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.
The History Of One Tough Motherfucker – Charles Bukowski
he came to the door one night wet thin beaten and
terrorized
a white cross-eyed tailless cat
I took him in and fed him and he stayed
grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway
and ran him over
I took what was left to a vet who said,”not much
chance…give him these pills…his backbone
is crushed, but is was crushed before and somehow
mended, if he lives he’ll never walk, look at
these x-rays, he’s been shot, look here, the pellets
are still there…also, he once had a tail, somebody
cut it off…”
I took the cat back, it was a hot summer, one of the
hottest in decades, I put him on the bathroom
floor, gave him water and pills, he wouldn’t eat, he
wouldn’t touch the water, I dipped my finger into it
and wet his mouth and I talked to him, I didn’t go any-
where, I put in a lot of bathroom time and talked to
him and gently touched him and he looked back at
me with those pale blue crossed eyes and as the days went
by he made his first move
dragging himself forward by his front legs
(the rear ones wouldn’t work)
he made it to the litter box
crawled over and in,
it was like the trumpet of possible victory
blowing in that bathroom and into the city, I
related to that cat-I’d had it bad, not that
bad but bad enough
one morning he got up, stood up, fell back down and
just looked at me.
“you can make it,” I said to him.
he kept trying, getting up falling down, finally
he walked a few steps, he was like a drunk, the
rear legs just didn’t want to do it and he fell again, rested,
then got up.
you know the rest: now he’s better than ever, cross-eyed
almost toothless, but the grace is back, and that look in
his eyes never left…
and now sometimes I’m interviewed, they want to hear about
life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,
shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say,”look, look
at this!”
but they don’t understand, they say something like,”you
say you’ve been influenced by Celine?”
“no,” I hold the cat up,”by what happens, by
things like this, by this, by this!”
I shake the cat, hold him up in
the smoky and drunken light, he’s relaxed he knows…
it’s then that the interviews end
although I am proud sometimes when I see the pictures
later and there I am and there is the cat and we are photo-
graphed together.
he too knows it’s bullshit but that somehow it all helps.

If You Knew – Ellen Bass
What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.
When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.
A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.
How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?
Poetry
- A Dog Has Died by Pablo Neruda
- A Moment of Silence – by Emmanuel Ortiz
- A Quiet Life – Baron Wormser
- A Wreath to the Fish – Nancy Willard
- Alone – Jack Gilbert
- Behold this view of “The Four Noble Truths” – Jake Agnew
- Crow Blacker Than Ever – Ted Hughes
- Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads
- Failing and Flying – Jack Gilbert
- Feel Mo
- Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg
- If You Knew – Ellen Bass
- my brain and heart divorced ~ john roedel
- The History Of One Tough Motherfucker – Charles Bukowski
- The Shyness – Sharon Olds
- Tryst with Death – Gina Puorro
- Wage Peace – Mary Oliver

Crow Blacker Than Ever – Ted Hughes
When God, disgusted with man,
Turned towards heaven.
And man, disgusted with God,
Turned towards Eve,
Things looked like falling apart.
But Crow . . Crow
Crow nailed them together,
Nailing Heaven and earth together –
So man cried, but with God’s voice.
And God bled, but with man’s blood.
Then heaven and earth creaked at the joint
Which became gangrenous and stank –
A horror beyond redemption.
The agony did not diminish.
Man could not be man nor God God.
The agony
Grew.
Crow
Grinned
Crying: ‘This is my Creation,’
Flying the black flag of himself.
(This poem may seem odd to some. It is one of a few dozen
crow poems in Hughes’ entire book of crow poems, Crow.
Hughes had a very dark side. Just ask Sylvia Plath.)
Poetry
- A Dog Has Died by Pablo Neruda
- A Moment of Silence – by Emmanuel Ortiz
- A Quiet Life – Baron Wormser
- A Wreath to the Fish – Nancy Willard
- Alone – Jack Gilbert
- Behold this view of “The Four Noble Truths” – Jake Agnew
- Crow Blacker Than Ever – Ted Hughes
- Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads
- Failing and Flying – Jack Gilbert
- Feel Mo
- Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg
- If You Knew – Ellen Bass
- my brain and heart divorced ~ john roedel
- The History Of One Tough Motherfucker – Charles Bukowski
- The Shyness – Sharon Olds
- Tryst with Death – Gina Puorro
- Wage Peace – Mary Oliver

