Dailies 1/23/18

Anaïs Duplan – Ode to the Happy Negro Hugging the Flag in Robert Colescott’s “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware”

I have waited all my life to find me find you
perched around my black neck in repose

–

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Richard Robbins – When the Other Man Asked Him Did He Pray

He kept driving, the storefronts a shoulder-to-shoulder forest he couldn’t
see around.

–

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Terry Ann Thaxton  – History of America

On the boat the men drank whatever the women poured
while the women buoyed up the heads of sick children,
and then they were peeling corn, and potatoes rose from
the earth. I never paid attention in school. Didn’t understand

–

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~TRIBRACH~

Poetry Diary:

Barbara Crooker – Grief

is a river you wade in until you get to the other side.

But I am here, stuck in the middle, water parting

around my ankles, moving downstream

over the flat rocks. I’m not able to lift a foot,

–

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Dailies 11/27/17

Afaa Michael Weaver – The Silver Thread

The fern gathers where the water seldom goes
unless the storms swell this world of wise choices,
the loud trickle of clear tongues of the stream
licking the edges of rock, while up ahead a curve
-
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~~~

 J.T. Barbarese – The Leaf on the Floor 

Some leaves of a tree had been found on the nursery floor. – J.B. Barrie 

Between fresh sheets,

they open their mouths,

gulp sleep.

