What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That's not been said a thousand times? 

The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know. 

We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.

We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings. 

We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our prides, we sheet our dead.

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that's the burden of a year.

~ This poem is in the public domain

crumbling. It died of old age,
I tell you, like a man. We wept.
We had worn our time upon it, put
our arms around to touch fingertips
and we measured ourselves, our feelings
on the years. We made our calculations
pay, then. Now, the fears, age,
daily mathematics. The tree held
the green. Birds, squirrels, coons
made memory there until the day it fell.
They got out. It groaned for twenty minutes.
I tell you, it sighed as it bent,
its branches catching the dull fall,
the soft turning in wet dissolution.
The body lay exposed: a gut of grubs,
a lust of hollowness. We wept,
as I say, more than it was called for.

~ from Good Poems for Hard Times, Selected by Garrison Keillor (Viking, 2005)

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day 
When the last fires will wave to me 
And the silence will set out 
Tireless traveller 
Like the beam of a lightless star 

Then I will no longer 
Find myself in life as in a strange garment 
Surprised at the earth 
And the love of one woman 
And the shamelessness of men 
As today writing after three days of rain 
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease 
And bowing not knowing to what

~ from A Book of Luminous Things, edited by 
Czeslaw Milosz, (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1996)

What matters most? It's a foolish question because I'm hanging on,
		         
just like you. No, I'm past hanging on. It's after midnight and I'm 
 falling
      
toward four a.m., the best time for ghosts, terror, and lost hopes.
 
 

No one says anything of significance to me. I don't care if the 
 President's
                
a two year old, and the Vice President's four. I don't care if you're
	               
cashing in your stocks or building homes for the homeless.
 
 

I was a caring person. I would make soup and grow you many flowers.
                     
I would enter your world, my hands open to catch your tears,
			          
my lips on your lips in case we both went deaf and blind.
 
 

But I don't care about your birthday, or Christmas, or lover's lane,
	 
or even you, not as much as I pretend. Ah, I was about to say,

			            
"I don't care about the stars" -- but I had to stop my pen.
  

Sometimes, out in the silent black Wisconsin countryside
			             
I glance up and see everything that's not on earth, glowing, pulsing,
		        
each star so close to the next and yet so far away.
  

Oh, the stars. In lines and curves, with fainter, more mysterious
	              
designs beyond, and again, beyond. The longer I look, the more I see,
	        
and the more I see, the deeper the universe grows.

  

I have a long way to go, and I'm starting now --
				                    
out in the silent black Wisconsin countryside.   

~ from Swimming with a Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle (Red Dragonfly Press, 2008)

We have a beautiful
mother 
Her hills 
are buffaloes 
Her buffaloes 
hills. 

We have a beautiful 
mother 
Her oceans 
are wombs 
Her wombs 
oceans. 

We have a beautiful 
mother 
Her teeth 
the white stones 
at the edge 
of the water 
the summer 
grasses 
her plentiful 
hair. 

We have a beautiful 
mother 
Her green lap 
immense 
Her brown embrace 
eternal 
Her blue body 
everything we know.

~ Her Blue Body Everything We Know (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1991)

part 1

Is it winter again, is it cold again,
didn't Frank just slip on the ice,
didn't he heal, weren't the spring seeds planted

didn't the night end,
didn't the melting ice
flood the narrow gutters

wasn't my body
rescued, wasn't it safe

didn't the scar form, invisible
above the injury

terror and cold,
didn't they just end, wasn't the back garden
harrowed and planted- 

I remember how the earth felt, red and dense,
in stiff rows, weren't the seeds planted,
didn't vines climb the south wall

I can't hear your voice
for the wind's cries, whistling over the bare ground

I no longer care
what sound it makes

when was I silenced, when did it first seem
pointless to describe that sound

what it sounds like can't change what it is—

didn't the night end, wasn't the earth
safe when it was planted

didn't we plant the seeds,
weren't we necessary to the earth,

the vines, were they harvested?

