Poems – Page 29 – Poetry Out Loud

Dropping napkins, corks, and non-compostables
into the trash, I see that friends have mistaken
my everyday chopsticks for disposables,

helpfully discarding them alongside inedibles:
pork bones, shrimp shells, bitter melon.
Among napkins and corks, they do look compostable:

off-white, wooden, warped from continual
washing — no lacquer, no ornament. But anyone
who thinks these chopsticks are disposable

doesn’t live with chopsticks in the comfortable
way of a favorite robe, oversized, a bit broken.
Thin paper napkins, plastic forks, and non-compostable

takeout boxes constitute the chopstick’s natural
habitat to many I hold dear. With family or alone,
I’ll maintain that chopsticks aren’t disposable,

but if I can make peace with the loss of utensils
when breaking bao with guests, I’ll be one of them,
not digging in the napkins and corks. Compostable
chopsticks are the answer: everyday and disposable.

A spring snow coincides with plum blossoms.
In a month, you will forget, then remember
when nine ravens perched in the elm sway in wind.

I will remember when I brake to a stop,
and a hubcap rolls through the intersection.
An angry man grinds pepper onto his salad;

it is how you nail a tin amulet ear
into the lintel. If, in deep emotion, we are
possessed by the idea of possession,

we can never lose to recover what is ours.
Sounds of an abacus are amplified and condensed
to resemble sounds of hail on a tin roof,

but mind opens to the smell of lightening.
Bodies were vaporized to shadows by intense heat;
in memory people outline bodies on walls.

I am four in this photograph, standing
on a wide strip of Mississippi beach,
my hands on the flowered hips

of a bright bikini. My toes dig in,
curl around wet sand. The sun cuts
the rippling Gulf in flashes with each

tidal rush. Minnows dart at my feet
glinting like switchblades. I am alone
except for my grandmother, other side

of the camera, telling me how to pose.
It is 1970, two years after they opened
the rest of this beach to us,

forty years since the photograph
where she stood on a narrow plot
of sand marked colored, smiling,

her hands on the flowered hips
of a cotton meal-sack dress.

Because the only view we have is the one
that looks down on the knees. Praise perspective.
Praise shared disdain. Praise space made by connective
tissue; the synaptic cleft; elbowroom
at the dinner table; polite conversation;
lies you push through your teeth. Because dissecting
a dog’s heart won’t change the way it thinks. Praise redirected
traffic. Praise the gnarled lip that defends
the gentle bones. Because your mother was
a seahorse. And to think of her thin is
to empty all the ice from the tea glasses;
to strain the soup by driving it through your hand.
Praise tablecloths; sway-back chairs; the plastic
folds that protect slice after slice of cheese.

Kings, here are the jewellers,
the crows. The blue sky is a scale.
We’ll weigh each seed’s dark half.

They hover. The shade of the oak
is damp and heavy. At its rim—
wick of the cricket
against the noon sun.

Farther off, the hidden brook,
meandering. Its ripples,
peas shaken from the pod,
a shy sound, barely audible…

I came to touch you.
You’ve fallen asleep in the grass.
You’ll think it’s a leaf
drifting down on your face.

The door of our house is the entrance
of a church on a day of wedding
and the glow inside is the ring
in the hand of the bridegroom.

Sunflowers,
my greed is not for gold.

Life has loveliness to sell,
     All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
     Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up
     Holding wonder like a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,
     Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
     Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit's still delight,
     Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness,
     Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
     Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
     Give all you have been, or could be.

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter’s cold,
Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old,
And cotton, scarce as any southern snow,
Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow,
Failed in its function as the autumn rake;
Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take
All water from the streams; dead birds were found
In wells a hundred feet below the ground—
Such was the season when the flower bloomed.
Old folks were startled, and it soon assumed
Significance. Superstition saw
Something it had never seen before:
Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear,
Beauty so sudden for that time of year.

Lonely, open, vast and free,
The dark’ning desert lies;
The wind sweeps o’er it fiercely,
And the yellow sand flies.
The tortuous trail is hidden,
Ere the sand-storm has passed
With all its wild, mad shriekings,
Borne shrilly on its blast.

Are they fiends or are they demons
That wail weirdly as they go,
Those hoarse and dismal cadences,
From out their depths of woe?
Will they linger and enfold
The lone trav’ler in their spell,

Weave ‘round him incantations,
Brewed and bro’t forth from their hell?
Bewilder him and turn him
From the rugged, hidden trail,
Make him wander far and falter,
And trembling quail
At the desert and the loneliness
So fearful and so grim,
That to his fervid fancy,
Wraps in darkness only him?

The wind has spent its fierce wild wail,
         The dark storm-pall has shifted,
Forth on his sight the stars gleam pale
         In the purpling haze uplifted.

And down the steep trail, as he lists,
         He hears soft music stealing;
It trembling falls through filmy mists,
         From rock-walls faint echoes pealing.

Whence comes this mystic night-song
With its rhythm wild and free,
With is pleading and entreaty
Pouring forth upon the sea
Of darkness, vast and silent,
Like a tiny ray of hope
That oft-times comes to comfort
When in sorrow’s depths we grope?

‘Tis the An-gu, the Kat-ci-na,
‘Tis the Hopi’s song of prayer,

That in darkness wards off danger,
When ’tis breathed in the air;
Over desert, butte, and mesa,
It is borne out on the night,
Dispelling fear and danger,
Driving evil swift a-flight.

For ages long, my people have been
      Dwellers in this land;
For ages viewed these mountains,
      Loved these mesas and these sands,
That stretch afar and glisten,
      Glimmering in the sun
As it lights the mighty canons
      Ere the weary day is done.
Shall I, a patient dweller in this
      Land of fair blue skies,
Tell something of their story while
      My shuttle swiftly flies?
As I weave I’ll trace their journey,
      Devious, rough and wandering,
Ere they reached the silent region
      Where the night stars seem to sing.
When the myriads of them glitter
      Over peak and desert waste,
Crossing which the silent runner and
      The gaunt of co-yo-tees haste.
Shall I weave the zig-zag pathway
      Whence the sacred fire was born;
And interweave the symbol of the God
      Who brought the corn—
Of the Rain-god whose fierce anger
      Was appeased by sacred meal,
And the trust that my brave people
      In him evermore shall feel?
All this perhaps I might weave
      As the woof goes to and fro,
Wafting as my shuttle passes,
      Humble hopes, and joys and care,
Weaving closely, weaving slowly,
      While I watch the pattern grow;
Showing something of my life:
      To the Spirit God a prayer.
Grateful that he brought my people
      To the land of silence vast
Taught them arts of peace and ended
      All their wanderings of the past.
Deftly now I trace the figures,
      This of joy and that of woe;
And I leave an open gate-way
      For the Dau to come and go.