Reader's Place: April 3, 2022

READERS PLACE APRIL 2022

NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

 

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” —Rita Dove

 

 

That we will sing

…..

Afterwards, the addicts in a circle of folding chairs rose for you,

speaking of God in Paterson to their teacher the heretic, reaching

for your hands as if they could take the spirit in your skin back

to the shelter where they sleep tonight, touching you the way

I touch you sometimes, not in lust but in astonishment, telling

myself I did not imagine you, that you are here, that we will sing.

 

Martín Espada, Floaters: Poems, 2021 (Library Catalog)

 

Driving Mama Home from Work

I’m tired she sighs Time to retire

Me too

You are young still

Young, but unlucky in love

You need a man who…

Loves me?

No, pities you

Mama, we’re not in Ukraine anymore

We’re women anywhere we go

 

Tamara  Zbrizher, Tell me something good: poems, 2019.   (Library Catalog)

 

Bourbon and Blues

For T.C. Cannon, a brother of poetry and song

…..

We were wild then.

I will always remember that night far south

Of town where we sat at the bar after our escape.

You had gone to war and had become a painter, poet and singer.

I was a poet, mother and I was learning how to sing.

We talked history, heartache, the blues, and what it means

To be an artist with nothing to lose, because we lost everything,

here, at the edge of America.

 

Joy Harjo, An American sunrise: Poems, 2021. (Library Catalog)

 

Praise Dance

For Mama

         Annie, his great

grandmother, at her 85th birthday

 

& at her feet, my second cousin

         performs a praise

dance, whirling, bobbing –

pale gloves

         a magician’s, his face

painted white

 

like a tribesman,

mine.

Nothing

 

disappears. Only

         this bowing –

thanking her

 

& how we all got here.

 

Kevin Young, Stones: Poems, 2021 (Library Catalog)

 

Eternity

         Nanluoguxiang Alley

Every chance I get, every face I see, I find myself

Searching for a glimpse of myself, my daughter, my sons,

 

More often, I find there former students, old lovers,

Friends I knew once and had until now forgotten. My

 

Sisters, a Russian neighbor, a red-haired American actor.

And on and on, uncannily, as though all of us must be

 

Buried deep within each other.

 

Tracy K. Smith, Such color: New and selected poems, 2021 (Library Catalog)

Compiled by Ina Rimpau

 

 

 

 

 

 

             

News, Readers’ PlaceRobert Nealon