Weekly Poem – Page 2

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Emily Cole

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountain and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Originally published in Dream Work in 1986. Republished with author permission.

A simple declaration negating the motivation behind most actions opens “Wild Geese,” paving the way for heartfelt encouragement that addresses the reader specifically. Before reaching this point, however, Oliver also rejects the idea of repentance, putting the powerful grasp of regret behind her. She reveals her own truism: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.” She continues with a request that would bewilder most of us used to responding to an inquiry about our state of being with “I’m good,” disregarding any second thought. Her offer of revealing her despair in return reveals the acceptance and understanding that prevails in these verses. The movement to the natural world expands the point of view with the repetition of “Meanwhile.” Meanwhile, when we are lonely, in despair, and full of regret, the world is expansive and welcoming. The invitation, in this case, is extended by the wild geese for whom the poem is named, with their “harsh and exciting” calls, inviting you home.

A prize-winning and prolific poet, Mary Oliver was born in a small town in Ohio. She attended Ohio State University and Vassar College before her career of writing poetry. Oliver has received copious awards throughout her life, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984 for her book American Primitive, the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems, and the New England Booksellers Association Award for Literary Excellence. Mary Oliver was described as “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet” by the New York Times.

— Laurel Myers

Slant by Suji Kwock Kim

Emily Cole

If the angle of an eye is all,
the slant of hope, the slant of dreaming, according to each life,
what is the light of this city,
light of Lady Liberty, possessor of the most famous armpit in the world,
light of the lovers on Chinese soap operas, throwing BBQ’d ducks at each other
with that live-it-up-while-you’re-young, Woo Me kind of love,
light of the old men sitting on crates outside geegaw shops
selling dried seahorses & plastic Temples of Heaven,
light of the Ying ‘n’ Yang Junk Palace,
light of the Golden Phoenix Hair Salon, light of Wig-o-ramas,
light of the suntanners in Central Park turning over like rotisserie chickens
sizzling on a spit,
light of the Pluck U & Gone with the Wings fried-chicken shops,
the parking-meter-leaners, the Glamazons,
the oglers wearing fern-wilting quantities of cologne,
strutting, trash-talking, glorious:
the immigrants, the refugees, the peddlars, stockbrokers and janitors,
stenographers & cooks,
all of us making and unmaking ourselves,
hurrying forwards, toward who we’ll become, one way only, one life only:
free in time but not from it,
here in the city the living make together, and make and unmake over and over
Quick, quick, ask heaven of it, of every mortal relation,
feeling that is fleeing,
for what would the heart be without a heaven to set it on?
I can’t help thinking no word will ever be as full of life as this world,
I can’t help thinking of thanks.

Originally published in Shenandoah; The Washington and Lee Review, Vol. 57, No. 3 (2007).

Suji Kwock Kim is a Korean-American poet and playwright. She was educated at Yale College; the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; Seoul National University, where she was a Fulbright Scholar; and Stanford University, where she was a Stegner Fellow. Her first book, Notes from the Divided Country (2003), won numerous prizes, including the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and a Mrs. Giles Whiting Award. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, The Nation, The New Republic, and The Paris Review. Private Property, a multimedia play she co-wrote, was produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and was featured on BBC-TV.

Suji Kwock Kim adopts a facetious tone in her poem “Slant” that might initially be perceived as sarcastically critical. After rhetorically asking her audience “what is the light of this city,” she begins her list of unconventional answers with an air of faux admiration in describing the Statue of Liberty as the “possessor of the most famous armpit in the world.” However, it soon becomes apparent as she describes aspects of the city that may often be brushed aside as peculiar or insignificant that her goal is not to critique or condemn. Instead, she draws attention to the understated beauty that can be found in the quirks and hidden corners of the city. The title of the poem is the first subtle hint at the idea that people hold different perceptions of the world. One’s outlook can change with the “angle of an eye,” a phrase with a clear double meaning that brings racial differences to the table. Along that line of thought, Kim joins together people from various walks of life in the city, imperfect and flawed as they are. From “the Glamazons” to the “immigrants,” the cologne-wearing “oglers” to the “refugees,” she envelops the city’s inhabitants into one whole that is changing and growing together. She writes, “all of us making and unmaking ourselves, / hurrying forwards, toward who we’ll become.” Though light-hearted and a little tongue-in-cheek, this poem sends an uplifting message of perspective and unity (ideas that tend to fall in short supply these days) as it gradually becomes more sincere, before ending with an expression of gratitude for the vibrancy of life.

