Poetry Flashcards
They just can’t seem to . . . They should try harder to . . . They ought to be more . . . We all wish they weren’t so . . . They never . . . They always . . . Sometimes they . . . Once in a while they . . . However it is obvious that they . . . Their overall tendency has been . . . The consequences of which have been . . . They don’t appear to understand that . . . If only they would make an effort to . . . But we know how difficult it is for them to . . . Many of them remain unaware of . . . Some who should know better simply refuse to . . . Of course, their perspective has been limited by . . . On the other hand, they obviously feel entitled to . . . Certainly we can’t forget that they . . . Nor can it be denied that they . . . We know that this has had an enormous impact on their . . . Nevertheless their behavior strikes us as . . . Our interactions unfortunately have been . . .
Elliptical - HARRYETTE MULLEN
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. Their irregular branches,
like broken arms backlit from MRI dye, offset by yearning.
They take form in ways only experts can decipher.
The light is blue. The observation of the alien doctor
flickers in his iris, furnace gaslight burning like a pagan memorial.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,
I pity their need for idolatry. It bares itself only to the void of me,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
I am unable to convince them otherwise.
I hear them mew and compete as if for a rough teat’s clear nutrition.
Foolish rule of the organic, uncultured and out of control.
I am mum and tidy as a nun in comparison.
Though capable of devastation are my desires which punish
the landscape with recrimination, uprooting the hedges.
They swallow fire, speak in four languages, and love no one.
I shudder with pride as they push themselves back to their origin,
to the scraped-out bottom of a uterine nothing;
this hard loneliness, skull-solid, pushed back into vagueness
until it succumbs as if overwhelmed by barbiturates.
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
Its green vapors trigger an olfactory déjà vu like a recurrent nightmare.
I envy the buried faces finally freed from worry and ailment,
from the pressure to remain always forward-thinking.
I picture their release, the prostrate bodies floating up as if levitated.
What peace, what stillness was shoveled onto their pine box beds
where darkness then dropped, all at once, final as an execution.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset. I identify with its nausea.
It meets me in the mirror uninvited, this face beneath my face,
restless and unwilling. It formulates inside me like a kicking fetus
and refuses to be ignored. It haunts and threatens like a past trauma.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; mute as a mug shot,
it is quiet, like someone suffocated who suddenly stops struggling.
I recognize in its warm death the expression of the starving
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Against me a force, not stronger or more intelligent,
but more adaptable to poor weather like dandelions.
I can feel it whittle me down to horse feed pellets.
I’m being winnowed out of the earth’s circulation,
with a pairing incremental as this winter’s passing.
Twice on Sunday the bells startle the sky—
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
I’m forced to listen to the liturgical lecturing,
truant student of a catechism I loathe.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names;
Myths and ideals I could never bring myself to believe in,
my prayers, the self-flagellation of unrequited love.
The yew tree points up like a New England steeple.
It has a Gothic shape. It used to remind me of home.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
Once fragile as rice paper, it hangs static and tough
like a noose signifying more hardship ahead—
interrogating flashlight that hurts my eyes.
Now no home exists—just an empty bed,
a pile of mangled sheets atop a dark wood floor,
like snow atop the frozen mud tracks of hoof and wheel.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
She licks her white feathers and stares back with one eye
vicious as a swan about to bite.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
I watch, my leg caught in the truth of my life
where beyond human emotion I’ve traveled at this point.
How I would like to believe in tenderness—
in those symbolic unions that elicit sweet concepts:
mother and child, father and daughter, husband and wife.
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
its cheekbones flushed with an afterworld favoritism
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes;
hair waving, mouth parted in mid-speech like drowned Ophelia.
I have fallen a long way. I lie at the bottom, smashed
like a dinner plate against kitchen tile, china chips and jagged bits.
I lie at the bottom, shattered and dangerous, looking up
with a baby’s stunned engrossment. I’m moving closer to Pluto and Mars.
Clouds are flowering blue and mystical over the face of the stars,—
It will not be quick. Death drinks me in, slow as syrup.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue.
They’ve ascended into heaven’s oxygen-deprived morgue.