–

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Audio

~~~

Athena Kildegaard – Mother’s Prayer

–

I stood on the porch of our raised cottage
*****and saw my two ruddy children

–

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~~~

Erin Rodoni – If No Energy Can Be Created of Destroyed

Before she turned the ultrasound
away, I saw my tiny unmanned satellite.

 

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~~~

 Lee Upton – The Major Holidays

In memory of James Tate (8 December 1943–8 July 2015)

The whole time I almost forgot about Unwise-mas, Unthink-mas,
and the Festival of Sullenness,
and how they all fell this year
in the month of the Day of Reckoning

–

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“It’s irrelevant if I understand consciously exactly what I am saying, only that I say it urgently enough….”

Despite My Efforts Even My Prayers Have Turned into Threats

–

Kaveh Akbar

–

Holy father I can’t pretend

I’m not afraid to see you again

but I’ll say that when the time

comes I believe my courage

will expand like a sponge

cowboy in water. My earth-

father was far braver than me —

coming to America he knew

no English save Rolling Stones

lyrics and how to say thanks

God. Will his goodness roll

–

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KAVEH AKBAR: HOW I FOUND POETRY IN CHILDHOOD PRAYER- Literary Hub – 9/12/17

“This music, this way of hymning directly to God, was my first conscious experience of mellifluous charged language, and it’s the bedrock upon which I’ve built my understanding of poetry as a craft and as a meditative practice. There is no way to divorce my writing life from my spiritual life; that Venn diagram would just be one big circle. Whichever Divine I address in my poems today—love, fear, death, family, God, or anything else—first needs to be courted. I learned from an early age language was a way to court the great unknowables, provided it was charged and earnest and true. It’s irrelevant if I understand consciously exactly what I am saying, only that I say it urgently enough, speak it with enough beauty of breath and spirit to earn a tiny moment of God’s attention.” 

Dailies 8/29/17: evil, old selves, Long Island Sound, pencils, saving the world, praying to the patron saint of lawyers and notaries

Daily Quote from “The Limited” by Sherman Alexie

Valerie Bandura  – Evil

I hear there’s evil in countries beginning with I,
as in the domain of the self,
the house of the id, the former
an actual place, the latter
a bunch of smaller versions
of the same ruination. So I wonder
how someone could stick a sticker
like Hate Evil on his bumper,
then sideswipe someone else with it,

–

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Emma Lazarus – Long Island Sound

–

I see it as it looked one afternoon
In August,—by a fresh soft breeze o’erblown.
The swiftness of the tide, the light thereon,
A far-off sail, white as a crescent moon.

–

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Ira Sadoff – Old Selves

Ok, I no longer want them,
the many selves I had to manage

that once exhausted friends. I believed

–

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Nancy Keating – Prayer to Saint Mark,
Patron Saint of Lawyers and Notaries

Gracious Saint Mark, evangelist, apostle, and all-around good
writer, you who are patron saint of lawyers, notaries, and
prisoners—so, basically, the designated protector of those
who labor under the constraints of bureaucracy—grant me the
patience to sit through the interminable hearings orchestrated
by my local municipality to bore the public to death so that,

–

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---

TRIBRACH

Poetry Diary: yesterday was my wedding anniversary. 7 years. Got my husband a pencil sharpener.  Because he likes pencils.

Todd Bass – The World Is in Pencil

–

—not pen. It’s got

–

that same silken

dust about it, doesn’t it,

–

–

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 –

 

 

 

“Both poetry and theology for me are about paying attention to the world in a very intentional way….”

“Both poetry and theology for me are about paying attention to the world in a very intentional way, and about admitting a mystery that is bigger than anything that I rationally understand. … I think poetry has always been for me a kind of prayer. So those things feel very linked for me. And, again, poetry does feel like the first — and in some ways best — language I ever had for mystery and for my sense of what exists beyond the world we’re currently living in.”

Molly McCully Brown – Poet Imagines Life Inside A 1910 Institution That Eugenics Built – Terry Gross – NPR – August 14, 2017

 

Grand Mal Seizure

Molly McCully Brown

–

There’s however it is you call,
& there’s whatever it is
you’re calling to.

July, I sew
my own dress
from calico & lace.

–

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Dailies 7/28/17: Schrödinger’s mouse, visiting an ancestral home, giving God a makeover & a prayer to talk to animals

Dana Curtis  – Schrödinger’s Mouse

There’s nothing so small that there isn’t something smaller —
a very small cat killed an even smaller mouse
and the box issues physics,
(sell: failed cell: blood) a gaslit house:

–

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Louis Jenkins – My Ancestral Home

–

We came to a beautiful little farm. From photos
I’d seen I knew this was the place. The house
and barn were painted in the traditional Falu
red, trimmed with white. It was nearly mid-

–

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Nikole Brown – A Prayer to Talk to Animals

Lord, I ain’t asking to be the Beastmaster
gym-ripped in a jungle loincloth
or a Doctor Dolittle or even the expensive vet
down the street, that stethoscoped redhead,
her diamond ring big as a Cracker Jack toy.

–

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Philip Fried – The Full Treatment

Algebrista y Sangrador

Barbering, bonesetting, bloodletting, it’s all
In the equation, the unknown revealed, the patient
Healed, as proclaimed by the helical red-and-white pole,
Sign of a site of bandages and blood,

–

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Dailies 7/15/17: climbing ladders, trying to pray, mourning an absence, & a rental dog

Lynne Sharon Schwartz – The Ladders

I was climbing risky rope ladders,
slowly, step by step, nearing the topmost rung
of the topmost ladder, it was some sort of quest.
I knew the reward was waiting at the peak.

–

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Rena Priest – The Rental Dog

The train came and the man

sat next to me, showed me

–

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Twyla Hansen – Trying to Pray

–

With my arms raised in a vee,
I gather the heavens and bring
my hands down slow together,
press palms and bow my head.

–

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Paul Laurence Dunbar – Absence

Good-night, my love, for I have dreamed of thee
In waking dreams, until my soul is lost—

–

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Dailies 4/23/17: ironing one’s father’s shirts, getting locked out of one’s house by one’s mother, becoming independent & getting one’s own place, & dreaming of having kids of one’s own

Jo McDougall – Fairy Tale

–

I’m fourteen, ironing my father’s shirts.
I am his handmaiden, chosen.

–

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Marilyn Longstaff – Opposite Freedom Fields Park, 1961

 

My mother, in a fit of whimsey, locked us out.

 

decided we should walk, like tradesmen,

–

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Margaret Hasse – Belongings

–

After being a student, then an hourly worker,
I became a career girl and earned real money.

–

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Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr. – A Prayer

As I lie in bed,
Flat on my back;
There passes across my ceiling
An endless panorama of things—

–

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Dailies 2/5/17: maps, prayers, debris, and outliving one’s mother

Terra Incognita – Terence Tiller 

Old sailors making landfall (but the tide
unruly and the wind uncertain) boast,
in their home port, of beauties undescribed.
Fog had kept modest all that skirted coast;

–

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Spring Runoff Prayer – D. A. Lockhart 

 

I pray that words
come like water
in first runoff,

–

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The Best Thing I Did – Ron Padgett

–

The best thing I did
for my mother
was to outlive her

–

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Débris – Lola Ridge

I love those spirits
That men stand off and point at,

–

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12/9/16: wondering how to re-enter a calendar. dressing the soul in women’s underwear. drinking strong coffee. hammering prayer.

Strong Coffee – Anne Higgins

Strong coffee
smells like a current
of warm southerly air
in the climate of dawn.

–

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From Grace – Leonard Gontarek

 

I may force the soul into nakedness.

I may lead the soul around on a leash.

I may dress the soul in women’s underwear

–

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Actually Very Simple – Jay Deshpande

He came back from halfway around the world like that,
tongue tied around him like a scarf. Everything set before him
set to bursting. The fear that what he’d seen—
what had been inside him—that one
clear note—now would slip away. He’d go back
to an electric life, stupid with administration.
How does one re-enter a calendar?

–

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Hammer Is the Prayer – Christian Wiman 

 

There is no consolation in the thought of God,
he said, slamming another nail

in another house another havoc had half-taken.
Grace is not consciousness, nor is it beyond.

–

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