The Shyness – Sharon Olds
Then, when we were joined, I became
completed, joyful, shyer.
I may have shone more, reflected
more, and from deep inside there rose
some glow passing steadily through me, but I was not
small, in a raftered church, or in
playing, now, I felt like someone
a cathedral, the vaulted spaces of the body
like a sacred woods. I was quiet when my throat was not
making those iron, orbital, earth,
rusted, noises at the hinge of matter and
whatever is not matter. He takes me
into the endings like another world at the
center of this one, and then, if he begins to
end when I am resting and I do not rejoin him yet
then I feel awe, I almost feel
fear, sometimes for a moment I feel
I should not move, or make a sound, as
if he is alone, now,
howling in the wilderness,
and yet I know we are in this place
together. I thought, now is the moment
I could become more loving, and my hands moved shyly
over him, secret as heaven
and my mouth spoke, and in my beloved’s
voice, by the bones of my head, the fields
groaned, and then I joined him again,
not shy, not bold, released, entering
the true home, where the trees bend down along the
ground and yet stand, then we lay together
panting as if saved from some disaster, and for ceaseless
instants, it came to pass what I have
heard about, it came to me
that I did not know I was separate
from this man, I did not know I was lonely.
Poetry
- A Dog Has Died by Pablo Neruda
- A Moment of Silence – by Emmanuel Ortiz
- A Quiet Life – Baron Wormser
- A Wreath to the Fish – Nancy Willard
- Alone – Jack Gilbert
- Behold this view of “The Four Noble Truths” – Jake Agnew
- Crow Blacker Than Ever – Ted Hughes
- Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads
- Failing and Flying – Jack Gilbert
- Feel Mo
- Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg
- If You Knew – Ellen Bass
- my brain and heart divorced ~ john roedel
- The History Of One Tough Motherfucker – Charles Bukowski
- The Shyness – Sharon Olds
- Tryst with Death – Gina Puorro
- Wage Peace – Mary Oliver
Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg
Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg, age 13, to me, November, 2002
The clock awakens
Ticking through time
The boy grows older
Abandoning nursery rhymes.
He learns to read,
Write, and talk
Goes through school
Books, tests and chalk.
To a bright future he heads
Aging too fast
Going through college
Using his skills from the past
The boy, now a man
Becomes a lawyer
Happily marries
Is his own employer
He grows older
Wiser too
Still fresh and hip
As he was at age two
He reaches sixty-two
A perfect age to be
Is wished happy birthday
By his good old friend, me.
Poetry
- A Dog Has Died by Pablo Neruda
- A Moment of Silence – by Emmanuel Ortiz
- A Quiet Life – Baron Wormser
- A Wreath to the Fish – Nancy Willard
- Alone – Jack Gilbert
- Behold this view of “The Four Noble Truths” – Jake Agnew
- Crow Blacker Than Ever – Ted Hughes
- Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads
- Failing and Flying – Jack Gilbert
- Feel Mo
- Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg
- If You Knew – Ellen Bass
- my brain and heart divorced ~ john roedel
- The History Of One Tough Motherfucker – Charles Bukowski
- The Shyness – Sharon Olds
- Tryst with Death – Gina Puorro
- Wage Peace – Mary Oliver

A Quiet Life – Baron Wormser
What a person desires in life
is a properly boiled egg.
This isn’t as easy as it seems.
There must be gas and a stove,
the gas requires pipelines, mastodon drills,
banks that dispense the lozenge of capital.
There must be a pot, the product of mines
and furnaces and factories,
of dim early mornings and night-owl shifts,
of women in kerchiefs and men with
sweat-soaked hair.
Then water, the stuff of clouds and skies
and God knows what causes it to happen.
There seems always too much or too little
of it and more pipelines, meters, pumping
stations, towers, tanks.
And salt-a miracle of the first order,
the ace in any argument for God.
Only God could have imagined from
nothingness the pang of salt.
Political peace too. It should be quiet
when one eats an egg. No political hoodlums
knocking down doors, no lieutenants who are
ticked off at their scheming girlfriends and
take it out on you, no dictators
posing as tribunes.
It should be quiet, so quiet you can hear
the chicken, a creature usually mocked as a type
of fool, a cluck chained to the chore of her body.
Listen, she is there, pecking at a bit of grain
that came from nowhere.
Poetry
- A Dog Has Died by Pablo Neruda
- A Moment of Silence – by Emmanuel Ortiz
- A Quiet Life – Baron Wormser
- A Wreath to the Fish – Nancy Willard
- Alone – Jack Gilbert
- Behold this view of “The Four Noble Truths” – Jake Agnew
- Crow Blacker Than Ever – Ted Hughes
- Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads
- Failing and Flying – Jack Gilbert
- Feel Mo
- Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg
- If You Knew – Ellen Bass
- my brain and heart divorced ~ john roedel
- The History Of One Tough Motherfucker – Charles Bukowski
- The Shyness – Sharon Olds
- Tryst with Death – Gina Puorro
- Wage Peace – Mary Oliver