–Emily Cole

Women’s Prison by Joseph Bathanti

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Two Sundays a month, darkness still abroad,
we round up the kids and bundle them
into a restored salvaged Bluebird school bus,
repainted green, and make the long haul

to Raleigh where their mothers are locked
in Women’s Prison. We pin the children’s names,
and numbers, to their coats, count them
like convicts at lights-out. Sucking thumbs,

clutching favorite oddments to cuddle as they ride
curled in twos on patched sprung benches,
they sleepwalk bashfully, the little aged,
into the belly of the bus, eyes nailed to its floor.

We feed them milk and juice, animal crackers, apples;
stop for them to use the bathroom,
and to change the ones so young, they can’t help wetting.
We try singing: folk tunes and strike ballads –

as if off to picket or march with an army of babies –
but their stony faces will not yield and, finally,
their passion to disappear puts them to sleep,
not to wake until the old Bluebird jostles

through the checkpoints into the prison.
Somehow, upon reopening their eyes, they know
to smile at the twirling jagged grandeur
surrounding the massive compound: concertina –

clotted with silver scraps of dew and dawn light,
a bullet-torn shroud of excelsior, scored
in dismal fire, levitating in the savage
Sabbath sky. By then, their mothers,

in the last moments of girlish rawboned glory,
appear in baggy, sky-blue prison shifts,
their beautiful hands lifting to shield their eyes,
like saints about to be slaughtered,

as if the light is too much, the sky suddenly egg-blue,
plaintive, threatening to pale away, the sun
still invisible, yet blinding. Barefoot, weepy,
they call their babies by name and secret endearment,

touch them everywhere like one might the awakened dead.
The children remain dignified, nearly aloof
in their perfect innocence, and self-possession,
toddling dutifully, into the arms of anyone

who reaches for them, even the guards, petting them too.
When visiting hours conclude, the children hand
their mothers cards and drawings, remnants
of a life they are too young to remember,

but conjure in glyphic crayon blazes.
Attempting to recollect the narrative
that will guide them back to their imagined homes,
the mothers peer from the pictures to the departing

children – back and forth, straining
to make the connection, back
and forth until the children, already fast asleep
as the bus spirits them off, disappear.

Joseph Bathanti was born on July 20, 1953, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He grew up in East Liberty, an Italian neighborhood in the city. Bathanti earned an M.F.A. in English Literature from the University of Pittsburgh. After graduation, he joined Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a national service program designed to fight poverty. In 1976, Bathanti was placed in North Carolina as a volunteer for the state’s prison system. Since then he’s spent 35 years teaching writing workshops in prisons and is the former chair of the North Carolina Writers’ Network Prison project. Bathanti is the author of eight books of poetry: Communion Partners; Anson County; The Feast of All Saints; This Metal; Land of Amnesia; Restoring Sacred Art; Sonnets of the Cross; and Concertina. From 2012 through 2014 Bathanti was Poet Laureate of North Carolina. His writing draws heavily on his life, ethnicity, religion, and personal experiences. His latest collection, Concertina, revolves around his experiences volunteering in the North Carolina penal system and features “Women’s Prison.”

Bathanti’s work in the prison system has greatly impacted his writing. Throughout the poem “Women’s Prison,” Bathanti depicts bringing children to their mother’s in prison on visitor’s day two times a month. The poem’s opening stanza says, “we round up the kids;” the phrase “round up” draws a parallel between the mothers in prison and their children. The second stanza continues this parallel with the simile, “count them/like convicts at lights-out.” Here Bathanti captures how entire families are impacted when one person goes to jail. Though the children of convicts have done no crime, they are rounded up and have numbers pinned to them when they go to visit the women who have given them life.

Bathanti continues the poem by calling attention to the innocence of these children by referring to their “Sucking thumbs” in stanza two, “clutching favorite oddments to cuddle” in stanza three and their being unable to “help wetting” in stanza four. These children are innocent before entering the prisons, but Bathanti hints at their eventual loss of innocence throughout the rest of the poem.

