five poems / five days #10

from my anthology of must read (a)merican poems

Dennis Brutus

A Special Cell


So there may have been
a shadow – an extra shadow –
in that dim dark cell
where shadows, somehow, never lifted
hovering over me, benign
from that cantankerous
busy-body fussing old man
urging always extra effort
extra willingness to endure.


      June 9, 2004

             from Remembering Soweto 1976


Brutus’ note: “One cell where I was kept at the Fort Prison before being sentenced, I was told was the cell where Mahatma Gandhi had been kept.”

*

As an activist against apartheid in South Africa, Dennis Brutus, born in Zimbabwe but raised an educated in South Africa, was arrested, several times, for his outspoken comments. He served time in the prison labor camp on Robben Island – alongside Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu. While in prison, his first collection, Sirens, Knuckles, Boots, was published in 1962 and won the Mbari Poetry Prize. Brutus now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

“A Special Cell” is a hard-edged poem that shows, with great economy, the price of loyalty to one’s beliefs – and how, if the cause is just, the price validates a life lived.

           always extra effort
extra willingness to endure

five poems / five days #9

Adam Zagajewski

Death of a Pianist


While others waged war
or sued for peace, or lay
in narrow beds in hospitals
or camps, for days on end

he practiced Beethoven’s sonatas,
and slim fingers, like a master’s,
touched great treasures
that weren’t his.

       (Trans. Clare Cavanagh)

*

A poem that makes my spine quiver. The opening stanza stages a violent, political landscape: waged war, sued for peace, hospital beds, and camps. Zagajewski is careful to show both sides of the political nature of war – waging and suing – as experiencing loss.

Perhaps, the connection between the hopeless state of war – “days on end” – among those embroiled in the conflict and the pianist at his instrument playing someone else’s music is that cause and effect is beyond one’s control. The pianist who only plays – or practices – the melodies and rhythms of others, regardless of the beauty or musicianship involved, will never find a unique and personal connection to music. And war – as we surely should have learned by now – has at least two losers.

five poems / five days #8

from my anthology of must read (a)merican poems

Natasha Trethewey

After Your Death


First, I emptied the closets of your clothes,
threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised
from your touch, left empty the jars

you bought for preserves. The next morning,
birds rustled the fruit trees, and later
when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem,

I found it half eaten, the other side
already rotting, or – like another I plucked
and split open – being taken from the inside:

a swarm of insects hollowing it. I’m too late,
again, another space emptied by loss.
Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.

*

This is a strong work from Trethewey’s new collection, Native Guard. She establishes a potent mood with a delicate image – “birds rustled the fruit trees”. Then she intensifies this view, twisting “a ripe fig loose from its stem” - before, finally revealing a hidden agenda, the fruit, “being taken from the inside”. Powerful use of the senses. The final line is perfect in stripping away all security, leaving only the truth of regret.

A lyrical piece, written by a poet who is relentless in showing, layer by layer, what is missing. What is not there again – Trethewey reminds us. The poem is structured, brilliantly, to force the reader into self-reflection. And it works.

five poems / five days #7

Mary Ruefle

Story


The children in ragged bedclothes
begged for a story
and had the door closed, very softly,
in their faces.
Years later, that was their story.

It was a long story. It took a bottle
of brandy and two nights of rain
to reach the end. Just before the door
closed completely, a bolt of light
fell in the dark across their happy faces.

*

Another amazing piece from Mary Ruefle – “a bottle / of brandy and two nights of rain”. One of strongest qualities in her poetry is that the reader’s always being unsettled by an image, a voice, a line – and never is certain of what might be waiting at the end of the poem. When I return to Ruefle’s poems, I’m always surprised by what I find. I never seem to exhaust her works. That must surely be at least one mark of greatness.

five poems / five days #6

from my anthology of must read (a)merican poems

Ravi Shankar

Shapes in the Wilderness


Beneath, beyond, away, other than,
The are who we are happens contrapuntally
To the observation of the are being.
Say you and I are flashlights that shining
Out from a clearing into the forest
Shape the forest, providing trees leaves,
Mulch moisture, vivifying what world
Would fit the light of our partial rounds.
Dense, multifarious, the dark wood
Has no essence but in fleeting swaths
Of light that in illumination, define.
The fact of the flashlight, battery and bulb,
Are the only a priories in existence,
Though we cannot know their constituency,
Being their constituency.

*

This is such a beautiful mastery of language - a tight view of reality. A ghostly shell - trees caught in harsh light. The lines are thick with strong rhythms and melody. Such an unusual opening line sets the stage for a poem that, at least on one level, explores the struggle to connect with the world, with the planet itself.

Shankar is a poet whose style and abilites compare to those of Wallace Stevens. He expresses a total command of language and content - yet it’s a command that is not contrived in the least, that does not aspire to what it is not. The more I read Shankar, the more I gain.

five poems / five days #5

Lucille Clifton

here yet be dragons


so many languages have fallen
off the edge of the world
into the dragon’s mouth. some

where there be monsters whose teeth
are sharp and sparkle with lost

people. lost poems. who
among us can imagine ourselves
unimagined? who

among us can speak with so fragile
tongue can remain proud?

*

A piece that, for me, shows the grand necessity of facing one’s dragon. Those things that cannot be easily said with words get away form us. Lost people, lost poems. The brilliant notion – “who / among us can imagine ourselves / unimagined” – delivers the scope of Clifton’s intentions. We are somewhere “off the edge of the world”. Lost possibilities, lost stories. And a fragile tongue.

five poems / five days #4

from my anthology of must read (a)merican poems

Ted Kooser

Year’s End


Now the seasons are closing their files
on each of us, the heavy drawers
full of certificates rolling back
into the tree trunks, a few old papers
flocking away. Someone we loved
has fallen from our thoughts,
making a little, glittering splash
like a bicycle pushed by a breeze.
Otherwise, not much has happened;
we fell in love again, finding
that one red feather on the wind.

*

A beautiful poem about how the creative spirit in a person is so wonderfully connected to the odd but powerful things in the universe – one red feather on the wind. The world, the seasons, the heavy drawers tend pull at each one of us. Kooser shows loss to be acute and impacting: “Someone we loved / has fallen from our thoughts”. A painful proposition to consider. There was a splash, a breeze, the world going on in an uneventful way.

Yet we fall in love again with the vast possibility that the next creation brings to us. A poem, a story, song, painting. And the new begins.

five poems / five days #3

Jean Valentine

Poetry


You, poem
the string I followed blind
to leaf by thick green leaf
to your stem
milky
poem without words
world electric with you

*

Valentine has written a strong and accurate image of the creative process – how poets follow the voice – not knowing or even understanding the where of the going – how the poem is outside us. We listen. We follow.

five poems / five days #2

Adam Zagajewski

This


This that lies heavy
and weighs down,
that aches like ache
and burns like a slap in the face,
is a stone
or an anchor.

         (Trans. Renata Gorczynski)

*

“This” is a type of writing that forces the reader to a realization of a dualism – at the very least – present in all actions. An event, a feeling, a motive is always multi-purposed. Many times, the differences between those causes and effects blur, and the details become sensed rather than fully delineated. Zagajewsiki uses a very compressed form, language, and imagery to deliver this piece.

five poems / five days #1

Jane Kenyon

What Came to Me


I took the last
dusty piece of china
out of the barrel.
It was your gravy boat,
with a hard, brown
drop of gravy still
on the porcelain lip.
I grieved for you then
as I never had before.

*

The brilliance of Kenyon’s poem is the reality of this image of grief, of loss, in such a compact form.