Words_Just_Words

Paul Laurence Dunbar (June 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who had been enslaved in Kentucky before the American Civil War, Dunbar began writing stories and verse when he was a child. He published his first poems at the age of 16 in a Dayton newspaper, and served as president of his high school's literary society.
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The Colored Band
Paul Laurence Dunbar

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Quarantine
Austen Leah Rose

Chopin on the stereo. A bag of flour on the kitchen counter.
The lamp emits a thin tremble
of light. We are stirring olive oil with onions

in a steel pan and I am thinking of my Oma in 1938
on the telephone with the Swiss embassy, her daughter in a hospital bed
with diphtheria while the war went on, then sailing

across the ocean to America with a piece of rye bread
in her wool pocket. I am thinking about foresight, how it means
arriving at the moment before the moment

arrives. I am thinking of walking through a forest, how the spaces
between trees widen like telescopes. Once
my father and I rode up a chairlift in the middle of a blizzard,

then skied down toward a city we believed in but could not see.
I am thinking of the white cloud of the present.
I am thinking of a time before newspapers or windows

or the idea of heaven. I am thinking of magnetic fields, the raw material
of mountains. I stand up. I take the hand of the person I love.
Is it true that only time can tell? I ask but don't wait for an answer.

He has entered the room like a stray cat sheltering from a storm.
We will sit at a wood table encased in a circle
of light, saying the names of flowers that we know, and repeating them.

Secrets
By Viggo Mortensen

Oceans take our secrets
what we don’t want to see or smell anymore.
We feel anonymous
we feel clean
when we throw our past away.
It will wash, we think.
It will sink
it will drift far from this shore.
It will disappear.
Maybe the fish will eat our words
maybe lost or spurned loves
will help deep-sea feathery green plants grow.

Secretos

El océano se lleva nuestros secretos,
lo que no queremos ver, ni oler, nunca más.
Nos sentimos limpios cuando arrojamos
lejos de nosotros el pasado.
Se lavará, pensamos, se hundirá.
La corriente se lo llevará lejos de esta orilla.
Desaparecerá.
Tal vez nuestras palabras alimenten a los peces.
Tal vez el amor perdido o abandonado haga crecer
frondosas y verdes praderas submarinas.

 

Reverse Poem: “I’m Used to It”

Ariana Bagley

 

In her pretty brown eyes

You could see it

Even with that dainty smile

Her happiness

Vanished

She saw

The disgust

As she looked in the mirror

The hatred

Took over

Her self-love

The pain

Changed

Her mindset

Now

She had sleepless nights full of hopes and dreams

Where

Her tear stained cheeks hit the pillow

She was troubled

Her only wish

Was

Becoming an aura that made people think of the color yellow

She remembers when

If anyone asked

She would’ve said

“I’m used to it.”

 

Now read from bottom to top.

Done | Viggo Mortensen

For three or four months I have visited the corner where we
sometimes used to meet for breakfast--though it is now far
out of my usual way----just to see your blood. That stain is no
longer a topic of conversation even incidentally among our
few remaining friends I occasionally come across. It black-
ened over the summer, picking up tire prints and a pigeon
feather, asphalt cooking up into it and joining you as it
might a flattened wad of gum. The last time I went to see,
you had so blended with the street that it took me a few
minutes to find the familiar outline. No need to keep
looking for the essence of what I've assumed to be our
shared memory and fading connection. I may sometimes
think to cast a passing glance at the spot on rare occasions
I find myself walking up that street, but will no longer stop
and kneel to look for the right light to catch you in.

Spring Cleaning
By Melvin Dixon

First goes floordust, then newspapers
stacked near the bed. Peanut shells
swept out of  hiding between mattress
and rug. Toenails clipped.
Sprouts of a beard shaved off.
With hourly glasses of Deer Park Water
and the barest of food, the body
sheds winter fat and filler.

The hair goes next, close
to the gleaming, gleaming skull.
You are ready for the sun
and the salt-tongued air.

You are someone new. I will be
someone new, like you, and promise
not to hear the rattle our bones make
moving from empty closets
and all through the room.

Doilies
Jacqueline Bishop

In the house off Constant Spring Road, the one
with the short spreading Julie mango tree
in the front yard, the lime tree
with their dark green leaves and delicate
white flowers; the palm-sized
burnt orange hibiscuses,
poisonous butter yellow allamandas,
I remember, I remember,
how my mother’s hands kept moving
as she produced one white crochet doily after another.
The slender silver hook and the fragile symmetry.
A Ford Escort was parked in the garage of that house.
Oil-slicked men tried stealing that powder blue
Ford Escort one night as we slept uneasily in the house—
Discussions began immediately about leaving
one i/land for another. The fat
balls of thread in my mother’s lap, at her feet,
those threads already unspooling, connecting one
memory, one life, one distant country to another.

Anne Frank Huis
BY Andrew Motion

Even now, after twice her lifetime of grief
and anger in the very place, whoever comes
to climb these narrow stairs, discovers how
the bookcase slides aside, then walks through
shadow into sunlit rooms, can never help

but break her secrecy again. Just listening
is a kind of guilt: the Westerkirk repeats
itself outside, as if all time worked round
towards her fear, and made each stroke
die down on guarded streets. Imagine it—

four years of whispering, and loneliness,
and plotting, day by day, the Allied line
in Europe with a yellow chalk. What hope
she had for ordinary love and interest
survives her here, displayed above the bed

as pictures of her family; some actors;
fashions chosen by Princess Elizabeth.
And those who stoop to see them find
not only patience missing its reward,
but one enduring wish for chances

like my own: to leave as simply
as I do, and walk at ease
up dusty tree-lined avenues, or watch
a silent barge come clear of bridges
settling their reflections in the blue canal.

Flying at Night
by Ted Kooser

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

I Miss You
By Joanna Fuchs

I miss you in the morning,
I miss you late at night,
But I know what you are doing
Is good and just and right.

You’re always in my thoughts;
I hope that you can see
I’m proud of you for serving
Our country, God, and me.

And when you’re home again
I won’t miss you anymore,
But I’ll always admire your courage
For fighting in this war.