Good Bones -- Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

 

---

Maggie Smith, "Good Bones" from Waxwing magazine (Issue IX, Summer 2016) (2016)

https://maggiesmithpoet.com/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/issue/1639193/january-february-2025

To the young who want to die -- Gwendolyn Brooks

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.

The gun will wait. The lake will wait.

The tall gall in the small seductive vial

will wait will wait:

will wait a week: will wait through April.

You do not have to die this certain day.

Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.

I assure you death will wait. Death has

a lot of time. Death can

attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is

just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;

can meet you any moment.

You need not die today.

Stay here — through pout or pain or peskyness.

Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.

Graves grow no green that you can use.

Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.

--

Gwendolyn Brooks (June 7, 1917–December 3, 2000) 

“To the Young Who Want to Die,” which appeared in her 1987 collection The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (public library), dedicated to the students of the Gwendolyn Brooks Junior High School, published by the imprint she had founded and named after her father, the janitor of a music company.

The Uses of Sorrow -- Mary Oliver

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me

a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

---

Source: The Uses of Sorrow” by Mary Oliver, from Thirst, 2007. Beacon Press.

Poem -- Langston Hughes (1901 –1967)

(To F. S.)

I loved my friend. 

He went away from me. 

There’s nothing more to say. 

The poem ends, 

Soft as it began,—

I loved my friend. 

---

Source:  The Weary Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926) by Langston Hughes. This poem is in the public domain.

What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade -- Brad Aaron Modlin

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark

After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—

something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something.


--- 
Source: Everyone at This Party Has Two Names by Brad Aaron Modlin. Copyright © 2016 by Brad Aaron Modlin. Originally published by Southeast Missouri State University Press.

This poem was originally read in the Poetry Unbound episode “A Poem for What You Learn Alone.”

Hear this poem:
https://onbeing.org/programs/brad-aaron-modlin-what-you-missed-that-day-you-were-absent-from-fourth-grade/

Wedding Thoughts: All I Know About Love -- Neil Gaiman

--

This is everything I have to tell you about love: nothing.

This is everything I've learned about marriage: nothing.


Only that the world out there is complicated,

and there are beasts in the night, and delight and pain,

and the only thing that makes it okay, sometimes,

is to reach out a hand in the darkness and find another hand to squeeze,

and not to be alone.


It's not the kisses, or never just the kisses: it's what they mean.

Somebody's got your back.

Somebody knows your worst self and somehow doesn't want to rescue you

or send for the army to rescue them.


It's not two broken halves becoming one.

It's the light from a distant lighthouse bringing you both safely home

because home is wherever you are both together.


So this is everything I have to tell you about love and marriage: nothing,

like a book without pages or a forest without trees.


Because there are things you cannot know before you experience them.

Because no study can prepare you for the joys or the trials.

Because nobody else's love, nobody else's marriage, is like yours,

and it's a road you can only learn by walking it,

a dance you cannot be taught,

a song that did not exist before you began, together, to sing.


And because in the darkness you will reach out a hand,

not knowing for certain if someone else is even there.

And your hands will meet, 
and then neither of you will ever need to be alone again.



And that's all I know about love.

---

Source: https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2017/10/wedding-thoughts-all-i-know-about-love.html?m=1

hide and seek -- Mandy Shunnarah

 No one told me you could be forgotten

by your cousins playing hide and seek.

 

No one told me the light in the fridge goes out

when you climb inside and close the door.

 

No one told me how the grate on the shelf above

presses into the ridges of your spine, compressing you

 

and how your legs folded underneath your torso

fall asleep, going numb as the chill sets in.

No one ever tells you the inside of refrigerators

smell like kitchen cleaner spray, arm & hammer powder

and salad greens wilting in plastic bags, or that

your grandmother’s homemade yogurt tempts from the top shelf.

No one ever tells you how impatient you grow and how your breath slows as you breathe the little oxygen you allowed inside with you.