~ from Averno (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006)

 for Adélia Prado

Poets swagger up and down the shore, I’ll bet,
Wagging their hips in time to the raucous tide.
They tip back their heads and life sears a path
Down the throat. At night they dance, don’t they,
Across tiles that might as well be glass, or ice.
And if they don’t want to spend the evening alone,
They don’t. And if they want to wear snow-angels
Into the sheets of some big empty bed, that’s
What they do, until a dark form takes shape
On the ceiling overhead. Then they put on a robe
And kick around looking for some slippers.
When the poem finally arrives, it grins
And watches back with wide credulous eyes.

~From Duende (Graywolf Press, 2007)

A day comes 
when the mouth grows tired 
of saying “I.”

Yet it is occupied 
still by a self which must speak. 
Which still desires, is curious. 
Which believes it has also a right.

What to do?

The tongue consults with the teeth 
it knows will survive 
both mouth and self,

which grin—it is their natural pose— 
and say nothing.

~ from After, Poems (HarperCollins, 2006)

The mind of the day draws no attention;
It dwells within the silence with elegance
To create a space for all our words,
Drawing us to listen inward and outward.

We seldom notice how each day is a holy place
Where the eucharist of the ordinary happens,
Transforming our broken fragments
Into an eternal continuity that keeps us.

Somewhere in us a dignity presides
That is more gracious than the smallness
That fuels us with fear and force,
A dignity that trusts the form a day takes.
 
So at the end of this day, we give thanks
For being betrothed to the unknown
And for the secret work
Through which the mind of the day
And wisdom of the soul become one.
 
~from To Bless The Space Between Us (Harmony, 2008)

I went into the Maverick Bar   
In Farmington, New Mexico.
And drank double shots of bourbon
        backed with beer.
My long hair was tucked up under a cap
I’d left the earring in the car.

Two cowboys did horseplay
         by the pool tables,
A waitress asked us
         where are you from?
a country-and-western band began to play   
“We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie”   
And with the next song,
         a couple began to dance.

They held each other like in High School dances   
          in the fifties;
I recalled when I worked in the woods
          and the bars of Madras, Oregon.   
That short-haired joy and roughness—
          America—your stupidity.   
I could almost love you again.

We left—onto the freeway shoulders—
           under the tough old stars—
In the shadow of bluffs
          I came back to myself,
To the real work, to
         “What is to be done.”

~ from Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974)

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths and squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

~ from Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (Houghton Mifflin Company 1980)

She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds,
we had been in the apartment two weeks straight,
I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his
face, again, and when I had her wrist
in my grasp I compressed it, fiercely, for a couple
of seconds, to make an impression on her,
to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even almost
savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing,
the expression, into her, of my anger,
"Never, never, again," the righteous
chant accompanying the clasp. It happened very
fast-grab, crush, crush,
crush, release-and at the first extra
force, she swung her head, as if checking
who this was, and looked at me,
and saw me-yes, this was her mom,
her mom was doing this. Her dark,
deeply open eyes took me
in, she knew me, in the shock of the moment
she learned me. This was her mother, one of the
two whom she most loved, the two
who loved her most, near the source of love 
was this.

~ from 180 More, Selected by Billy Collins (Random House, 2005)

When I think of words
I am one of those people
words all over
pieces of paper
I lose those papers
writing words trying to remember
small woman in the supermarket she told me
her eggplant was the spitting image
of Richard Nixon this is my life,
although it goes by so quickly
especially summers when days
more beautiful than beautiful
begin and end before I can write
them down when I try to tell you
about the world
and my sitting
on the porch I am writing a few things down
what I want to tell you
is how life, small wonderful
bright yellow life how life
can happen if you watch and if you try
to write it down

~ from The On Being Project (September 13, 2015)

If there’s one true thing, it’s that
Google will make money off us no matter what.
If we want to know
what percentage of America is white
(as it seems we do)
what percentage of the population is gay
(as it seems we do)
what percentage of the earth is water:
the engine is ready for our desire.
The urgent snow is everywhere
is a line by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and
many have asked, apparently,
where am I right now. Also
when will I die. Do you love me
may be up there, generating
high cost-per-click, but not
as high as how to make pancakes,
what time is it in California.
So many things I wanted to ask you,
now that you’re gone, and your texts
bounce back to me
undeliverable. Praise to
the goddess of the internet search, who returns
with her basket of grain,
67,000 helpful suggestions
to everything we request:
how to solve a Rubik’s Cube,
what to do when you’re bored,
how old is the earth,
how to clear cache,
what animal am I,
why do we dream,
where are you now, come back.

