English by Yusef Komunyakaa

English

When I was a boy, he says, the sky began burning,

& someone ran knocking on our door

one night. The house became birds

in the eaves too low for a boy's ears.

I heard a girl talking, but they weren't words.

I knew one good thing: a girl

was somewhere in our house,

speaking slow as a sailor's parrot.

I glimpsed Alice in Wonderland.

Her voice smelled like an orange,

though I'd never peeled an orange.

I knocked on the walls, in a circle.

The voice was almost America.

My ears plucked a word out of the air.

She said, Friend. I eased open the door

hidden behind overcoats in a closet.

The young woman was smiling at me.

She was teaching herself a language

to take her far, far away,

& she taught me a word each day to keep secret.

But one night I woke to other voices in the house.

A commotion downstairs & a pleading.

There are promises made at night

that turn into stones at daybreak.

From my window, I saw the stars

burning in the river brighter than a big

celebration. I waited for her return,

with my hands over my mouth.

I can't say her name, because it was

dangerous in our house so close to the water.

Was she a boy's make-believe friend

or a beehive breathing inside the walls?

Years later my aunts said two German soldiers

shot the girl one night beside the Vistula.

This is how I learned your language.

It was long ago. It was springtime.

 

It Was Like This: You Were Happy by Jane Hirshfield

It Was Like This: You Were Happy

It was like this:

you were happy, then you were sad,

then happy again, then not.

It went on.

You were innocent or you were guilty.

Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.

Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness—

between you, there is nothing to forgive—

but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment

he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you

or your days: they will be wrong,

they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,

all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,

you slept, you awakened.

Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

 

Left by Nikky Finney

Left

   Eenee Menee Mainee Mo!

       —Rudyard Kipling, “A Counting-Out Song,"

in Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides, 1923

           The woman with cheerleading legs

has been left for dead. She hot paces a roof,

four days, three nights, her leaping fingers,

helium arms rise & fall, pulling at the week-

old baby in the bassinet, pointing to the eighty-

two-year-old grandmother, fanning & raspy

in the New Orleans Saints folding chair.

                       Eenee Menee Mainee Mo!   

          Three times a day the helicopter flies

by in a low crawl. The grandmother insists on

not being helpless, so she waves a white hand-

kerchief that she puts on and takes off her head

toward the cameraman and the pilot who

remembers well the art of his mirrored-eyed

posture in his low-flying helicopter: Bong Son,

Dong Ha, Pleiku, Chu Lai. He makes a slow

Vietcong dip & dive, a move known in Rescue

as the Observation Pass.   

          The roof is surrounded by broken-levee

water. The people are dark but not broken. Starv-

ing, abandoned, dehydrated, brown & cumulous,

but not broken. The four-hundred-year-old

anniversary of observation begins, again—   

             

                      Eenee Menee Mainee Mo!   

                      Catch a— 

The woman with pom-pom legs waves

her uneven homemade sign:    

                      Pleas Help  Pleas 

and even if the e has been left off the Pleas e 

do you know simply 

by looking at her

that it has been left off

because she can’t spell

(and therefore is not worth saving)

or was it because the water was rising so fast

there wasn’t time?          

                      Eenee Menee Mainee Mo!    

                      Catch a— a—   

          The low-flying helicopter does not know

the answer. It catches all this on patriotic tape,

but does not land, and does not drop dictionary,

or ladder.   

          Regulations require an e be at the end

of any Pleas e before any national response

can be taken.   

          Therefore, it takes four days before

the national council of observers will consider

dropping one bottle of water, or one case

of dehydrated baby formula, on the roof

where the e has rolled off into the flood, 

                      (but obviously not splashed

loud enough) 

where four days later not the mother,

not the baby girl,

but the determined hanky waver,

whom they were both named for,

(and after) has now been covered up

with a green plastic window awning,

pushed over to the side

right where the missing e was last seen.   

                      My mother said to pick   

                      The very best one! 

What else would you call it,

Mr. Every-Child-Left-Behind. 

Anyone you know

ever left off or put on

an e by mistake? 

Potato   Po tato e   

          In the future observation helicopters

will leave the well-observed South and fly

in Kanye-West-Was-Finally-Right formation.

They will arrive over burning San Diego.   

          The fires there will be put out so well.

The people there will wait in a civilized manner.

And they will receive foie gras and free massage

for all their trouble, while there houses don’t

flood, but instead burn calmly to the ground. 

