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Category Archives: Poetry
Sam Rempell – Poem (“The Night Before the War Began”)
The night before
The war began,
We began
With nothing else.
We began as
An open hand,
Like an open book,
Beginning, for example, with
The letter A:
An arrowhead, and
The letter I: watching
The sky,
Thinking the thoughts
Of the first man alive.
Robinson Jeffers – Poem (“Be Angry at the Sun”)
That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.
Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you. Watch the wheel slope and turn,
They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors,
This republic, Europe, Asia.
Observe them gesticulating,
Observe them going down. The gang serves lies, the passionate
Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.
You are not Catullus, you know,
To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar. You are far
From Dante’s feet, but even farther from his dirty
Political hatreds.
Let boys want pleasure, and men
Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,
And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped.
Yours is not theirs.
A. L. Pella – Poem (“American Garden”)
“Not here, not now” a gruff
hand insists, the brick square
public but not large, behind the shops
and the pub, dark now, a straggling
departer crossing to his car here, shadow
and there, fixed, a man hunched over
plastic bags, no where else
for now to go.
Later, he gets in our
back seat, dislocated to the wrong
donut store, this one not open all
night, or not to him, so we carry him
cross town to the other
– and if it were
colder, we might give him
enough, or barely enough
for a room though tonight
it’s warm enough for
for him to lean against the wall,
his bags under the plastic
table, just as I sleep when I fly.
How’d you wind up living like this, Frank,
we ask in the car, and he’s
honest, we have to give him
that:
Ah, I’m a terrible
drinker, he says,
I brought it all on myself. Yes,
yes, yes, he says, and
sometimes he can stay
with his sister
a few towns over,
but he
doesn’t really like her all that much,
or she, him, and really,
he says, it’s just a pleasure to
be out here,
moving through the world.
Randall Bloom – Poem (“Brancusi”)
The stone halves
curve in square blocks
inclining toward each
other.
It’s more than
a gesture, more
than stone, more
and
a strand
of hair,
a parting
lip, and ex
halation, un
bending,
out, and
curving
in
Gerry Crinnin – Poem (“Never Forget, Larry”)
Never forget, Larry, the fall night I fell
off a cliff trying to save Carol’s sandal,
blowing kisses all the way down to Lake Erie
Randall Bloom – Poem (“Three Graces”)
The first offers
nothing, but the second
a thought for grace, a
memory
of admiration, or a hope
for something better
than the way
before us.
The branches blossom,
the shade uncovers
words overwhelmed
by light, and a
sheltering
grace
returns.
Randall Bloom – Poem (“Over”)
Never a good thought to
conclude
that the thing itself – the constellation
of time and place, of apprehension
and – to say it simply, of hope –
is lost.
Aspiration may be the point,
or merely the hint of
direction, but it stays
close
and the few words
we build our public places,
we set stone,
upon, still sit square
and express some
centered
notion of
common
creation
that
demands
regard
Charles Olson – Poem (“Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]”)
I come back to the geography of it,
the land falling off to the left
where my father shot his scabby golf
and the rest of us played baseball
into the summer darkness until no flies
could be seen and we came home
to our various piazzas where the women
buzzed
To the left the land fell to the city,
to the right, it fell to the sea
I was so young my first memory
is of a tent spread to feed lobsters
to Rexall conventioneers, and my father,
a man for kicks, came out of the tent roaring
with a bread-knife in his teeth to take care of
the druggist they’d told him had made a pass at
my mother, she laughing, so sure, as round
as her face, Hines pink and apple,
under one of those frame hats women then
This, is no bare incoming
of novel abstract form, this
is no welter or the forms
of those events, this,
Greeks, is the stopping
of the battle
It is the imposing
of all those antecedent predecessions, the precessions
of me, the generation of those facts
which are my words, it is coming
from all that I no longer am, yet am,
the slow westward motion of
more than I am
There is no strict personal order
for my inheritance.
No Greek will be able
to discriminate my body.
An American
is a complex of occasions,
themselves a geometry
of spatial nature.
I have this sense,
that I am one
with my skin
Plus this—plus this:
that forever the geography
which leans in
on me I compell
backwards I compell Gloucester
to yield, to
change
Polis
is this
Randall Bloom – Poem (“The Night Before”)
The night before
The war began,
We began
With nothing else.
We began as
An open hand,
Like an open book,
Beginning, for example, with
The letter A:
An arrowhead, and
The letter I: watching
The sky,
Thinking the thoughts
Of the first man alive.
The.American.Word. 