Welcome to Day 21, September 21st of our poetry blog, our "30 poems in 30 days" fundraiser for the Ithaca Sanctuary Alliance
SEPT 21
UNTIL THERE IS Susan Weitz
You never know when something’s
about to end:
The sky so drenched with sun
that there’s no such thing
as darkness,
until there is.
The achingly yellow finches
in ravenous crowds,
one morning,
gone.
The warm, heavy air
nudged southward
by orange-crayon wind.
Blossoms, fields,
rusting, drying,
dying.
You never know when so many things
are about to
end.
Maybe you forgot
to cherish them.
Sin título VII SANTIAGO RODRIGUEZ
Y volteamos al cielo y vemos la luna y la tierra y suspiramos. Ahí está, recordándonos que no es para nosotros.
(BLOGGER'S NOTE: I HAVE SPECIFICALLY AVOIDED TRANSLATING THE POEMS OF SANTIAGO RODRIGUEZ, WANTING THEIR BEAUTY IN SPANISH TO STAND ALONE AND USING GOOGLE TRANSLATE MYSELF TO AUGMENT MY OWN PURELY PASSIVE AND LIMITED GRASP OF SPANISH; BUT I COULD NOT RESIST PROVIDING A TRANSLATION FOR THIS ONE, NOT BEING ABLE TO TOLERATE THE POSSIBILITY OF ANY READER'S MISSING ITS ESPECIALLY WILD WISDOM AND INVENTIVENESS)
No title VII (Santiago Rodriguez, translated from the Spanish by Google Translate)
I sometimes imagine a strange future where we live in space and wealthy people are the ones who have the privilege of living on the planet. And I'm a pizza delivery boy from space.Or a lone miner on an asteroid, with a robot dog for company, missing a home, waiting for the six months of my contract to end to return to a tight and junk-filled space colony. But with people, and among those people maybe one or two good friends. That's enough in space.And we all talk about the earth as if we had ever been there, but we are space rats dreaming of swings and trees, of earth. And with insects also lurking around.But here in space nothing, or at least very little.And we turn to the sky and we see the moon and the earth and we sigh. There it is, reminding us that it's not for us.
N’ilah David Regenspan
You will fail at this
Said the meditation leader to us
While we were on retreat.
No one can achieve
Total emptying of the mind,
But you try. You try.
We Jews have another take on it,
This trying. We say
That at the end of Yom Kippur the Temple gates
Are closed and locked at sundown.
It is the last chance at repentance, of being cleansed
Before the closing of these gates,
But you try, you try. But there is no full cleansing,
No stepping away from being human;
This, deep down, we know.
Why then be held captive by a metaphor?
We Jews are trapped in our language,
But we are also contained in it
And this is the paradox. Most of us
Do not even want a Temple anymore,
Let alone its gates. But we keep the poetry.
The poem is the thing.
Its music makes it sufficient to say
We try, we try.
If it were possible to evade complexity Barbara Regenspan
(response to Marge Piercy’s poem, Ne’ilah)
Oh to be a worker bee approaching Yom Kippur—
to have finished with feelings of belonging or not,
of having done enough or not,
to join a community that knows
what justice looks like—
certain that everyone’s story
could be understood, if you had
all the facts—
certain that the gates closing
would isolate only evil—
detached from people
who got bad information and little love—
letting them all in the hive on conditions
of what must be left out.
Other the guns! Other the weapons,
Other all othering of others!
Hold this loved child’s vision of the possible
where everyone has a home and nurture
crafting the days as works of art
fueled by the beautiful already here.
I, in a time of covidian trial Martin Bidney
classical hexameter Ovidian elegiac distichs
with modern rhymes
/xx /xx /xx /xx /xx /x
/xx /xx / /xx /xx /
I, in a time of covidian trial, would have you consider
What, in a past that might seem gladder and granted repose,
Differed from that which we face in our era when, socially distant,
Oddly imprisoned one feels, gloomy when loneliness grows.
Emily Dickinson pictured a prairie while merely beholding
Clover and bee and no more, knowing that what would avail
Soon might arrive and alight in the mind while she wrote in a corner,
Waiting for strength to shed light: “revery” never would fail.
Think of how Whitman could sing, in his grief, about Abraham Lincoln:
What did he view in the soul, clearly in dark of the night?
Heart-formed, the leaf of a lilac as emblem of passion eternal:
Tenderness grew as he dreamed, sorrow’s renewal of might.
Melville had hoped that in Hawthorne he’d find a companion in writing.
That never happened, alas! Loveward, his will was turned back.
Smiles he would call ambiguity vehicles, not to be trusted:
Shakespeare, however, would prove, Seër-speech heals every lack.
Covid-enclosures are many: oblique and opaque, our confession.
Think: our creator’s unknown. We in that likeness are made.
Knowing yourself is a goal, but no human will ever attain it:
Yet will reflections reward – fragments in greatness arrayed.
Inanity JOANNA GREEN
Let’s try turning off the brain
And see
What is allowed
To grow in the space
Between thoughts
I hope for a poem
Take these notes to catch
What I may
Between thoughts
I hear
The low hiss and pop of fall’s first fire
(No not the one scorching California, the one at my slippered feet)
The gurgle slosh and thrash of water
(No not the floods in Alabama, the washing machine downstairs)
Between thoughts
I grow impatient
If this is a poem it should take a turn right about now but
I see no way out of this
Inanity
Waiting for three new stars SUSAN ESCHBACH
way up on East Hill
wide sky
goldenrod, tanned wheat grasses
greens I don’t know the names of
texturing the landscape
the air buzzing like a hot August day,
that vibrating pulse across fields
and yet it is the chill of Fall
an expanse of blue just peach at the edges
an orange blaze coming on
sun westward
it is the beginning of the end of the first day
of the new year
a wind picks up through my ears
a blowing
a shofar , starting anew
calling me to wonder, pay attention, make peace
make a change,
be with it all.
Vi a un ratón metiéndose a la casa el otro día. También lo vi salirse.
