April- Poetry Month

April is a busy month: Exodus, Easter, wildflowers bursting their bulbs and tax-time. However, with April about done we shouldn’t forget the notable holiday: National Poetry Month. As Wm. C. Williams said, it is difficult to get the news from poetry yet men die every day for lack of what is found there.

Yes, and now more than ever we need an antidote to the violence of bulletins. Poetry demands a different kind of reading than a newspaper. Words like brushstrokes; an immersive experience. Life is found between the words which can open a shuttered heart.

I contend one doesn’t need to write poetry to be a poet. It has to do with allowing that sensibility to find expression; to perceive life metaphorically and find associations between this and that. It is less a way of saying than a way of being. One can live their poem.

I thought to take this occasion to offer some poems I wrote years ago which I just came across.

Work

A warehouseman lifts a crate / and his arms are holding a child.

With a cleaver in his hand / the butcher watches a rose / bloom on his apron.

Under the hydraulic lift / seven colors arrange themselves / at the mechanic’s feet.

Through leaky margins / these moments ease their way in / with blood and oil.

______________________________________

Grandpa Harry

 

He was the kid wheeled by pushcart

from Warsaw to Hester St.

hiding the rotten peaches on the bottom.

Winter meant gloves with holes

for his fingers to count on

and thaw over an ashcan cooking chestnuts.

He saw out of the sides of his eyes

for grabbing hands.

He could yell in four languages,

shut his ears to all of them

and to the hooves beating

their baruchas and curses on the cobblestone.

 

Words and chestnuts were cheap, he said

seventy years later in his backyard.

He still can’t listen much

but remembers more than he ever heard.

He needs his noise-

it keeps his blood moving.                                                                                                                                                      

Crickets make him nervous

when they hesitate,

then start up again

rubbing their legs together         

bargaining for his life.      

_________________________

 Ours Alone

 

The English muffin has survived the toaster.

Your maple syrup has 50% more…

My fiberized cereal with 30% less

has me thinking of that landscape in Connemara,

rich in desolation; oxen the mid-summer night.

Now we are walking in the Bois d’ Amour.

What passes between us is hushed.

Everything for sale in the Sunday paper

but we have (common)wealth and need nothing.

You shape a new poem in that spiral notebook

with your yellow pencil and pink erasure

deciphering the off-shore fog and skeletal tree.

Buzzy, the hummingbird is a no-show.

Nearly bare branches, empty bowl.

The silent n at the end of autumn.

O, this voluptuous life, this quiet jubilation.