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.

[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

Willow

...and a decrepit handful of trees.
—Aleksandr Pushkin

And I matured in peace born of command,
in the nursery of the infant century,
and the voice of man was never dear to me,
but the breeze’s voice—that I could understand.
The burdock and the nettle I preferred,
but best of all the silver willow tree.
Its weeping limbs fanned my unrest with dreams;
it lived here all my life, obligingly.
I have outlived it now, and with surprise.
There stands the stump; with foreign voices other
willows converse, beneath our, beneath those skies,
and I am hushed, as if I’d lost a brother.

-- Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), great Russian writer, poet, and translator, translated by Jennifer Reese

Painting - "Willow" by Claude Monet

Memento

We will all leave

                  unfinished business.

pages scattered across a desk

grit on the windowsill

                  where the leaves blow in

laundry at the bottom of the stairs

the fetor of old bacon seeping through the house.

With interminable patience a single white cup

                 endures the dripping faucet.

Your query hangs in the air.

But for a debt paid

a word spoken

a life given

fitly received.

--The Rev. Michael Knowles, poet, preacher, teacher, and cleric in the Anglican Church of Canada, from The Anglican Theological Review, Winter 2020, Volume 102, Number 1

A Blackbird Singing

It seems wrong that out of this bird,
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
Places about it, there yet should come
Such rich music, as though the notes’
Ore were changed to a rare metal
At one touch of that bright bill.

You have heard it often, alone at your desk
In a green April, your mind drawn
Away from its work by sweet disturbance
Of the mild evening outside your room.

A slow singer, but loading each phrase
With histories overtones, love, joy
And grief learned by his dark tribe
In other orchards and passed on
Instinctively as they are now,
But fresh always with new tears.

--R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), Welsh poet and Anglican priest from Collected Poems, 1945-1990.

The Need of Being Versed in Country Things

The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place’s name.

No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum up on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.


-- Robert Frost (1874-1963), American poet and teacher

"More Than a Woman"

Ever since I woke up today, 
a song has been playing uncontrollably
in my head—a tape looping

over the spools of the brain,
a rosary in the hands of a frenetic nun,
mad fan belt of a tune.

It must have escaped from the radio
last night on the drive home
and tunneled while I slept

from my ears to the center of my cortex.
It is a song so cloying and vapid
I won’t even bother mentioning the title,

but on it plays as if I were a turntable
covered with dancing children
and their spooky pantomimes,

as if everything I had ever learned
was being slowly replaced
by its slinky chords and the puff-balls of its lyrics.

It played while I watered the plants
and continued when I brought in the mail
and fanned out the letters on a table.

It repeated itself when I took a walk
and watched from a bridge
brown leaves floating in the channels of a current.

Late in the afternoon it seemed to fade,
but I heard it again at the restaurant
when I peered in at the lobsters

lying on the bottom of an illuminated
tank which was filled to the brim 
with their copious tears.

And now at this dark window
in the middle of the night
I am beginning to think

I could be listening to music of the spheres,
the sound no one ever hears
because it has been playing forever,

only the spheres are colored pool balls,
and the music is oozing from a jukebox
whose lights I can just make out through the clouds.

--Billy Collins, from Aimless Love, 2013.

Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World

The morning air is all awash with angels—Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”



The eyes open to a blue telephone 
In the bathroom of this five-star hotel. 

I wonder whom I should call? A plumber, 
Proctologist, urologist, or priest? 

Who is blessed among us and most deserves 
The first call? I choose my father because 

He’s astounded by bathroom telephones. 
I dial home. My mother answers. 

“Hey, Ma,” I say, “Can I talk to Poppa?” 
She gasps, And then I remember that my father 

Has been dead for nearly a year. “Shit, Mom,” 
I say. “I forgot he’s dead. I’m sorry— 

How did I forget?” “It’s okay,” she says. 
“I made him a cup of instant coffee 

This morning and left it on the table— 
Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years— 

And I didn’t realize my mistake 
Until this afternoon.” My mother laughs 

At the angels who wait for us to pause 
During the most ordinary of days 

And sing our praise to forgetfulness 
Before they slap our souls with their cold wings. 

Those angels burden and unbalance us. 
Those fucking angels ride us piggyback. 

Those angels, forever falling, snare us 
And haul us, prey and praying, into dust.

--Sherman Alexie (1966- ), member off the Spokane/Coeur d/Alene Nation, poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, filmmaker, from Face, 2006

Connection

A hawk touches down
                  the humming earth before Miami,
                                                                         Oklahoma.
              You old Shawnee, I think
                                                  of your rugged ways
                      the slick-floored bars and whiskey
                        sour nights when the softer heart
                                                                             comes apart.
The Spokane you roam isn't City of the Angels
          but another kind of wilderness.
              You speed in a Ford truck and it's five
                  in the morning, the sun and dogs
                                                                      only ones up
and you go home to red earth
                                            when you see a hawk
               crossing wires

                                       touching down.

-- Joy Harjo (1951- ), Muscogee (Creek) American, US Poet Laureate 2019- . musician and artist, from She Had Some Horses, 1983.