaning the stillness that entered us,

which is the stillness inside the burnt piano, which is also
the woman we untie, who is the mother of stillness.

--Traci Brimhall (1982- ), American poet, professor, Poet Laureate of Kansas 2023-2026. From Our Lady of the Ruins, 2014.

Image: Marika Reinke, Untitle Chaos, painted after her miscarriage in 2008, found here.

Miscarriage

                   1

Down of no comfort, 

pillows for loss, 

white feathers floated
over the hospital road.

One caught the windshield 

and held a moment, 

small flag of hope, then vanished

in the clearer logic of air. 

On the long last grade 

we overtook the flatbed
stacked with shivering geese. 

                   2

In the garden

the com silk browned.

The ears spiraled
plump from the stalks. 

Beneath the husks 

a green worm worked 

its way down,
gorging itself. 

In its wake the offal
of its life hung. 

                   3

I drew stems of daisies 

and zinnias from buckets
in the florist's shop,
pinched one in my numbed hand.

The woman smiled, said 

they'd cheer a room and not 

to worry, the hurt
stem would mend. 

                   4

The evening storm, first 

only sensed, hit so hard 

it was all there was
to see, to hear.

Gradually it slowed, disappeared.
Silhouettes of trees emerged.

Streetlamps glittered
on the housetops. 

We ate what we salvaged
of the corn, and it was sweet. 

Deep in the night the air 

flinched like a fitful sleeper, 

and the rain stored in the trees
fell again.

--Eric Nelson (1952- ), American poet and professor emeritus at Georgia Southern University, from Poetry magazine, October 1988.

Two Before the Altar

 Luke 18:9-14

“There is a crack in everything;
That’s how the light gets in.”—Leonard Cohen

The upright Pharisee, each hair in place, not a
Fringe on his tasseled loafers askew, stood
Before God’s altar and prayed to himself
Congratulations for his impeccable soul.
He knew what others thought of him.
His righteousness shone from his shoulders
Like epaulets- so certain was he of his goodness.
He checked the lock on the vault of his heart,
And nodded, satisfied. Nothing
In, nothing out, undisturbed. Shrugging deeper
Into the mantle of his own esteem,
Duty satisfied, he knew he was blessed.
Nothing had changed.

On trembling legs the tax-collector climbed the steps, aware
Of the eyes that turned his way, the stink of collusion
That clung to his fine clothes. He could still turn away,
But his heart urged him forward. No one
Expected to see him here in God’s courts,
And some sneered as he passed.
He knew what others thought of him.
Eyes downcast, he made himself small,
And beat his breast,
Pouring out his sins until his soul
Was an empty bowl, so thirsty was he for God’s mercy.
A spark of forgiveness lit the tinder
Of his heart. Cheeks wet, he resolved to turn.
In the new fire of grace and gratitude he was reclaimed.
Everything had changed.

--Leslie Barnes Scoopmire. This was first published at Episcopal Journal's Speaking to the Soul on October 20, 2222.

Children's Hospital

Our sorrow had neither place nor carrier-away,
and dared not hover over the child
whose breath opened as transom
of a frail house.
Nor could we put our sorrow in the dictionary,
for ghastliness already shot out its own defining
in rags of fired light.
Pigeons would not sleek it
over their dirty coats, nor fly
sorrow against the aviary's sharp fence.
Each day bridgeless, each night birdless,
all the nocturnals needless at the expanse
of our nightwatch.
                                But wake at the moon,
we could, mumbling, are we
in a horror show?—inside of sleep
our shock-white minds caught on reels
where a child's body breaks the heart
and the mother can't know
if she counts as a mother. I don't know
if the child heard
what wept at the bedside,
orderlies snapping smelling salts from chalky bullets
against all the mothers falling,
all the fathers under
what each branch let down:
there's a hidden weight to snow.

--Katie Ford (1975- ), American poet, essayist, and professor. 

Mama's Promise

I have no answer to the blank inequity
of a four-year-old dying of cancer.
I saw her on t.v. and wept
with my mouth full of meatloaf.

I constantly flash on disasters now;
red lights shout Warning. Danger.
everywhere I look.
I buckle him in, but what if a car
with a grille like a sharkbite
roared up out of the road?
I feed him square meals
but what if the fist of his heart
should simply fall open?
I carried him safely
as long as I could,
but now he's a runaway
on the dangerous highway.
Warning. Danger.
I've started to pray.

But the dangerous highway
curves through blue evenings
when I hold his yielding hand
and snip his miniscule nails
with my vicious-looking scissors.
I carry him around
like an egg in a spoon,
and I remember a porcelain fawn,
a best friend's trust,
my broken faith in myself.
It's not my grace that keeps me erect
as the sidewalk clatters downhill
under my rollerskate wheels.

