Wrong Number by Wisława Szymborska

Wrong Number

At midnight, in an empty, hushed art gallery

a tactless telephone spews forth a stream of rings;

a human sleeping now would jump up instantly,

but only sleepless prophets and untiring kings

reside here, where the moonlight makes them pale;

they hold their breath, their eyes fixed on some nail

or crack; only the young pawnbroker’s bride

seems taken by that odd, ringing contraption,

but even she won’t lay her fan aside,

she too just hangs there, caught in mid-nonaction.

Above it all, in scarlet robes or nude,

they view nocturnal fuss as simply rude.

Here’s more black humor worthy of the name

than if some grand duke leaned out from his frame

and vented his frustration with a vulgar curse.

And if some silly man calling from town

refuses to give up, put the receiver down,

though he’s got the wrong number? He lives, so he errs.

(Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanaugh)

(Death’s Dictionary) by Kevin Young

(Death’s Dictionary)

A shack made of ribs.

A house made of out.

A car made of rust.

A smile made of doubt.

A house made of fire.

A magician’s gesture.

Of cards. Of the Lord.

As preacher, pats his brow.

A joint made of juke.

A twist. A night away. 

A wood made of green.

Of blood.

The kerchief now a bandage.

A place in the sun.

A house made of railroad.

A shack of shotgun.

O' Noblesse O' by Nikky Finney

O' Noblesse O'

{on the occasion of Martin Puryear’s Noblesse O’ (red cedar and

aluminum paint) at the Dallas Museum of Art}

Perfect for picking up marbles,

For finding, lifting, a favorite

Blade of grass, O’ magic elastic straw of the watering hole,

Perfected for sucking, water, up,

Then miraculously aiming back

Around, into the mouth, mod implement for trumpeting sound,

And underwater snorkeling,

And cracking the shell but never the peanut,

Graceful long-legged factory of olfaction, engineered for uprooting

Eight hundred pounds of tree trunk,

Like an arm, you were designed for touch,

Elongated curious proboscis, at the tip waits opposable fingers,

The nerve endings

Composed of the most sensitive tissue

Found in the world, evolutionary marvel, one alone,

Holding 150,000 fascicles,

All muscle, no bone, zero fat,

Only plush gray memory matter, inter-connected dorsal and ventral,

Laterals, transverse and radiating,

The interior of your snout

Arranged like the wheel of a bicycle, engineered to control

The larger movements in life,

Up and down, side to side, (Run! He has a gun!)

The most versatile appendage ever designed, given the delicate flexibility

Of something earth-rooted,

As well as something in flight,

Coordinated precise contractions, making complex coiling movements,

Reaching twenty-three feet

In the air, for food,

Wrestling with conspecifics, digging for water, raising mud beds,

Shoveling sand, wiping an eye,

Here rises all that is left of her,

Truncated assemblage of all her senses, beneath what you thankfully

Cannot see, is the rest of her severed body,

Her last big movement, simple;

To hoist her oil can of a nose as high in the air as inhumanly possible,

To warn her family,

Her trumpet calling out to her new calf

Nearby, humans on all sides, she will still be alive when he swings

His massive blade into her long thick snout,

As they, scurry away with her two front teeth,

Cassocked in their blood cloth, long prehensile double nostril writing

Tube, made of smart flesh and mother muscle,

Monarch and Luna moth tissue,

One hundred and forty pounds and 150,000 fascicles, each with a sense of

Smell 4x that of a bloodhound,

Here rises the trunk of the last elephant,

Who came as her mother came, to the watering hole, early in the day,

Before the heat & the humans,

To lower herself, to teach her calves, this is how to drink,

O’ Noblesse oblige, O’ Noblesse O.

Swallows by A. E. Stallings

Swallows

Every year the swallows come

And put their homestead in repair,

And raise another brood, and skim

And boomerang through summer air,

And reap mosquitoes from the hum

Of holidays. A handsome pair,

One on the nest, one on the wire,

Cheat-cheat‐cheat, the two conspire

To murder half the insect race,

And feed them squirming to their chicks.

They work and fret at such a pace,

And natter in between, with clicks

And churrs, they lift the raftered place

(Seaside taverna) with their tricks

Of cursive loops and Morse-code call,

Both analog and digital.

They seem to us so coupled, married,

So flustered with their needful young,

So busy housekeeping, so harried,

It’s hard to picture them among

The origins of myth—a buried

Secret, rape, a cut-out tongue,

Two sisters wronged, where there’s no right,

Till transformation fledges flight.

But Ovid swapped them in the tale,

So that the sister who was forced

Becomes instead the nightingale,

Who sings as though her heart would burst.

It’s Ovid’s stories that prevail.

And so the swallow is divorced

Twice from her voice, her tuneless chatter,

And no one asks her what’s the matter.

These swallows, though, don’t have the knack

For sorrow—or we’d not have guessed—

Though smartly dressed in tailored black,

Spend no time mourning, do not rest.

One scissors forth, one zigzags back,

They take turns settled on the nest

Or waiting on a perch nearby

To zero in on wasp or fly.

They have no time for tragic song,

As dusk distills, they dart and flicker,

The days are long, but not as long

As yesterday. The night comes quicker,

And soon the season will be wrong.

Knackered, cross, they bitch and bicker,

Like you and me. They never learn.

And every summer, they return.

The Pedestrian by Tommye Blount

The Pedestrian

When the pickup truck, with its side mirror,

almost took out my arm, the driver’s grin

reflected back; it was just a horror

show that was never going to happen,

don’t protest, don’t bother with the police

for my benefit, he gave me a smile—

he too was startled, redness in his face—

when I thought I was going, a short while,

to get myself killed: it wasn’t anger

when he bared his teeth, as if to caution

calm down, all good, no one died, ni[ght, neighbor]—

no sense getting all pissed, the commotion

of the past is the past; I was so dim,

he never saw me—of course, I saw him.

The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till by Gwendolyn Brooks

The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till

    (after the murder,

     after the burial)

Emmett's mother is a pretty-faced thing;

       the tint of pulled taffy.

She sits in a red room,

       drinking black coffee.

she kisses her killed boy.

       And she is sorry.

Chaos in windy grays

       through a red prairie.

Political Poem by Amiri Baraka

Political Poem

(for Basil)

Luxury, then, is a way of

being ignorant, comfortably

An approach to the open market

of least information. Where theories

can thrive, under heavy tarpaulins

without being cracked by ideas.

(I have not seen the earth for years

and think now possibly "dirt" is

negative, positive, but clearly

social. I cannot plant a seed, cannot

recognize the root with clearer dent

than indifference. Though I eat

and shit as a natural man (Getting up

from the desk to secure a turkey sandwich

and answer the phone: the poem undone

undone by my station, by my station,

and the bad words of Newark.) Raised up

to the breech, we seek to fill for this

crumbling century. The darkness of love,

in whose sweating memory all error is forced.

Undone by the logic of any specific death. (Old gentlemen

who still follow fires, tho are quieter

and less punctual. It is a polite truth

we are left with. Who are you? What are you

saying? Something to be dealt with, as easily.

The noxious game of reason, saying, "No, No,

you cannot feel," like my dead lecturer

lamenting thru gipsies his fast suicide.