In stanza five, Bathanti refers to the children of convicts as “an army of babies,” saying their “stony faces will not yield.” Comparing these children to armies strips them of their individuality and turns them into men and women who know they are about to face horrors that will change them for the rest of their lives. This sense of loss of innocence continues in the next stanza when Bathanti writes of the children “reopening their eyes.” These children walk into the jail and are forced to face seeing their mothers behind bars. They have the opportunity to see their mothers and talk to them, but they must do so in a prison compound. Walking into this new environment may be new and exciting for them, on some level, but this new place is a “bullet-torn shroud of excelsior.” This place has the excitement of familial reunion, but it is surrounded by violence.

As the poem continues, Bathanti references the children’s “perfect innocence, and self possession” as they first see their mothers in the prison in stanza ten. Though his wording makes it clear these children are still innocent, the words throughout the poem hint that this innocence will soon trickle away. Though they are visiting their mothers, they are quickly forgetting these mothers as they were before going to jail. Bathanti writes they bring their mothers cards and drawings of “a life they are too young to remember.” Drawing these pictures is their attempt to remember the lives they had before their mother’s went away to jail and left their families in shambles.

As Bathanti words it, these children are trying to “recollect the narrative/that will guide them back to their imagined homes.” In these lines, Bathanti uses the word “homes” instead of houses. Since a home is distinguished from simple being a house by the fact that a family lives inside, this specific word choice emphasizes that these children are attempting to find a path back to the families they used to have. This poem ends with these very children “straining/to make the connection” until they all eventually “disappear.” These disappearances not only show how the children leave the prison, and their mother’s worlds, but also show how from these experiences these children lose a part of themselves, their innocence.

What My Father Knows by Nancy Naomi Carlson

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My father knows his mind is leaving,
Cells fleeing a mineshaft’s dark.
My father remembers the color of Laddie’s coat –
first of a long line of dogs – but forgets the shade
of my mother’s eyes when she leaves the room.

How long before he forgets her face
and the fire of her auburn hair?

Each night she pours him Jiuqu Wulong tea –
dragon brew – to head off the growing chill,
and chides him when he spills a drop –
from highest mountains come finest teas.

She invents a tale of an emperor – K’ang Ha –
who seduces a red-haired beauty beneath a gingko tree.
A pot of water simmered nearby.
As she finger combed her shimming hair,
three strands broke free to ride the wind
into the steaming brew –
now transformed into liquid amber, jasmine-oiled –
a dynasty of song.

My father inhales the scent of her words.

Nancy Naomi Carlson received her B.A. from Queens College and her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. She is currently an instructor at the Bethesday Writer’s Center, and a senior translation editor for Tupelo Quarterly and Blue Lyra Review. She is the author of three poetry collections, as well as the critically acclaimed Stone Lyre: Poems of René Char. Her work has appeared in print over 290 times in various publications, including, Poetry, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Iowa Review and has won her grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland Arts Council, and the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County.

Right at the opening of Carlson’s heartbreaking poem, the encroaching threat of a life forgotten consumes the reader. Carlson writes of the heartbreak of watching a parent, presumably one suffering from Alzheimer’s or dementia, and their struggle to remember basic life details. In the opening stanza, Carlson writes, “My father knows his mind is leaving.” This minor detail, that the person who is slowly forgetting everything knows they are slowly forgetting everything, brings to mind the tragedy of people knowing they are suffering from dementia, but having no way to stop the progression. Throughout this poem, Carlson captures how this is often harder to face than the actual memory loss itself. The first stanza continues by calling on minuscule details of life, the specifics that many people take for granted, but that make life complete. She writes of the “shade of my mother’s eyes.” The very eyes the narrator’s aging father has looked into presumably every day for decades are quickly erased from his memory.

In the second stanza, Carlson presents the idea that eventually the disease will make the narrator’s father forget not just the color of his wife’s eyes, but his wife entirely. This type of tragedy is something that people have become more aware of in recent years, from books like The Notebook and so forth. As this stanza continues, the “Jiuqu Wulong tea” the wife serves him to “head off the growing chill” can be seen as her trying to slow the progression of his memory loss.

