Poems By Others
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Within this section of my website – I showcase pieces of poetry that are written by others, which I find to be particularly worthy of further reflection and sharing.
Feel Mo
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.)
Mo tennis balls, lawn bowls,
Regular bowels,
No Mo broken bones.
Mo families, everywhere,
cousins, ex in-laws, friends’ families, friends’ friends,
All one big family of Mo,
Mo, Larry and Curly,
Mo parties, Mo ecstasy,
Mo hanging from monkey bars.
Mo mentum … No you’re retired. Relax.
Mo ney please.
Mo dogs (Donovan added that.)
Mo hikes.
Mo lying on the grass.
Mo clutter, Mo mo clutter!
Mo of everything
Mo beautiful.
Many Mo years, Mo.
Lots more Mo, Mo.
Wage Peace – Mary Oliver
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.
A Moment of Silence
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
A Dog Has Died by Pablo Neruda
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.
Oh I shall not tell the sadness on the earth
For not having him any more as companion,
He who was never for me a servant.
He showed towards me the friendship of a hedgehog
That preserved its sovereignty,
The friendship of an independent star
Without more intimacy than was necessary,
Without going to extremes:
He would never climb over my clothes
Covering me with hairs and mange,
Nor would he rub up against my knee
Like other sexually obsessed dogs.
No, my dog would look at me,
Giving me the attention that I need,
The necessary attention
To make a vain person like me understand
That, as he was a dog
With eyes purer than mine,
I was wasting his time, but he would look at me
With the look that his silent life,
All his gentle, hairy life
Reserved for me,
Near me, without ever annoying me
And without asking anything from me.
Oh how many times did I want to have a tail
And go bounding along beside him on the sea shore,
In the Isla negra wintertime,
In the big, solitary open spaces; up there the air
And its ice-cold birds,
And my dog jumping, hairy, full
of marine voltage in motion:
My dog roving around and all nose,
And golden tail stuck high in the air
In front of the Ocean and its foam.
Happy, happy, happy
In the way that dogs know how to be happy,
With nothing else, with the absolutism
Of barefaced nature.
There are no goodbyes for my dog who has died.
And there are not, nor ever were, lies between us.
He has gone now and I buried him, and that’s all
there is to it.
Failing and Flying
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
Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads
Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads,
a woman who feels too much,
a woman who writes…
Don’t fall in love with an educated, magical, delusional, crazy woman.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who thinks,
who knows what she knows
and also knows how to fly;
a woman sure of herself.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who
laughs or cries making love,
knows how to turn her spirit into flesh;
let alone one that loves poetry (these are the most dangerous),
or spends half an hour contemplating a painting
and isn’t able to live without music.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who is interested
in politics and is rebellious and
feels a huge horror from injustice.
One who does not like to watch television at all
Or a woman who is beautiful
no matter the features of her face or her body.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who is intense,
entertaining, lucid and irreverent.
Don’t wish to fall in love with a woman like that.
Because when you fall in love
with a woman like that,
whether she stays with you or not,
whether she loves you or not,
from a woman like that, you never come back.
~Martha Rivera-Garrido
my brain and heart divorced ~ john roedel
my brain and
heart divorced
a decade ago
over who was
to blame about
how big of a mess
I have become
eventually,
they couldn’t be
in the same room
with each other
now my head and heart
share custody of me
I stay with my brain
during the week
and my heart
gets me on weekends
they never speak to one another
– instead, they give me
the same note to pass
to each other every week
and the notes they
send to one another always
say the same thing:
“This is all your fault”
on Sundays
my heart complains
about how my
head has let me down
in the past
and on Wednesday
my head lists all
of the times my
heart has screwed
things up for me
in the future
they blame each
other for the
state of my life
there’s been a lot
of yelling – and crying
so,
lately, I’ve been
spending a lot of
time with my gut
who serves as my
unofficial therapist
most nights, I sneak out of the
window in my ribcage
and slide down my spine
and collapse on my
gut’s plush leather chair
that’s always open for me
~ and I just sit sit sit sit
until the sun comes up
last evening,
my gut asked me
if I was having a hard
time being caught
between my heart
and my head
I nodded
I said I didn’t know
if I could live with
either of them anymore
“my heart is always sad about
something that happened yesterday
while my head is always worried
about something that may happen tomorrow,”
I lamented
my gut squeezed my hand
“I just can’t live with
my mistakes of the past
or my anxiety about the future,”
I sighed
my gut smiled and said:
“in that case,
you should
go stay with your
lungs for a while,”
I was confused
the look on my face gave it away
“if you are exhausted about
your heart’s obsession with
the fixed past and your mind’s focus
on the uncertain future
your lungs are the perfect place for you
there is no yesterday in your lungs
there is no tomorrow there either
there is only now
there is only inhale
there is only exhale
there is only this moment
there is only breath
and in that breath
you can rest while your
heart and head work
their relationship out.”
