Poet's Corner: pandemic poems (part 2)

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

This is the second batch of poems from Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic edited by Alice Quinn. There were several poems with lines I liked but I didn't like the whole poem.

They include:

from Shelter in Place by Peter Cooley

I savor my sense of smell. I'm well, I'm safe at home.
Reader, help me to tongue-taste these flowers' hues:
piquant crimsons, tart amethysts, honey-ambers.

and the opening lines of A Private Life by Mark Wunderlich

Now that all life is private life
I am more a fiction than previously thought.

But there were four I liked in their entirety.

The Burning One by Li-Young Lee [and if you want to hear the poet read it, you can here.]

Say, Ahhhh.

Stop saying, Death lives
because Life dies,
thus rendering the impossible possible.

Say, Ohhhh.

Stop saying, Death owns one foot
and Life owns the other,
and that’s why everybody limps,
that’s why we keep walking in circles,
that’s why we’ll never be free
of the spell of yes-and-no.

Say, Mmmm.

Don’t say, Life and Death dwell together
in each foot of both feet, and each step
means falling
forward into Life and Death,
a rocking heel to toe,
out of Life into Death,
out of Death into Life.

And don’t say, Life and Death are in the human heart,
that seat of the possible and the impossible,
that fulcrum and pivot of all rocking
forward and backward,
all leaning port and starboard.

The heart is but a shoe keeping time
to an older cresting and ebbing, opening and closing.
Our Being called forth and our Being called back
ride the surge of a greater arc and deeper stepping,
a closer turning upon an utter, inmost pole,
our perfect rotation upon an ancient and absolute axis.

Say, Ahhhh,
and kiss me.
Seal my mouth with your mouth.

Say, Ohhhh,
and kiss me again.
Part my lips with your lips.

Say, Mmmm,
and kiss me once more and longer.
Put your mortal stamp on me.


The End of Poetry by Ada Limón [read by the poet here]

Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower
and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,
enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy
and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and tis
of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and god
not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,
enough of the will to go on and not go on or how
a certain light does a certain thing, enough
of the kneeling and the rising and the looking
inward and the looking up, enough of the gun,
the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lost
letter on the dresser, enough of the longing and
the ego and the obliteration of ego, enough
of the mother and the child and the father and the child
and enough of the pointing to the world, weary
and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border,
enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough
I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,
enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high
water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,
I am asking you to touch me.

----

I haven't been able to find cut and pasteable versions of two more poems I like "Poem for My Students" by Sharon Olds and "Fantasia in a Time of Plague" by Rown Ricardo Phillips so I may scan them and post them later today. Wednesday is shopping day so I'm off to do that.