other people's poems

Poem of the Day: Women Like Me BY WENDY ROSE making promises they can’t keep. For you, Grandmother, I said I would pull each invading burr and thistle from your skin, cut out the dizzy brittle eucalypt, take from the ground the dark oily poison– all to restore you happy and proud, the whole of you transformed and bursting into tomorrow.            But where do I cut first? Where should I begin to pull? Should it be the Russian thistle down the hill where backhoes have bitten? Or African senecio or tumbleweed bouncing above the wind? Or the middle finger of my right hand? Or my left eye or the other one? Or a slice from the small of my back, a slab of fat from my thigh? I am broken as much as any native ground, my roots tap a thousand migrations. My daughters were never born, I am as much the invader as the native, as much the last day of life as the first. I presumed you to be as bitter as me, to tremble and rage against alien weight. Who should blossom? Who should receive pollen? Who should be rooted, who pruned, who watered, who picked? Should I feed the white-faced cattle who wait for the death train to come or comb the wild seeds from their tails? Who should return across the sea or the Bering Strait or the world before this one or the Mother Ground? Who should go screaming to some other planet, burn up or melt in a distant sun? Who should be healed and who hurt? Who should dry under summer’s white sky, who should shrivel at the first sign of drought? Who should be remembered? Who should be the sterile chimera of earth and of another place, alien with a native face, native with an alien face? Poem of the Day: The Reason BY STEVIE SMITH My life is vile          I hate it so          I’ll wait awhile             And then I’ll go.          Why wait at all?          Hope springs alive,          Good may befall             I yet may thrive. It is because I can’t make up my mind    If God is good, impotent or unkind.

Poem of the Day: I Dreamed That I Was Old

BY STANLEY KUNITZ

I dreamed that I was old: in stale declension   

Fallen from my prime, when company

Was mine, cat-nimbleness, and green invention,   

Before time took my leafy hours away.

My wisdom, ripe with body’s ruin, found   

Itself tart recompense for what was lost

In false exchange: since wisdom in the ground   

Has no apocalypse or pentecost.

I wept for my youth, sweet passionate young thought,

And cozy women dead that by my side   

Once lay: I wept with bitter longing, not   

Remembering how in my youth I cried.

Stanley Kunitz, “I Dreamed That I Was Old” from The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928-1978. Copyright © 1930, 1944, 1958, 1971, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1978, 1979 by Stanley Kunitz. Reprinted with the permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Source: Selected Poems 1928-1958 (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1958)

Poem of the Day: Song

BY RANDALL MANN

I found my muster station, sir.

My skin is patent leather.

The tourists are recidivists.

This calm is earthquake weather.

I’ve used up all the mulligans.

I’d kill to share a vice.

The youngster reads a yellowed Oui.

The socialite has lice.

The Europe trip I finally took

was rash and Polaroid,

was gilt, confit, and bathhouse foam.

And I cannot avoid

the end: I will not die in Paris,

won’t rest for good behind

a painted mausoleum door.

The purser will not find

me mummified beneath your tulle,

and Paris will not burn.

Today is Thursday, so I’ll die.

Come help me pick my urn.

Poem of the Day: Break of Day in the Trenches

BY ISAAC ROSENBERG

The darkness crumbles away.

It is the same old druid Time as ever,

Only a live thing leaps my hand,

A queer sardonic rat,

As I pull the parapet’s poppy

To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

To cross the sleeping green between.

It seems you inwardly grin as you pass

Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,

Less chanced than you for life,

Bonds to the whims of murder,

Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

The torn fields of France.

What do you see in our eyes

At the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens?

What quaver—what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins

Drop, and are ever dropping;

But mine in my ear is safe—

Just a little white with the dust.

Poem of the Day: When I Am Asked

BY LISEL MUELLER

When I am asked   

how I began writing poems,   

I talk about the indifference of nature.   

It was soon after my mother died,   

a brilliant June day,   

everything blooming.   

I sat on a gray stone bench   

in a lovingly planted garden,   

but the day lilies were as deaf   

as the ears of drunken sleepers   

and the roses curved inward.   

Nothing was black or broken   

and not a leaf fell   

and the sun blared endless commercials   

for summer holidays.   

I sat on a gray stone bench   

ringed with the ingenue faces   

of pink and white impatiens   

and placed my grief   

in the mouth of language,   

the only thing that would grieve with me.