this morning,
while my brain
was busy reading
tea leaves
and while my
heart was staring
at old photographs
I packed a little
bag and walked
to the door of
my lungs
before I could even knock
she opened the door
with a smile and as
a gust of air embraced me
she said
“what took you so long?”
Alone – Jack Gilbert
I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody’s dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once that she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on their lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other’s eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy the way it always did.
POETRY BY OTHERS
Behold this view of “The Four Noble Truths” – Jake Agnew
Life is suffering:
The first of the teachings explains
a world of hurt, beleaguered with pain.
It says that life is suffering
and full of strife and struggling.
From birth until death, in human form –
we can certainly expect to be consumed by the forlorn.
Within this incarnation which we reside
there will be sin and tarnation held inside.
Suffering has a reason:
The second of these meaningful teachings
expresses why there is pain and its reasons.
From the days before, until tomorrow and after
this dismay is important, with its sorrowful disaster.
The tragedy which we must endure and feel
with sadness and grief are from something sure and real.
The chaos of life has cause and effect,
where dismay, loss and strife have obvious connections.
The reason for suffering is attachement:
The third of these truths states the following:
the absurdity and abuse are related to wallowing
in desire, needs and attachments of want,
with a fire that feeds, combats our senses and taunts.
The vexing hate and confusion we sustain
are connected, related to the delusions entertained.
When we long for an outcome to be consistently granted,
we feel wronged with doubt – succumbing to differences from what was demanded.
Disconnecting from attachment brings the cessation of suffering:
The fourth jewel of wisdom that is taught and shared
is an important tool of precision in thought and cares.
Liberation from suffering can be truthfully attained,
with a situation of less struggling, and fewer pains.
By practicing detachment and ceasing desire –
with these tactics we can combat the grief, and fire.
Enlightenment is within our reach and potential
when using this insight intense, of these teachings so influential.
Written by Jake Onami Agnew, 2009
POETRY BY OTHERS
Tryst with Death – Gina Puorro
death asked me to join him for dinner
so I slipped into my favorite black dress
that I had been saving for a special occasion
and let him walk me to our candlelit tryst.
He ordered a ribeye, extra rare
I ordered two desserts and red wine
and then I sipped
and wondered
why he looked so familiar
and smelled like earth and memory.
He felt like a place both faraway
and deep within my body
A place that whispers to me
on the crisp autumn breeze
along the liminal edges of dusk and dawn
somewhere between dancing
and stillness.
He looked at me
with the endless night sky in his eyes
and asked
‘Did you live your life, my love?’
As I swirled my wine in its glass
I wondered If I understood the thread I wove into the greater fabric
If I loved in a way that was deep and freeing
If I let pain and grief carve me into something more grateful
If I made enough space to be in awe that flowers exist
and take the time to watch the honeybees
drink their sweet nectar
I wondered what the riddles of regret and longing
had taught me
and if I realized just how
beautiful and insignificant and monstrous and small we are
for the brief moment that we are here
before we all melt back down
into ancestors of the land.
Death watched me lick buttercream from my fingers
As he leaned in close and said
‘My darling, it’s time.’
So I slipped my hand into his
as he slowly walked me home.
I took a deep breath as he leaned in close
for the long kiss goodnight
and I felt a soft laugh leave my lips
as his mouth met mine
because I never could resist a man
with the lust for my soul in his eyes
and a kiss that makes my heart stop.
POETRY BY OTHERS