The grandmothers were right

about everything.   

          People who outlived bullwhips & Bull

Connor, historically afraid of water and routinely

fed to crocodiles, left in the sun on the sticky tar-

heat of roofs to roast like pigs, surrounded by

forty feet of churning water, in the summer

of 2005, while the richest country in the world

played the old observation game, studied

the situation: wondered by committee what to do;

counted, in private, by long historical division;

speculated whether or not some people are surely

born ready, accustomed to flood, famine, fear.   

                     My mother said to pick  

                     The very best one  

                     And you are not   it!   

          After all, it was only po’ New Orleans,

old bastard city of funny spellers. Nonswimmers

with squeeze-box accordion accents. Who would

be left alive to care?

 

Demeter to Persephone by Alicia Ostriker

Demeter to Persephone

I watched you walking up out of that hole

All day it had been raining

in that field in Southern Italy

rain beating down making puddles in the mud

hissing down on rocks from a sky enraged

I waited and was patient

finally you emerged and were immediately soaked

you stared at me without love in your large eyes

that were filled with black sex and white powder

but this is what I expected when I embraced you

Your firm little breasts against my amplitude

Get in the car I said

and then it was spring

 

December by Charles Simić

December

 

            It snows

and still the derelicts

            go

carrying sandwich boards—

 

            one proclaiming

the end of the world

            the other

the rates of a local barbershop 

 

Poem in October by Dylan Thomas

Poem in October

        It was my thirtieth year to heaven     

Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood     

        And the mussel pooled and the heron                

                        Priested shore           

                The morning beckon      

With water praying and call of seagull and rook     

And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall           

                Myself to set foot                

                        That second        

        In the still sleeping town and set forth.         

        My birthday began with the water-     

Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name        

        Above the farms and the white horses                

                        And I rose            

                In a rainy autumn     

And walked abroad in shower of all my days     

High tide and the heron dived when I took the road            

                Over the border                

                        And the gates        

        Of the town closed as the town awoke.         

        A springful of larks in a rolling     

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling        

        Blackbirds and the sun of October                

                        Summery            

                On the hill's shoulder,     

Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly     

Come in the morning where I wandered and listened            

                To the rain wringing                

                        Wind blow cold         

        In the wood faraway under me.         

        Pale rain over the dwindling harbour     

And over the sea wet church the size of a snail        

        With its horns through mist and the castle                

                        Brown as owls             

                But all the gardens     

Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales     

Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.             

                There could I marvel                

                        My birthday        

        Away but the weather turned around.         

        It turned away from the blithe country     

And down the other air and the blue altered sky        

        Streamed again a wonder of summer                 

                        With apples             

                Pears and red currants     

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's     

Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother             

                Through the parables                 

                        Of sunlight        

        And the legends of the green chapels         

        And the twice told fields of infancy     

That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.        

        These were the woods the river and the sea                

                        Where a boy             

                In the listening     

Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy     

To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.             

                And the mystery                

                        Sang alive        

        Still in the water and singing birds.         

        And there could I marvel my birthday     

Away but the weather turned around. And the true        

        Joy of the long dead child sang burning                

                        In the sun.             

                It was my thirtieth        

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon        

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.             

                O may my heart's truth                

                        Still be sung        

        On this high hill in a year's turning.

 

Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame by Rickey Laurentiis

Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame

The way he writhed

      Beneath the other man

Argued his loneliness,

      But he wasn’t just a blank measure

Waiting to sound;

However much an O

His mouth made,

      He wasn’t just an O—

Thrusting back, up,

      Against what is almost

Like a finger, though

It isn’t, always needing

To be touched

      Like a finger, to be held:

—I’m lonely.

      My waist cinched

Inward like some vintage

Japanese fan, the clever

Blade of my back,

      Working inch-by-inch

Toward a pleasure

      Half mine, the way fire

Pleases,

Wax pleases . . .

What does possession mean?

      No, really. Tell me.

That at this moment

      Someone beside myself can feel

How many times

I shudder?

Asked if I like it,

      I like it, I speak out

Those few syllables, mess myself.

      The point is, I think,

To empty—?

It feels good.

To be two men

      Interlocked in a sentence

Still forming. We

      Danced the dance that says I want you,

Come closer,

Come in me.

No, really, he said

      As a whisper—Boy,

You want to be possessed.

      Because, you see, he’d been removed

From his body then,

Per usual,

His beauty, like a talisman, offered,

His woundedness revealed—