A Wreath to the Fish – Nancy Willard
Who is this fish, still wearing its wealth,
flat on my drainboard, dead asleep,
its suit of mail proof only against the stream?
What is it to live in a stream,
to dwell forever in a tunnel of cold,
never to leave your shining birthsuit,
never to spend your inheritance of thin coins?
And who is the stream, who lolls all day
in an unmade bed, living on nothing but weather,
singing, a little mad in the head,
opening her apron to shells, carcasses, crabs,
eyeglasses, the lines of fisherman begging for
news from the interior-oh, who are these lines
that link a big sky to a small stream
that go down for great things:
the cold muscle of the trout,
the shining scrawl of the eel in a difficult passage,
hooked-but who is this hook, this cunning
and faithful fanatic who will not let go
but holds the false bait and the true worm alike
and tears the fish, yet gives it up to the basket
in which it will ride to the kitchen
of someone important, perhaps the Pope
who rejoices that his cook has found such a fish
and blesses it and eats it and rises, saying,
“Children, what is it to live in the stream,
day after day, and come at last to the table,
transfigured with spices and herbs,
a little martyr, a little miracle;
children, children, who is this fish?”
from Water Walker, 1989, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY
Poetry
- A Dog Has Died by Pablo Neruda
- A Moment of Silence – by Emmanuel Ortiz
- A Quiet Life – Baron Wormser
- A Wreath to the Fish – Nancy Willard
- Alone – Jack Gilbert
- Behold this view of “The Four Noble Truths” – Jake Agnew
- Crow Blacker Than Ever – Ted Hughes
- Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads
- Failing and Flying – Jack Gilbert
- Feel Mo
- Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg
- If You Knew – Ellen Bass
- my brain and heart divorced ~ john roedel
- The History Of One Tough Motherfucker – Charles Bukowski
- The Shyness – Sharon Olds
- Tryst with Death – Gina Puorro
- Wage Peace – Mary Oliver

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.
Poetry
- A Dog Has Died by Pablo Neruda
- A Moment of Silence – by Emmanuel Ortiz
- A Quiet Life – Baron Wormser
- A Wreath to the Fish – Nancy Willard
- Alone – Jack Gilbert
- Behold this view of “The Four Noble Truths” – Jake Agnew
- Crow Blacker Than Ever – Ted Hughes
- Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads
- Failing and Flying – Jack Gilbert
- Feel Mo
- Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg
- If You Knew – Ellen Bass
- my brain and heart divorced ~ john roedel
- The History Of One Tough Motherfucker – Charles Bukowski
- The Shyness – Sharon Olds
- Tryst with Death – Gina Puorro
- Wage Peace – Mary Oliver

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.

Poetry
- A Dog Has Died by Pablo Neruda
- A Moment of Silence – by Emmanuel Ortiz
- A Quiet Life – Baron Wormser
- A Wreath to the Fish – Nancy Willard
- Alone – Jack Gilbert
- Behold this view of “The Four Noble Truths” – Jake Agnew
- Crow Blacker Than Ever – Ted Hughes
- Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads
- Failing and Flying – Jack Gilbert
- Feel Mo
- Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg
- If You Knew – Ellen Bass
- my brain and heart divorced ~ john roedel
- The History Of One Tough Motherfucker – Charles Bukowski
- The Shyness – Sharon Olds
- Tryst with Death – Gina Puorro
- Wage Peace – Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver
A Moment of Silence – by Emmanuel Ortiz
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

Poetry
- A Dog Has Died by Pablo Neruda
- A Moment of Silence – by Emmanuel Ortiz
- A Quiet Life – Baron Wormser
- A Wreath to the Fish – Nancy Willard
- Alone – Jack Gilbert
- Behold this view of “The Four Noble Truths” – Jake Agnew
- Crow Blacker Than Ever – Ted Hughes
- Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads
- Failing and Flying – Jack Gilbert
- Feel Mo
- Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg
- If You Knew – Ellen Bass
- my brain and heart divorced ~ john roedel
- The History Of One Tough Motherfucker – Charles Bukowski
- The Shyness – Sharon Olds
- Tryst with Death – Gina Puorro
- Wage Peace – Mary Oliver