~ Copyright © 2018 by Rachel Richardson

  para mi abuela en la isla   

A hurricane destroyed your sense of home
and all you wanted was to pack your bags
in dead of night, still waving mental flags,
forgetting the nation is a syndrome.
All that’s left of the sea in you is foam,
the coastline's broken voice and all its crags.
You hear the governor admit some snags
were hit, nada, mere blips in the biome,
nothing that private equity can’t fix
once speculators pour into San Juan
to harvest the bad seed of an idea.
She tells you Santa Clara in ’56
had nothing on the brutal San Ciprián,
and yes, your abuela’s named María.

Thoughts of Katrina and the Superdome,
el Caribe mapped with blood and sandbags,
displaced, diasporic, Spanglish hashtags,
a phantom tab you keep on Google Chrome,
days of hunger and dreams of honeycomb.
Are souls reborn or worn thin like old rags?
The locust tree still stands although it sags,
austere sharks sequence the island’s genome
and parrots squawk survival politics
whose only power grid is the damp dawn.
There is no other way, no panacea.
Throw stuff at empire’s walls and see what sticks
or tear down the walls you were standing on?
Why don’t you run that question by María?

Beyond the indigenous chromosome,
your gut genealogy’s in chains and gags,
paraded through the colonies’ main drags
and left to die. So when you write your tome
please note: each word must be a catacomb,
must be a sepulcher and must be a
cradle in some sort of aporía
where bodies draw on song as guns are drawn,
resilient, silent h in huracán.
Your ache-song booms ashore. Ashé, María.

Copyright © 2018 Urayoán Noel

I like poets who swear 
less is more
earthy abbreviations of long histories
with parents
with the world
with God dammit

I write things down so I can say them again

I like poets who obviously wash dishes
the sound of service in service to words
checking both sides of a sound
for anything that might send it back into the water

you write things down so you never have to say them again

I like poets who write short books so I can sleep

~ from You’ve Changed (Mezcalita Press, 2017)

Lord,
    when you send the rain,
    think about it, please,
    a little?
Do
    not get carried away
    by the sound of falling water,
    the marvelous light
    on the falling water.
I
    am beneath that water.
    It falls with great force
    and the light
Blinds
    me to the light.

~ from Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems (Beacon Press, 2014)

Stay, stay at home, my heart, and rest;
Home-keeping hearts are happiest,
For those that wander they know not where
Are full of trouble and full of care;
       To stay at home is best.
 
Weary and homesick and distressed,
They wander east, they wander west,
And are baffled and beaten and blown about
By the winds of the wilderness of doubt;
       To stay at home is best.
 
Then stay at home, my heart, and rest;
The bird is safest in its nest;
O’er all that flutter their wings and fly
A hawk is hovering in the sky;
       To stay at home is best.
 
~ Public domain

I am so busy at times
trying to make it all
worthwhile, that I am
stunned at how easily the
whole of life speaks to me,
when music I’ve never heard
or a truth I never understood
plucks the one string I carry
deep within.

I only want that string pluck-
ed and yet, it stays in a place
only suffering or surrender
can open.

Still, violins in minor keys
make me swallow my fear
and herons flying into
the end of a long day
make me wish I’d led
a more peaceful life.

~ from Reduced to Joy (Viva Editions  2013)

Talking can be sweet.  A field can bloom in your	
eyes when sharing words with the right person.

An invisible effulgence wafts out from a heart 
that is happy.  That is an oxygen to us.
In some cities, smoke stacks pollute the air and 	
harm the lungs of many creatures.

A good song fills our chests too, but can have	
the opposite effect—everything it touches
may be better of.

There is a governor of every region of space,	 	
a divine agent; he or she may remain hidden,
but their business is your soul, as it is mine.

Words can fertilize space now and then; don’t	
deny yourself becoming enriched.

Find some ears that love the touch of your	
sounds, and you theirs.

~ from The Purity of Desire, 100 Poems of Rumi, translated by Daniel Ladinsky with Nancy Owen Barton (Penguin Books, 2012)