national poetry month XVI

it's almost here! 

once again this year, i will be posting a poem for each day of national poetry month.

enjoy, and remember to support your local poet(s)!

merry christmas!

peace and joy to you and yours!

"forgive the living and the dead." - nicholas samaras

"Forgive the living and the dead."
                                                                 Saint Kosmas Aitolos

This is the weight of the unresolved dead.

Deep hours. A wooded house
with one yellow pane of light. 
Words on a page.
Wind in the foothills.
Years I have carried you like a tombstone in my heart.

Tonight, with this book before me
in simple lamplight,
I find the small surprise of perspective,
feel how one found passage may show
the thin, bright plume beneath a closed door.
I know you are alive somewhere --
dreaming I hand you a plate of oranges,
each day waking to forget my name,
dressing and arranging your hair
to meet someone younger than I.
Before a stoked spine of fire
with this volume on my lap,
I sit up in the hushed parlor,
remembering the closed history of us,
my old habit of thinking you buried to me.

Now with this quote from a quiet saint,
I care to be winter, choose
to unclasp like leaves.
Hatred has kept me
tied to you, kept me your servant.
Anger is a hard strength that isn't good enough anymore.
So, to this paragraph, I speak your name.
Once.
Simply.

I tell you it is alright.
I let the past be finally adequate.
I forgive the living and the dead.
Whichever you are is your own choice.
Mine is to move from him.

Samaras, Nicholas. "Forgive the Living and the Dead" Hands of the Saddlemaker. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992. 49-50.

(from) out of cana: maura eichner

Eat bread. Drink wine. Try to sing the song
of Christ. Live life. If you can dance, dance.
Everywhere grace awaits. Desire to love to love.

Eichner, Maura. from "Out of Cana" Upholding Mystery: An Anthology of Contemporary Christian Poetry. Ed. David Impastato, Ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 163.

you talk of art - joan murray

You talk of art, of work, of books.
Have you ever sat down, thought all that's to do?
That book to read, that book to write,
Sat down, stood up, walked back and forth,
Because not an action you could do would
Fill the gap that's wanting action to the chin?

Look. Look into the past one damned moment,
And on that you ask me to work, to dream, to do?
Try it yourself on nothing. I can't.

Every confounded one has had so much of life
that left them gasping in a stinking or a lighter air,
Left out of breath and glad to think at last,
Higher or lower, their there and there to there.

And where am I? Where I began, and where I'll end:
Sitting, sitting, with the last grain of will
Rotting in time, and there's no time or tide in me.

You talk of art, of work, of books.
I'll talk of nothing in its lowest state,
Talk till my jaw hangs limply at the joint,
And the talk that's one big yawn in the face of all of you,
Empty as head, empty as mood, and weak.
And I can hear all the watery wells of desolation
Lapping a numbing sleep with in the head.

Murray, Joan. "You Talk of Art" Modern Canadian Poets. Jones, Evan and Todd Swift, eds. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2010. 74.