No one tells you how light your head feels, how loud your blood thunders, how desperate your heart screams, louder than the muted world outside.

No one tells you the door suctions shut and you might be folded so small you don’t have the space to push yourself out.

No one tells you that you’ll have to thrash, pound, and flail against the plastic walls until there’s a burst of warm outside air––

No one tells you you’ll roll out gasping, cramped and claustrophobic, victory chilled into your bones when your cousins ask “Where were you?”

 

 

Source: Shunnarah, M (2022). Hide and Seek. Electric Literature, 232 (8 August 2022). Retrieved 9 August 2022 from https://electricliterature.com/two-poems-by-mandy-shunnarah/

Warming Her Pearls -- Carol Ann Duffy

Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress 
bids me wear them, warm them, until evening 
when I'll brush her hair. At six, I place them 
round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her,
resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk 
or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself 
whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering 
each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope.
She's beautiful. I dream about her
in my attic bed; picture her dancing
with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent
beneath her French perfume, her milky stones.
I dust her shoulders with a rabbit's foot, 
watch the soft blush seep through her skin 
like an indolent sigh. In her looking-glass 
my red lips part as though I want to speak.
Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see 
her every movement in my head.... Undressing, 
taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching 
for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way
she always does.... And I lie here awake, 
knowing the pearls are cooling even now 
in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night 
I feel their absence and I burn.

Source: www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/56715, retrieved 15 November 2016.
Original source: Duffy, Carol Ann, 1987, 'Warming Her Pearls' in Selling Manhattan,  Anvil Press Poetry, Ltd.

Quotes by Nayyirah Waheed

expect sadness
like
you expect rain.
both,
cleanse you.


---


if 
the ocean 
can calm itself, 
so can you.
we 
are both 
salt water 
mixed with 
air.


Retrieved 14 November 2016, www.nayyirahwaheed.com

Mementos, 1 -- WD Snodgrass

Sorting out letters and piles of my old
    Canceled checks, old clippings, and yellow note cards   
That meant something once, I happened to find
    Your picture. That picture. I stopped there cold,   
Like a man raking piles of dead leaves in his yard
             Who has turned up a severed hand.

Still, that first second, I was glad: you stand
    Just as you stood—shy, delicate, slender,
In that long gown of green lace netting and daisies
    That you wore to our first dance. The sight of you stunned   
Us all. Well, our needs were different, then,
             And our ideals came easy.

Then through the war and those two long years
    Overseas, the Japanese dead in their shacks   
Among dishes, dolls, and lost shoes; I carried
    This glimpse of you, there, to choke down my fear,   
Prove it had been, that it might come back.
             That was before we got married.

—Before we drained out one another’s force   
    With lies, self-denial, unspoken regret
And the sick eyes that blame; before the divorce
    And the treachery. Say it: before we met. Still,   
I put back your picture. Someday, in due course,
             I will find that it’s still there.


Source: Snodgrass, WD 1987, 'Mementos, 1' from Selected Poems, 1957-1987, Soho Press, New York. Retrieved 18 August 2015, www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171518.

Late Night Ode -- JD McClatchy

HORACE IV. i

It’s over, love. Look at me pushing fifty now,
   Hair like grave-grass growing in both ears,
The piles and boggy prostate, the crooked penis,
   The sour taste of each day’s first lie,

And that recurrent dream of years ago pulling
   A swaying bead-chain of moonlight,
Of slipping between the cool sheets of dark
   Along a body like my own, but blameless.

What good’s my cut-glass conversation now,
   Now I’m so effortlessly vulgar and sad?
You get from life what you can shake from it?
   For me, it’s g and t’s all day and CNN.

Try the blond boychick lawyer, entry level
   At eighty grand, who pouts about overtime,
Keeps Evian and a beeper in his locker at the gym,
   And hash in tinfoil under the office fern.