Then, in the fourth stanza, the wife “invents a tale” to tell him, which seems reminiscent of how the two probably met as well. As the tale continues she alludes to her husband’s mental state saying, “three strands broke free to ride the wind.” The “three strands” of hair can be seen as a metaphor for the memories slowly leaving her husbands mind. Just as the strands land in the tea and are “transformed into liquid amber,” his thoughts leave his mind and become forever lost. Carlson ends the forth stanza by writing, “a dynasty of song,” and although “song” is not capitalized and could just refer to musical sound dissipating in the open air, the earlier mention of an emperor named K’ang Ha brings the Chinese Song dynasty to the reader’s mind. The Song dynasty reigned over China from 960-1279 and ended abruptly when 8-year-old emperor Emperor Huaizong of Song (along with Prime Minister Lu Xiufu and 800 members of the royal clan) committed suicide. The father in the poem seems to have led a long life, but, like the Song dynasty, his life quick fades away.

This poem is overall evocative of a lifetime slowly being lost in the mind of an old man and reads like the father inhaling “the scent of her words” in the last line. The lines of the poem put a heavy weight on the readers heart, like smelling a loved ones perfume after their passing.

Lincoln in Marble by Henry Hart

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The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

No one shoos pigeons from his marble hair
or sandblasts tears of soot from craters
in his cheeks. No sculptor climbs a ladder
to carve or hoist his stovepipe hat.

Having stared so long at the moldy onion
of the Capitol, his eyes solidify to chalk.
His shadow slips toward fluted columns
and skies doublecrossed by jets.

Stars fall into the black reflecting pool
like snow on the grave of his beloved Ann.
Again he fingers a jack-knife in his pocket
while a nighthawk cheeps on a branch.

A man in torn army coat and camouflage fatigues
pushes a shopping cart full of amputated limbs
from Bull Run through Washington’s mud.
Cars filibuster up Rock Creek.

Where Whitman wrote letters home for the dying,
offering them sweetcrackers and raspberries
on hospital cots of pine boughs,
grass fades like dollar bills.

Shadows touch the bronze boot
of a bandoliered solider rubbed to gold
by NRA lobbyists, slip toward a monument
splitting green turf like a beached destroyer.

How many ghosts have read the Braille
carved in its black hull? How many
have seen the dead light candles
and float them across the Potomac?

Soon tourists dressed like John Wilkes Booth
scuffle beneath Lincoln’s stone boots,
trigger fingers poised on loaded cameras.
Planes reopen the wound in his head.

He stares at monumental clouds,
like the time he threw away his flintlock
and stood on a stump in a cleared field
waiting like marble for the words to come.

The Lincoln Memorial at night. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Henry Hart has written three books of poetry (The Ghost Ship, The Rooster Mask, and Background Radiation). His poems have been published in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, and other journals, and served as a founding editor of the international poetry journal Verse. Henry Hart is currently a Professor of English and Humanities at the College of William and Mary. “Lincoln in Marble” was previously published in Shenandoah Volume 47, Number 3.

On the week of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday and with the upcoming 150^th anniversary of his assassination, Henry Hart’s poem explores the ways we commemorate one of the nation’s greatest presidents. However, the poem’s tone reflects the grim reality of Lincoln’s legacy; though we build monuments to the man and know his face, we fail to shoo the pigeons from the monument’s hair or prevent his eyes from becoming chalky after gazing upon the Capitol and the modern government. It’s somewhat easy to trivialize the man whose face is so commonplace that it greets you every time you see a penny on the sidewalk or pull a five dollar bill out of your pocket. The line “grass fades like dollar bills” reminds us of this fact and brings attention to Lincoln’s modern reputation. Tourists who visit the Lincoln Memorial (“dressed like John Wilkes booth”) and are interested in the spectacle of the monument itself rather than displaying deference to the actual man minimalize the enormous impact Lincoln had in shaping the country we know today. Hart’s final stanza recalls the reason why Abraham Lincoln is worth remembering even today by conjuring images of the Gettysburg Address, reminding us of the incredible challenges he faced as president in guiding the country through a Civil War and successfully rebuilding it as a united nation in its aftermath.

Those interested in recent publications about the life and death of Abraham Lincoln should check out the newly released books Mourning Lincoln by Martha Hodes, Lincoln’s Body by Richard Wightman Fox, and Founder’s Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln by Richard Brookhiser.