unpredictable thoughts » poetry

Sekou Sundiata reading, New American Theater.

ste!!a — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 12:22:36 +0000

Sekou Sundiata, 1948–2007

I thought I was in a dream.

ste!!a — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 05:30:47 +0000

“The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream.”

Jack Kerouac

poem today : Losses by Kay Ryan

ste!!a — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 23:58:02 +0000

Losses

Most losses add something —
a new socket or silence,
a gap in a personal
archipelago of islands.

We have that difference
to visit—itself
a going-on of sorts.

But there are other losses
so far beyond report
that they leave holes
in holes only

like the ends of the
long and lonely lives
of castaways
thoughts dead but not.

Recently Gil Scott Heron.

ste!!a — Sat, 28 May 2011 17:05:21 +0000

I can’t say anything. His death has not silenced his voice.

Poem today : Climbing the Chagrin River

ste!!a — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 04:11:50 +0000

We enter
the green river,
heron harbor,
mud-basin lined
with snagheaps, where turtles
sun themselves–we push
through the falling
silky weight
striped warm and cold
bounding down
through the black flanks
of wet rocks–we wade
under hemlock
and white pine–climb
stone steps into
the timeless castles
of emerald eddies,
swirls, channels
cold as ice tumbling
out of a white flow–
sheer sheets
flying off rocks,
frivolous and lustrous,
skirting the secret pools–
cradles
full of the yellow hair
of last year’s leaves
where grizzled fish
hang halfway down,
like tarnished swords,
while around them
fingerlings sparkle
and descend,
nails of light
in the loose
racing waters.

Poem Today: Sylvia Plath, The Rival

ste!!a — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 00:10:35 +0000

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,

And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.

The moon, too, abuses her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.

No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

— Sylvia Plath

poem today : Naomi Shihab Nye, Negotiations with a Volcano

ste!!a — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 17:13:01 +0000

We will call you “Agua” like the rivers and cool jugs.
We will persuade the clouds to nestle around your neck
so you may sleep late.
We would be happy if you slept forever.
We will tend the slopes we plant, singing the songs
our grandfathers taught us before we inherited their fear.
We will try not to argue among ourselves.
When the widow demands extra flour, we will provide it,
remembering the smell of incense on the day of our Lord.

Please think of us as we are, tiny, with skins that burn easily.
Please notice how we have watered the shrubs around our houses
and transplanted the peppers into neat tin cans.
Forgive any anger we feel toward the earth,
when the rains do not come, or they come too much,
and swallow our corn.
It is not easy to be this small and live in your shadow.

Often while we are eating our evening meal
you cross our rooms like a thief,
touching first the radio and then the loom.
Later our dreams begin catching fire around the edges,
they burn like paper, we wake with our hands full of ash.

How can we live like this?
We need to wake and find our shelves intact,
our children slumbering in their quilts.
We need dreams the shape of lakes,
with mornings in them thick as fish.
Shade us while we cast and hook—
but nothing else, nothing else.

poem today : Naomi Shihab Nye

ste!!a — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 17:12:10 +0000

Making a Fist

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?“
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

poem today : Native Trees, W. S. Merwin

ste!!a — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 18:25:30 +0000

Neither my father nor my mother knew
the names of the trees
where I was born
what is that
I asked and my
father and mother did not
hear they did not look where I pointed
surfaces of furniture held
the attention of their fingers
and across the room they could watch
walls they had forgotten
where there were no questions
no voices and no shade
Were there trees
where they were children
where I had not been
I asked
were there trees in those places
where my father and my mother were born
and in that time did

my father and my mother see them

and when they said yes it meant

they did not remember

What were they I asked what were they
but both my father and my mother
said they never knewW. S. Merwin, “Native Trees” from The Rain in the Trees (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988). Copyright © 1988 by W. S. Merwin. Reprinted with the permission of The Wylie Agency, Inc.

Source: The Rain in the Trees (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988)

Gil Scott-Heron words that turn you round

ste!!a — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:17:55 +0000

Always have loved the work. Glad to see that he has been able to produce something new. Just getting acquainted with his new album.

More about his life and career.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Scott-Heron

Album website.
http://gilscottheron.net

from his website :

Gil Scott-Heron (born April 1, 1949) is an American poet, musician, and author known primarily for his late 1960s and early 1970s work as a spoken word soul performer and his collaborative work with musician Brian Jackson. His collaborative efforts with Jackson featured a musical fusion of jazz, blues and soul music, as well as lyrical content concerning social and political issues of the time, delivered in both rapping and melismatic vocal styles by Scott-Heron. The music of these albums, most notably Pieces of a Man and Winter in America in the early 1970s, influenced and helped engender later African-American music genres such as hip hop and neo soul. Scott-Heron’s recording work is often associated with black militant activism and has received much critical acclaim for one of his most well-known compositions “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”. On his influence, Allmusic wrote “Scott-Heron’s unique proto-rap style influenced a generation of hip-hop artists”.