Poems of Protest, Resistance, and Empowerment
Check out this poem sampler the editors of the Poetry Foundation have provided. Some of the usual suspects are there, of course, but look further to find Danez Smith’s “Tonight in Oakland,” Ilya Kaminsky’s “We Lived Happily During the War,” Heather McHugh’s “What He Thought,” and much more.
More poetry! More resistance!
If we don’t seek, how will we learn?
The Academy of American Poets is offering a series, curated by 2016 Walt Whitman winner Mai Der Vang, featuring poems by and discussions with Hmong American poets.
Our country is enriched by its great diversity, yet we too often passively accept only what comes to us. Read these poets. Listen to their words. This is who they are. Who we are.
My poem, “A Brief History of Babel,” is up at Bonnie McClellan’s International Poetry Month Celebration. She’ll be presenting 28 poems following this year’s theme of “Neural Networks: The Creative Power of Language.” It’s going to be a fun, interesting month.
Politics
No snakes here,
but a little voice
says the mice
will return,
and which
do you prefer,
the one that
gnaws open
ramen packages
then craps
on your plate
or the one
who takes
its prey
under the house
and swallows
it whole,
leaving
no bones
behind?
Palinode (platelets, sign, color)
Cloistered, it circulates and combats, feeds, heals
and defends, destroying, at times, its host, and thereby
itself. Extracted, it congeals into a dark symbol,
resembling our innermost facade. The reddened
moon, incorruptible and estranged. A bull’s eye.
I pressure it daily, measuring flow and constricting
elements. Numinous river, source of strength, the internal flood.
The internal flood summons bitterness, application
of the embodied life, rubedo. I inscribe my name in
three strokes: the upright, the downward curve, the
encompassing circle, omitting the between: as above,
so below. The color-blind more accurately perceive
texture, alleviating the effects of spectral sensitivity.
We build from within, flowing outward in unison.
Flowing outward, split asunder, I assume the neural
response. Color, as expression, as survival factor,
attractant and warning. As symbol. The ancients
buried red pigment with bones to hasten renewal.
Life energy, passion and rage. The force in bodies,
in spirit, in blood. Shade of the alchemist’s sulfur,
glowing embers, ash, the transitory energy of human desire.
This first appeared, in slightly different form, in ditch, in January 2014.
My poem “Scarecrow Pretends” is up at The Slag Review.
My poem, “What We Say When We Say Nothing,” is up at Glass: A Journal of Poetry. Ten poems, ten poets. The work is exquisite. Many thanks to editor Anthony Frame for taking this piece and aligning it with these poems. And hey, while you’re there, you might consider subscribing to The Glass Chapbook Series. Great writing and publication standards. I look forward to receiving the rest of the series.
My last five posts of 2016 will be reruns of the five most viewed poems on this site during the year. Number four made its appearance here in July.
In Response to Nadia’s Misdirected Email, I State Exactly What I Am Looking For
Balance. The ability to stand on one foot, on a tightrope, and juggle AR-15s,
ethics and dollar bills, while chanting the U.S. Constitution, in tongues.
Or good health.
Unweighted dreams.
A mechanism for disagreeing without needing to annihilate the opposition.
Doorways without doors, truth without fear.
A simple tulip.
One word to describe that instant between thought and pulled trigger,
intent and wish, the elevated pulse and sense of diminished space and time.
Sanctuary. Regret. Apology. Respect.
A tonic to the bitterness, a foil to the sweet.
Fitted sheets that fold. Uncommon sense.
Love in the abstract. More bacon. Smiles.
A closet that embraces everything you place in it. Everything.
The means of unfiring guns, of reversing wounds to undamaged flesh,
and rounds to their magazines, full and never used.
Self-organizing drawers. Due process.
Mothers who know only tears of joy.
One peaceful day.
Just one.
Variations on a Theme
1. The Long Night
We envy the shadow its attributes, its willingness to subside,
but what of its flesh?
I lay in the field and wept.
Think of the fragrance, the moist leaves
enveloping the still
warm body. In retrospect, I realize that I should never have left, that air
returns to voided space despite all attempts to disavow
light, that wind and rain and soil alike filter through the chest’s
cavity, that stones may bear one’s touch in perpetuity.
At nineteen, death had gifted nothing to my world.
At twenty, little else remained.
So close, so lovely.
2. The Loneliness of Shadows
Light collapsing around a point. The two-headed flower.
In my dreams, no one speaks.
Not the thing itself, the bud bursting forth, petals ablaze with color,
but rather change: the process reinforced.
Sleep seldom shows such kindness.
Or its fruit, redolent of sun and rain, withdrawn and shriveled,
and finally, ingested.
Yesterday I woke damp but unafraid.
3. Alchemy
Stones never talk, but they rise from the earth, appearing as if by invitation.
The way silence lines an unfilled
grave, which is to say as below
so above, an infinite murmur open to the night.
And other notions: transpiration.
Waste.
Sublimation. Calcination and burning.
At times I have withdrawn
like water from the air’s
body, fearful yet reckless in the act.
That evening the moon flickered and the shadows lay at our feet,
and all the words we never framed,
the bitters our tongues could not know, the wasted
music and abandoned caresses, those words,
sighed into the ground, leaving you adrift, alone.
But how else might one transform darkness to light?
Or the reverse.
This originally appeared in Boston Poetry Magazine in April, 2014, and was first posted here in July of 2015..
I’m delighted that my poems “Scarecrow Remembers” and “Scarecrow Sees” are up at The High Window. Many thanks to editors David Cooke and Anthony Costello for their interest in publishing American poets.
O at the Edges 