Poem of the Day #9

Filmstrip Genre

What do they know in New York
about "Understanding Your Love Feelings"
the name of the filmstrip we watch as poets.
Projector with strips of film
rolled, plastic see-through, teacher with wooden pointer
on the screen.
A kid in class mimics the 'beep' sound perfectly
causing the teacher to get confused, advance the strip
all wrong.    She asks us, is this fact or fiction?
Shout your answers.  Here in the 'Burque we don't know,
we say faction.


Thanks to Jenette for the filmstrip session at last night's East of Edith and for Mitch for the story about the kid.

Poem of the Day #8

Zoo

Humans have a way of living in boxes
organizing box-like structures for other species
to live as we do.

Plants are easy.  They don't complain if we arrange
beautiful gardens
and leave them there for our happiness.
Sexual organs flourish as flowers and we can pick them at will.

Who's to say the giant koi aren't happy?

Colorful swimmers, they are well-fed and with their own kind.

The sole white rhino is more difficult.

Hunted for his horn, warning signs are posted outside his area

to remind us of illegal ivory selling

blaming the demand on some far-away bushmen

with insatiable desires to feed their manhood with its magical powers.

The zebras are not running away from the lions

The people here will never hear the ear-splitting roar of the King of the Jungle

The cheetah  naps most of the day.

A teenager asks, "Why are they sleeping all the time?" 

"You would too, if you were in a cage," her friend replies.

The aquarium seems more soothing.

We cannot imagine what it's like to be a fish

and couples have their photos taken with the sharks

and barracudas behind them.

Something primal is in the jellyfish moon tank

lit up in darkness.  They pulse and glow.

No brain, no heart, no organs we argue for when we say human life begins,

yet here they are, surviving in spite of us.

We have done our part to catalog and preserve our fellow creatures

into extinction from wildness.

The elephants sway and toss dust or water on themselves with their trunks.

They grieve, like us, of course.

Why would it be otherwise?

I say goodbye to the four elephants as I ride the train

back to the gardens and conservatory.

The sign reaassured me they have 5.5 acres to roam

and they "sleep under the stars" on summer nights.

We are all born into captivity.

I went to the Albuquerque Biopark for the first time yesterday. Within walking distance from my house.  This poem was forming in my head all day, I just had to write it down.  I admire the gardens and the aquarium and the Biopark is a great part of the city.  The Children's Fantasy Garden is marvelous and enchants the imagination.  I've always felt a bit uncomfortable in zoos, however.

Poem A Day #7

Fowl

Pheasants are an exotic bird, she said, she saw one for the first time.
Daddy used to go hunting, I thought, and brought them home
and I'd stroke their colorful feathers while our golden lab, Blondie
proudly wagged her tail as she stood next to me.
A Minnesota autumn saw pheasants hiding in cornfields
as they walked through dried stalks, the dogs flushing them out
while the men shoot.
I was 5 or 6 at the time, and remember grouse hunting too
but ring-necked
pheasants were the superior bird for the dinner plate.

I call up Dad today to ask him about pheasants. They are scarcer now
and he tells me when they started plowing down the cornstalks before each winter
when he was on the farm. Corn bores would destroy the crop, seeking the sugar.
No more habitat left for either.

Quail are exotic to me.
I see them running in a group of four, or five as I float in the air
my hot air balloon pilot friend pointing them out in the desert.

Pigeons coo-coo-ca-choo from my neighbor's rooftop.
I know their calls and their nesting habits as they parade down the sidewalk
their heads bobbing, from Minneapolis to Albuquerque.

Poem A Day #6

Plan B

America celebrates Sacajawea's birthday on a silver dollar
forgot she was kidnapped at ten, bought by her French-Canadian trapper husband
as one of his two wives, saved the men's lives and received no monetary payment
only to die of fever at 23, her two children adopted by Clark.

Today a federal judge struck down age limits on the morning-after pill
so now any age girl or woman can control what happens in her body
with a simple trip to the drugstore plucked off the shelf.

Would Sacajawea had taken the pill if she could? Would she have been sold as a child
slave and future bride to bear children and used to navigate, a symbol of peace
trapped in patriarchy? A silly question for that time when women were property of men.

It's better now but not a lot when women worldwide have to bear their breasts
in protest for women's rights, where the breast still gets attention for being seen in public
whether nursing or for expressing love or hate -  those  motherly, sexy, beautiful breasts
and vaginas that keep women under the still oh so invisibly there glass ceiling.
Yes we've come a long way, baby but we still haven't passed the ERA
we are working on equal marriage rights for all and Plan B is sitting on a teenager's dresser.

Poem A Day #5

Somewhere

This is the somewhere

We were always trying to get:

Landscape

Reduced to the basics:

Rolling mills, rocks, running

Water, burdocks, trees living and dead. (1)

Somewhere the dead

are buried under humps of dirt, somewhere

a white cross perches with faded plastic flowers run

over on the highway by drivers who will rush to get

somewhere unimportant. A basic

necessity of burial:  warm landscape

soft enough to dig.  We walk the land, scope

out our future with planted trees, no dead

ancestors among us. Basic

survival skills are burdock roots, some

flower stalks harvested before they get

to bloom. Tree bark stripped off as runners

to make canoes, stone faces stare at us from the bank. We run

into landscape.