There’s your hound from heaven, with buccaneer
   Curls and perfumed war-paint on his nipples.
His answering machine always has room for one more
   Slurred, embarrassed call from you-know-who.

Some nights I’ve laughed so hard the tears
   Won’t stop. Look at me now. Why now?
I long ago gave up pretending to believe
   Anyone’s memory will give as good as it gets.

So why these stubborn tears? And why do I dream
   Almost every night of holding you again,
Or at least of diving after you, my long-gone,
   Through the bruised unbalanced waves?


Source: McClatchy, JD, 1998, ‘Late Night Ode’ from Ten Commandments, Alfred A. Knopf.  Retrieved 18 August 2015, www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/236602

Anorexic -- Eavan Boland

b. 1944 Irish. 

Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.

Yes I am torching
her curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self denials.

How she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers

till I renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.

I vomited
her hungers.
Now the bitch is burning.

I am starved and curveless.
I am skin and bone.
She has learned her lesson.

Thin as a rib
I turn in sleep.
My dreams probe

a claustrophobia
a sensuous enclosure.
How warm it was and wide

once by a warm drum,
once by the song of his breath
and in his sleeping side.

Only a little more,
only a few more days
sinless, foodless,

I will slip
back into him again
as if I had never been away.

Caged so
I will grow
angular and holy

past pain,
keeping his heart
such company

as will make me forget
in a small space
the fall

into forked dark,
into python needs
heaving to hips and breasts
and lips and heat
and sweat and fat and greed.


Source: Boland, E 1980, 'Anorexic', In Her Own Image, Arlen House.

The Romance of Middle Age -- Mary Meriam

Now that I’m fifty, let me take my showers
at night, no light, eyes closed. And let me swim
in cover-ups. My skin’s tattooed with hours
and days and decades, head to foot, and slim
is just a faded photograph. It’s strange
how people look away who once would look.
I didn’t know I’d undergo this change
and be the unseen cover of a book
whose plot, though swift, just keeps on getting thicker.
One reaches for the pleasures of the mind
and heart to counteract the loss of quicker
knowledge. One feels old urgencies unwind,
although I still pluck chin hairs with a tweezer,
in case I might attract another geezer.

Meriam, M 2009, 'The Romance of Middle Age', Rattle, vol. 15, no. 2.

Starting to Show -- Kevin Young

She sleeps on the side
her heart is on —

sleeps facing the sun
that juts through our window

earlier and earlier. In the belly
of the sky the sun kicks

and cries. My wife
has begun to wear the huge

clothes of inmates, smuggling you
inside her — son

or daughter. I bring her
crackers and water.

Wardens of each other,
in the precincts

of unsteady sleep, we drift
off curled

like you are, listening
to the night breathe.

Source: www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/magazine/starting-to-show.html?_r=0, published 13 March 2015.

August -- Mary Oliver

(1935–Current, American)

Our neighbor, tall and blonde and vigorous, the mother
of many children, is sick. We did not know she was sick,
but she has come to the fence, walking like a woman
who is balancing a sword inside of her body, and besides
that her long hair is gone, it is short and, suddenly, gray.
I don’t recognize her. It even occurs to me that it might
be her mother. But it’s her own laughter-edged voice,
we have heard it for years over the hedges.

All summer the children, grown now and some of them
with children of their own, come to visit. They swim,
they go for long walks at the harbor, they make
dinner for twelve, for fifteen, for twenty. In the early
morning two daughters come to the garden and slowly
go through the precise and silent gestures of T’ai Chi.

They all smile. Their father smiles too, and builds
castles on the shore with the children, and drives back to
the city, and drives back to the country. A carpenter is
hired—a roof repaired, a porch rebuilt. Everything that
can be fixed.

June, July, August. Every day, we hear their laughter. I
think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair.
Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over
his eyes.


Source: Oliver, M (1993) 'August', Poetry magazine, August 1993. Retrieved 29 January 2015 www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/162/5#!/20603668