Still When I Picture It the Face of God Is a White Man’s Face

By Shane McCrae


Before it disappears

on the sand his long white      beard before it disappears

The face of the man

in the waves I ask her does she see it ask her does

The old man in the waves      as the waves crest she see it does

she see the old man his

White     his face crumbling face it looks

as old as he’s as old as

The ocean looks

and for a moment almost looks

His face like it’s     all the way him

As never such old skin

looks my / Daughter age four

She thinks it might he might be real she shouts Hello

And after there’s no answer answers No

[That]

By Leslie Harrison


That this is the morning in which nothing much

that the sky is still there and the water dresses

accordingly that only at night does the water rest

vanish from sight that the stars are too small too far

to register there that all our names too are writ

invisibly on water that abiding requires more hope

than I can possibly acquire that hope is not a thing

with feathers that hope is a thing with a fist a thin

crust sketched over oceans that hope is what despair

uses for bait come in hope says the water's fine

that hope is the blood with which you write letters

that start dear sea dear ocean stop asking so fucking

much that hope is a telegram delivered by men

in pairs men in uniform a telegram that says missing

stop that says once again presumed lost stop

Leslie Harrison, "[That]" from The Book of Endings. Copyright © 2017 by Leslie Harrison. 

Tonight, in Oakland

by Danez Smith

I did not come here to sing a blues.
Lately, I open my mouth

& out comes marigolds, yellow plums.
I came to make the sky a garden.

Give me rain or give me honey, dear lord.
The sky has given us no water this year.

I ride my bike to a boy, when I get there
what we make will not be beautiful

or love at all, but it will be deserved.
I’ve started seeking men to wet the harvest.

Come, tonight I declare we must move
instead of pray. Tonight, east of here,
two boys, one dressed in what could be blood

& one dressed in what could be blood
before the wound, meet & mean mug

& God, tonight, let them dance! Tonight,
the bullet does not exist. Tonight, the police

have turned to their God for forgiveness.
Tonight, we bury nothing, we serve a God

with no need for shovels, we serve a God
with a bad hip & a brother in prison.

Tonight, let every man be his own lord.
Let wherever two people stand be a reunion

of ancient lights. Let’s waste the moon’s marble glow
shouting our names to the stars until we are

the stars. O, precious God! O, sweet black town!
I am drunk & I thirst. When I get to the boy

who lets me practice hunger with him
I will not give him the name of your newest ghost

I will give him my body & what he does with it
is none of my business, but I will say look,

I made it a whole day, still, no rain
still, I am without exit wound

& he will say Tonight, I want to take you
how the police do, unarmed & sudden

& tonight, when we dream, we dream of dancing
in a city slowly becoming ash.

Danez Smith, "Tonight, in Oakland." Copyright © 2015 by Danez Smith. 

Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther

by A.E. Stallings

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes, 
The booze and the neon and Saturday night, 
The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons? 
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes? 
Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons 
And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite? 
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes, 
The booze and the neon and Saturday night?

A Rhyme for Halloween

By Maurice Kilwein Guevara

Tonight I light the candles of my eyes in the lee

And swing down this branch full of red leaves.

Yellow moon, skull and spine of the hare,

Arrow me to town on the neck of the air.

I hear the undertaker make love in the heather;

The candy maker, poor fellow, is under the weather.

Skunk, moose, raccoon, they go to the doors in threes

With a torch in their hands or pleas: "O, please . . ."

Baruch Spinoza and the butcher are drunk:

One is the tail and one is the trunk

Of a beast who dances in circles for beer

And doesn't think twice to learn how to steer.

Our clock is blind, our clock is dumb.

Its hands are broken, its fingers numb.

No time for the martyr of our fair town

Who wasn't a witch because she could drown.

Now the dogs of the cemetery are starting to bark

At the vision of her, bobbing up through the dark.

When she opens her mouth to gasp for air,

A moth flies out and lands in her hair.

The apples are thumping, winter is coming.

The lips of the pumpkin soon will be humming.

By the caw of the crow on the first of the year,

Something will die, something appear.

Maurice Kilwein Guevara, "A Rhyme for Halloween" from Poems of the River Spirit. Copyright © 1996 by Maurice Kilwein Guevara.

Ars Poetica?

by Czeslaw Milosz

I have always aspired to a more spacious form 
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose 
and would let us understand each other without exposing 
the author or reader to sublime agonies. 

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: 
a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, 
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out 
and stood in the light, lashing his tail. 

That’s why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion, 
though it’s an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel. 
It’s hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from, 
when so often they’re put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty. 

What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons, 
who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues, 
and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand, 
work at changing his destiny for their convenience? 

It’s true that what is morbid is highly valued today, 
and so you may think that I am only joking 
or that I’ve devised just one more means 
of praising Art with the help of irony. 

There was a time when only wise books were read, 
helping us to bear our pain and misery. 
This, after all, is not quite the same 
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics. 

And yet the world is different from what it seems to be 
and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.
People therefore preserve silent integrity, 
thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors. 

The purpose of poetry is to remind us 
how difficult it is to remain just one person, 
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, 
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry, 
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, 
under unbearable duress and only with the hope 
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

Czeslaw Milosz, "Ars Poetica?" from The Collected Poems: 1931-1987. Copyright © 1988 by Czeslaw Milosz.

Losses

by Andrew Motion

General Petraeus, when the death-count of American troops
in Iraq was close to 3,800, said ‛The truth is you never do get
used to losses. There is a kind of bad news vessel with holes,

and sometimes it drains, then it fills up, then it empties again’—
leaving, in this particular case, the residue of a long story
involving one soldier who, in the course of his street patrol,

tweaked the antenna on the TV in a bar hoping for baseball,
but found instead the snowy picture of men in a circle talking,
all apparently angry and perhaps Jihadists. They turned out to be

reciting poetry. ‛My life’, said the interpreter, ‛is like a bag of flour
thrown through wind into empty thorn bushes’. Then ‛No, no’, he said,
correcting himself. ‛Like dust in the wind. Like a hopeless man.’

Andrew Motion, “Losses” from Coming In To Land: Selected Poems 1975—2015. Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Motion.