Sometimes I lie awake
troubled by this thought:
It's not so simple to give a child birth;
you also have to give it death,
the jealous fairy's christening gift.

I've always pictured my own death
as a closed door,
a black room,
a breathless leap from the mountain top
with time to throw out my arms, lift my head,
and see, in the instant my heart stops,
a whole galaxy of blue.
I imagined I'd forget,
in the cessation of feeling,
while the guilt of my lifetime floated away
like a nylon nightgown,
and that I'd fall into clean, fresh forgiveness.

Ah, but the death I've given away
is more mine than the one I've kept:
from my hand the poisoned apple,
from my bow the mistletoe dart.

Then I think of Mama,
her bountiful breasts.
When I was a child, I really swear,
Mama's kisses could heal.
I remember her promise,
and whisper it over my sweet son's sleep:

     When you float to the bottom, child,
     like a mote down a sunbeam,
     you'll see me from a trillion miles away:
     my eyes looking up to you,
     my arms outstretched for you like night.

-- Marilyn Nelson (1947- ), African American poet, translator, children's and young adult author, professor, and Poet Laureate of Connecticut 2001-2006.

Image: detail from Detroit Industry mural, Diego Rivera, 1932-33, painted as Rivera and Frida Kahlo suffered a series of miscarriages

The Birth

The birth isn’t about poetry
It is about screaming pain on a Sunday
Hailing a cab and head racing
To the hospital, now so close to the new apartment

I had a baby inside of me
But no one expected it to happen so fast
Or then at least they said they didn’t
Maybe they expected it to happen so fast
All along

Alone in the waiting room I shook and shook
And the blood ran down my legs
Later with the magnesium
I thought of the many permutations of the bald head
Pale, pickling fish skin, glowing with scales

When she came out, she was dark and full of hair
No blood, but born in the caul
Like the other magical realities of my past accomplishments
When she came out she cried and it sounded like me
But passed me, into her new reality

Now 3 weeks later, they say I am still not an erotic object
So I wander the park in the snow with my friend
We light candles and pray to the darkness
We light the park on fire and the police come and find us

When they take us to the jail, I say no, it’s not right
I am a mother after all
They say, but where is your baby
And I say, no no, my baby my baby
They say, yes yes, look at your beautiful baby

I say, I do, I do
Look, look, and listen
My baby my baby
She’s here

--Dorothea Lasky (1978- ), St. Louis-born poet and professor of poetry at Columbia University

Death is Entirely Something Else

Department of Trance
Department of Dream of Levitation
Department of White Fathom
Department of Winding
Sometimes my son orders me lie down
I like when he orders me lie down            close your eyes
Department of Paper Laid Gentry
Department of Sound of Sheets of Paper
                                                                              he covers me with
then sings
I like best the smallest sounds he makes then
Department of This Won’t Sting
Am I slipping away
Department of Violet Static
as if he were a distant station
Department of Satellite
My child says you sleep
Department of Infinitely Flexible Web
and covers my face with blankness
Department of Tap-Tapping the Vein
Department of Eyelash
I can’t speak
                                  or even blink
                                                                or the page laid over my face will fall
Department of Clear Tape in Whorls and Double Helixes on the Wall
He says Mama don’t look
Department of You Won’t Feel a Thing
I cannot behold
Department of Pinprick
He will not behold
Department of Veils and Chimes
of Lungs Afloat in Ether

I like this best
Department of Spider Vein
when I am most like dead
and being with him then, Department of Notes
Struck from Thin Glasses Successively at Random
I must explain to my child that sleep
                                                               is not the same as dead
Department of Borderlessness
so that he may not be afraid of
Department of Fingertips Lightly on Eyelids
so I can lie and listen
not holding not carrying not working
Department of Becalmed                faint sound of him

                                                                                                  I am gone

His song is the door back to the room

I am composed of the notes

--Joy Katz (1963- ), American poet, from All You Do Is Perceive, 2013

Image: Simon Fieldhouse, There's no "I" in Team, 2018

Song for Baby-O, Unborn

Sweetheart
when you break thru
you’ll find
a poet here
not quite what one would choose.

I won’t promise
you’ll never go hungry
or that you won’t be sad
on this gutted
breaking
globe

but I can show you
baby
enough to love
to break your heart
forever

-- Diane Di Prima (19340-2020), feminist Beat poet, short-story writer, named Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2009, and Buddhist.

Prayer for the Journey

Alone with none but thee, my God

I journey on my way.
What need I fear, when thou art near
O king of night and day?
More safe am I within thy hand
Than if an host didst round me stand.

-- St Columba (c.521-597) of Iona, whose feast day is today.

St. Kevin and the Blackbird

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

--Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), Irish poet, professor, winner of the 1995 Novel prize in Literature.

St. Kevin of Glendalough's feast day is June 3.

Seamus Heaney reads the poem and explicates it below: