Poems By Others

Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg, age 13, to me, November, 2002

Feel Mo – for Mo Shooer on his 70th birthday – by Michael Korson, M.D.

Feel Mo
More of Mo, so much Mo, 
Hale-Bopp blazing over Yosemite mountains 
And that ballet of shooting stars over strawberrys. 
Mo words, a galaxy of words, 
Q’s and A’s,
Mo politics, Mo sports, 
Mo man on second one out and a single up to the middle. 
Mo jubilation,
Mo Super Bowls,
Mo sorrows and Mo tears,
Mo arms to comfort and hold. 
Mo belly full laughs, 
Mo broken rules,
Mo hopped fences, 
Mo ignoring signs, 
Mo towed vans at Candlestick Park.
Mo music, saxophone, Middle Eastern,
Mo Omar Sosa in MOMA, 
Mo plays and discussions and opinions and questions. 
(To be a Jew is to question. Mo told me.)

Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble;
breathe out whole buildings and flocks of redwing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children and freshly mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothespins, clean rivers. Make soup.
Play music.  Learn the word for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries
Imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty or the gesture of fish.  Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.
Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.  Don’t wait another minute.

Before I start this poem, I’d like to ask you to join me in a moment
of silence in honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon last September 11th.

I would also like to ask you to offer up a moment of silence for all
of those who have been harassed, imprisoned, disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes, for the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing…
A full day of silence for the tens of thousands of Palestinians who
have died at the hands of U.S.-backed Israeli forces over decades of
occupation.

Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people, mostly
children, who have died of malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S. embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem, two months of silence for the Blacks under
Apartheid in South Africa, where homeland security made them aliens in their own country

Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where death rained down and peeled back every layer of concrete, steel, earth and skin and the survivors went on as if alive.

A year of silence for the millions of dead in Viet Nam—a people, not a
war—for those who know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their relatives’ bones buried in it, their babies born of it.

A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of a
secret war … ssssshhhhh …. Say nothing … we don’t want them to
learn that they are dead.

Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia, whose
names, like the corpses they once represented, have piled up and
slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem,
An hour of silence for El Salvador…
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua…
Two days of silence for the Guetmaltecos…
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, the west … 100 years of silence …

For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the refrigerator of our consciousness …

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut

A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same

And the rest of us hope to hell it won’t be.
Not like it always has been

Because this is not a 9-1-1 poem
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem

This is a 1492 poem.
This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written

And if this is a 9/11 poem, then
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison, New York, 1971.

This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and Newsweek ignored
This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children

Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit
If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton’s 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful people have gathered

You want a moment of silence
Then take it
Now,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence
Take it.
But take it all
Don’ t cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime.

But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing
For our dead.

— Emmanuel Ortiz 9.11.02 

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
Beside an old rusted machine,
In the same spot, neither lower down,
Nor higher up,
He will join up with me some day.
Now he’s gone off with his cold nose,
Hairy coat and bad education.
And I, materialist that I am,
Who do not believe in the celestial
Promised Land for any human
For this dog or for any dog,
I do believe in heaven, yes, I believe
In a heaven where I shall not enter,
But he will be waiting for me
Waving his fan-shaped tail
So that I shall have friends when I arrive.

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was 
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars 
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
– Jack Gilbert