Some day we will elope to a new place, get

dressed in red and tie ourselves to trees. The dead

and living surround us.  Somewhere

in our pockets lie changes.  BASIC

programs run on a green screen. Basic

codes run all life forms.  Somewhere someone runs

deep into the forest.  Ferns unfold.   Some ask where

they are but we see another landscape

appear on the screen.  Death

sleeps under down covers.  No graveyards to get

creepy with.  Graves are fine and private, we get

consolation in the land of Elysian, a basic

right of passage with manicured lawns, the dead

no longer gone but sweetly singing under running

water, weeping willows, the statuary landscape

attracting tourists with guidebooks, draped urns, winged cherubs, somewhere

over the rainbow death got lost.

This is the somewhere we exit, back to basics.

Run to the stonecutter, chisel our own mortality.

1 – opening stanza quote is verbatim  from “Daybooks 1,” Two Headed Poems, Margaret Atwood 1978.

photo:  Burdocks Arctium minus

I started this sestina on Wed in our sestina class when I had students write a sestina using a line or first stanza of another poet's poem.  James Cummins (one of my favorite sestina troubadours) gave me the idea for this with his poem #22 from his book "The Whole Truth."   The last three lines of the sixth stanza are also celebrations of Walt Whitman's view of cemeteries, from his biography.

Poem A Day #4

Blood Money

Reading Walt Whitman’s bio

I smile when I see poem titles Blood Money

or Song for a Certain Congressman or The House of Friends

the latter referencing Doughfaces, Crawlers, Lice of Humanity.

Not much has changed in one-hundred-fifty years

one century to the next fighting for freedom and the voices

of the people. Walt was devastated when hero fighter journalist Margaret Fuller

drowned off Fire Island, New York in 1850 along with her lover and child.

She admired George Sand, same as I do. I wonder what she would have thought

of Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, murdered in a plane crash with his wife

by the Doughfaces, Crawlers, Lice of Humanity politicians.

Voices are remembered, or forgotten, bodies lost at sea, or in cornfields

or paying for their own tombs, their names etched in stone. How do we remember our own

pending deaths? Words in the ether, poems printed, birthplaces memorialized, the world marches on.

　

　

pic: Walt Whitman's tombstone, Camden, NJ

Bio:  Walt Whitman A Life by Justin Kaplan p. 163-164.

Poem a Day #3

A Kind of Courage

 

What kind of courage is it?

The anxious, scary kind,

the pottery on her aunt’s shelf in turquoise blue

chipped on the rim, well-worn and loved

through three generations and now you are responsible

for keeping it safe, handling it to save your life.

 

What kind of fool takes their life

and leaps into their unfamiliar? It’s

a congested kind of dust responsible

for new allergies, a woman who never knew the kinds

of desert plants that would settle her into love

of chamisa, blooming yucca, cactus, pinon, juniper and that incredible blue

 

sky, blue hovering sadness, blue

disappearing into the Great Lakes. Her life

out of the fog of waiting. How she loved

seeing Dad at the kitchen table, six am, it

was him alone, eating breakfast cereal, kindness

in his hands as she joined him, responsible

 

for getting up for school, responsible

with Mom and brother still in bed, her blue

eyes join his dream world of the working trucks, kinds

of home calling her away even then. Life

someday giving her offices, cubicles, typewriters, it

never stopped with just carbon paper and blue stencils loved

 

by her Mom’s church secretary upper office, love

of the smell of mimeographed bulletins responsible

for news and prayer chains and the next holy season, it

churns them out around the wheel of yellow, blue,

purple, pink and red.  She waits for her life

to arrive at the front steps, waits for the boy on the motorcycle, kind

 

of coming to pick her up, where they kind

of talk and lay down in the green park grass where love

eludes her young body this time. Life

will grow on in years, waiting to be responsible

for her own wedding crystal, her own blue

sky over her grandmother’s lost grave in Iowa, it

 

takes her prairie life and leads her.  A kind

of courage, it gives her love of the wind,

her response to chipped blue pottery.

 

I started this sestina in last week's sestina class that I am teaching to six wonderful sestina troubadours in Albuquerque. We are in week 5 of 6.  We did a writing exercise about how we felt in the moment. I started with "How do you feel right now?" and we wrote several one-word descriptions.  One of mine was 'courage.'  We then added an object that represented one of the feelings.  I looked around the room and saw Lauren's beautiful pottery displayed on her dining room wall shelf. Something about the pottery, the question and the way the sestina wraps me into it's form, pulling out things that I never knew were there, took me onward.  I wanted to start with the question and wrote the first stanza.  After that, it's that sestina magic that kept me going.