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness,
mannequins perennially enacting the nativity in a wax museum.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild
as one dying of cancer. She begs for relief, but her pillow-muffled
shrieks disperse with the other sounds and shadows of the night.
We are left alone, her cadaver face, gaunt and grim, prescient of mine.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.
The Moon and the Yew Tree - TORY DENT
By the dawn’s early light, I think of skin; I think of how
Light can shine through my eyelids no matter how hard I close them.
I question, do they see
a lampshade at a neo-Nazi party?
When I think of eyelids
I pet mine with flower petals soaking.
We soak up the sun’s rays to make chlorophyll.
Am I a daisy pushed up after someone has died?
When I think of flower petals
I think of honey bees hovering over the sex organs of flowers
and tongues
of black bears. Am I a black bear starving in the forest for lack of bees?
When I think of black bears
I think of polar bears who have white fur but black skin.
Am I a polar bear starving in the Arctic for lack of ice
and seal prey? When I think of I.C.E. I think of brown
skin, that looks just like mine, trying to make it in America.
Am I American if neo-Nazis are running America?
When I think of America, my body aches
for something more protective than skin. Skin is only skin deep.
Skin is only skin
Deep. Black-Red-Yellow-Brown as brown can be.
Oh Say Can You See - VIKTORIA VALENZUELA
The one who’s lying on his back under the tall trees
is also up there within them. He’s flowing out into thousands of twigs,
swaying to and fro,
sitting in an ejector seat that lets go in slow motion.
The one who’s standing down by the docks squints at the water.
The docks age faster than people.
They have silver-gray lumber and stones in their gut.
The glaring light pounds all the way in.
The one who’s traveling all day in an open boat
over the glittering bays
will fall asleep at last inside a blue lamp
while the islands crawl like huge moths over the glass.
Translated from the Swedish
Breathing Space, July - Tomas TRANSTRÖMER
For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
unseen power;
For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
dragging along never gaining never reaping never
knowing and never understanding;
For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama
backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor
and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking
and playhouse and concert and store and hair and
Miss Choomby and company;
For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn
to know the reasons why and the answers to and the
people who and the places where and the days when, in
memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we
were black and poor and small and different and nobody
cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;
For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to
be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and
play and drink their wine and religion and success, to
marry their playmates and bear children and then die
of consumption and anemia and lynching;
For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox
Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New
Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy
people filling the cabarets and taverns and other
people’s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and
land and money and something—something all our own;
For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time
being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when
burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled
and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures
who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;
For my people blundering and groping and floundering in
the dark of churches and schools and clubs
and societies, associations and councils and committees and
conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and
devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,
preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by
false prophet and holy believer;
For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way
from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,
trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,
all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a
bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs
be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
rise and take control.
For My People - Margaret Walker
First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,
Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand
To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed
To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit——
Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they’ll bury you in it.
Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start
But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.
It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it’s a poultice.
You have an eye, it’s an image.
My boy, it’s your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
The Applicant - Sylvia Plath
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)
[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in] - E.E. Cummings
Know how you always buy that single can of lentil soup
for every ten cans of split pea, the kind you actually like
and would be content eating daily save for the lingering misgivings
induced by some antiquated article you’d read decades ago
about the dangers of a diet lacking in variety
And you know how you figure one day you’ll acclimate enough
to its earthen flavor to enjoy it rather than scarfing it down
in a kind of motion nearly mud sad enough to flatten the spoon
And know how the labels look similar on those
lentil and split pea cans, how you stack them on the top shelf
of a corner cabinet, so that when reaching for one you register
without looking only the heft of it in your palm
And know how today you so anticipated that warm bowl
of split pea soup that you wielded the can opener
like a piece of medieval weaponry piercing through armored flesh
And know how your anticipation was instantly deflated
when you saw in the nearly mangled can that swampy mass of lentils
And know what stopped you from tossing in the rubbish the entire mess
was that sudden resignation to what’s right in front of you
Eat the lentils. Read the classics. Run through the Parthenon.
Some commitments give you all the right sustenance in all the wrong flavors
In Praise of The Classics - Noah Eli Gordon
