Category: Poetry
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Upon Finding Your Old Prison Letters and Prayers — from 58 poems written at 29
It was freezing and fire and filled with the smell Of men who made due with maybe two Pairs of britches and who probably shat One anyways in the evening. Yet over it all You sing your song of something like a hope Or a cosmic comedy, of a careful need To never neuter the…
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Greenwood Cemetery Graves at Snowfall — from 58 poems written at 29
Snow on the stones, salts and ices That garnish the graves. Greenwood waits For the day when dawn doffs the wrappings And garments of granites, the garland of a robe Or a blanket’s mask on the bleak pillars Like condoms or clasps of copper bracelets Or the hood of The Grim. How will their clothing…
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Home — from 58 poems written at 29
You yanked up years of dreaming When they pulled the plug out. Powerful longings — How they flounder in flame. But fleeting are the ways Friction frees us: it frames our pains But tames truth — is the time we spend Bitter a better base for erecting Tomorrow’s morning? Minds fashioned After the evening will ever…
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Pane — from 58 poems written at 29
Light leaks in lifting the spirit Of this glass-surfaced glittering kitchen Table and my letters. To tend to many Things in thin-air — this is a way To illumine our love. For light, it shines On to it and up to it, undergirding Its place in our plane. The panel of glass-surface, Framing our fictions, fades…
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The Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot
In keeping with the annual tradition of reading the best Christmas stories for adults (as well as the best Christmas stories for kids and the best Christmas poems), here is The Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot: As you’ll hear in the recording, I was clued into The Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot by Professor…
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Vulnerare
In the Christmas Carols are the covered truths About the battered beauties who then love Despite the signs, the signaled fears That cue our cowing, that create our fights And fletch our flights with the feathers of something That kidnaps our courage. They execute a Plan as if plotting, as if placing a mole Merrymaking…
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Pigeons and Turtledoves
Watch and the world withers before you As you sit and sip. Seats on the peaks Of stool stumps rock. Staying on wheels Lateral that lean? Like we are just sliding Towards the wakes? Towards the streets And their dangerous drakes? Dream about biding Time and the tide. Teach the childer How racist we aren’t.…
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To Jack Across the Sea
We two met in the one Irish New York pub known and still run by Eires like you. Our talking it turned up tragic: tuition, writers from the thirties rotting. These comic thoughts, these ideas interrupted the oral momentum: translucent roofs true to Spiderman, blurred and iron // blank and fragile— clichés are the things…
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Letters to a Young Poet …via Email
The following letters to a young poet grew out of emails sent to a poet. He had recently sent me a three-stanza poem asking for critique. I also, by the end, quote from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet: ••• [Young Poet,] There are some really, really good lines in here and obviously the subject matter is hard…
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Gloria in Profundis by G.K. Chesterton
In keeping with our annual tradition — Christmas readings of the best Christmas stories — here’s a poem by G.K. Chesterton entitled Gloria in Profundis. It’s a poem about how the fall of God is greater than the fall of man: If you’d like to hear more of the best Christmas stories, click here. cover…
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Mother of Exiles
Eight-hundred. Their open mouths Similarly sing songs we all know Though know not: their tongues — they show No face cards. Nimble, demure, go ghosts Of the Mind of God, mad sod made sad, Triangle eyelids, squares and trundle sides, But they’re still eyes, you know. Stopping together They see as one. Smell as one though…
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Guantanamera
You sing it. Yourn — they mourn, they Wring it over, ragdolls and wine, Listening somber, listening longer Than anyone else in the “N” train’s crowd. Others ignore you, mothers note the Boredom born in baby faces. Teens spend their braincells as tender On turn-based games in their tiny screens. You sing it. Yourn — they mourn,…