Category Archives: Great Poems Online

William Childress: “How the Earth Was Made”


William Childress is a Pulitzer-nominated author and photojournalist who is regarded as one of the foremost poets of the Korean War. His books include Burning the Years and Lobo. “Chilly” is a Winning Writers subscriber and an endlessly entertaining correspondent. He emailed me one of his latest poems, which I liked so much that I got permission to reprint it here. Though I don’t share the narrator’s atheistic conclusion, I can relate to the feeling that God’s creation is so much grander and more mysterious than some of our stunted human concepts of the divine. Sometimes, religious ideas (like any ideas) can be a distraction from appreciating what’s right in front of us.

How the Earth Was Made

I was a youngster when I walked a trail
Through autumn woods a nonexistent god
took credit for. I never thought it odd
that to a child, the world was magical,

and yellow was the color of enchantment.
It wasn’t simply that a golden hue
should bejewel and complement the blue
eternal arc that made a firmament,

but that the sky itself should overlay
my own poor silly guise. There had to be
so many ways to create such a world,
ways understood by all but those who spoiled

the fairness and the flowers by saying God
made it all in just seven days. How odd
we are, attributing power to nothing but air.
If you can’t see it, then it isn’t there.

Tracy Koretsky: “Pietà”

    
Tracy Koretsky is a poet, novelist, and literary critic who has won over 50 awards, including three Pushcart Prize nominations. Later this fall, she’ll be taking over my poetry critique column in the Winning Writers newsletter (subscribe free). I’ve long been a fan of her novel Ropeless, a comic, poignant story about an old-fashioned Jewish mama, her mentally disabled son, and a dutiful daughter learning to follow her dreams.

Tracy’s poetry collection Even Before My Own Name is now available for downloading as a free e-book in PDF format. Visit her website to order a copy. She kindly shares this poem from the book below.

Pietà

Just before the end we watched you there,
    stretched out
across your mama’s lap, her strong young man,
    silent, cold;

your eyes closed. I leaned toward the screen when
    they showed
Mary’s face, all the sorrow in the world in them
    stone eyes.

Newslady said some sad soul splattered red paint
    across
your chest, across your mama’s face. I wondered if

it made a tear. Said the madman tried to break you
    apart
with a hammer. Couldn’t do it though. Takes more
    than that,

I know. Don’t have to say nothing; a mother just
    knows.
So I told him he might as well fall in love with a
    rich man

as a poor one. I told him, “You be careful,” you
    know.
He promised he was. Got scared when I caught
    him

rubbing his throat. I made him see that doctor
    myself.
That doctor. Had to wear a mask and robe just to
    see my son,

had to use gloves to touch his hair, straight and
    thin like a white
boy’s. He hated to see me coming at him like that;
    he’d say, “Let me

see your face, Mama.” “No, son.” I had to say.
    Nearly broke
us both in two. So I took him home. Hospital’s no
    place for a boy

to die. Quit my job, brought him cookies. He’d eat
    bag after bag;
always offer me some. I wasn’t sure, but I ate
    anyway. Then

my boy would groan and curl. I knew what I had to
    do. Roll him
over, untape the padding, soak the rag in the
    bucket, wring it,

wring it, pat on the powder with my gloved hand,
    saying “Never
you mind, son.”          My  son.

If your Mama didn’t shed no tears it was ’cause
    she never had to
powder your thirty-year-old bottom. Oh, I know
    you got your

reasons, ain’t for me to question in this life, but as
    a mother,
you know, I gotta say: You wanted my boy, Lord?
    Then

you hold him near. You let his pretty voice rise up
    in your choir.
You greedy for my boy, Lord? So bad you couldn’t
    wait

just thirty years? Then tell your mama to touch his
    hair without
gloves, Lord, without masks. I never got to hold
    my baby

cool across my lap. Mortician made me pay extra
    just to clean
him. Now, before you go and listen to someone
    else’s troubles

I want to say I saw that statue again: on a card at
    the Well-Mart.
Opened it real fast. It said nothing, just…nothing. I
    took it home.

Put it in his drawer, under the paper. Put a lock
on the door so I can sleep nights. Sometimes I
    wonder

if they got the thing cleaned off. I dream of rags in
    buckets
of red, Mary’s stone hand wringing          wringing.

Pamela Uschuk: “North Carolina Ghost Story”


Pamela Uschuk is the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Cutthroat. Her new poetry collection Crazy Love (Wings Press, 2009) is enlivened by twin passions for social justice and the beauties of the Colorado landscape. In these poems, nature always provides a restorative place of peace and abundance when the wartime news becomes overwhelming. Beauty is her foundation, but unsentimentally so; the broken human world remains a constant background presence, as if to say that the joys that nourish us are not for our private pleasure alone, but also to give us strength to nourish others.

Read a review of Crazy Love in the literary journal RATTLE: Poetry for the 21st Century. Pam kindly shares a poem from this collection below.

North Carolina Ghost Story

for Elizabeth Dewberry, Teri Hairston and Zelda Lockhart

I

Sunrise torches the Winston-Salem Projects,
a saxophone of light swelling the cups of red buds
and crenoline skirts of Japanese cherry blossoms
morphing my back yard from orange clay
to Southern belle parfait that a red-tailed hawk
    cuts
through chasing pigeon breakfast on the wing.
Spooked, the blue jay creaks, a rusty gate
flapping as it navigates dogwood’s white dance.
I walk to campus, hear a rustle,
see how small things of the world survive.
A burrowing chipmunk pokes his nose
from rotten old magnolia leaves,
breathes sky.

II

I think of my friend, Teri, waking
in the Hood, her dreds emerging
from a thrift store blanket, waking
to pigeons she feeds strut and coo
on the fire escape, waking to
sirens and the smell of grits and coffee
from across the common lawn.

I remember her eyes last night,
chilled even while she laughed,
I don’t want to hear about ghosts. Black girls don’t
like ghosts; don’t tell me about no ghosts, uh, uh.

So Teri waited in the damask parlor
of the elegant old college President’s house
while we three climbed secret stairs
to the attic, where dusky air
compacted like a punctured lung
with each step until our chests squeezed
into the small wheezing cry
of the girl we all heard dragged
across the floor to the terror of her life
and we felt her die
and die and die, her fear bright
and palpable as blood
that streaked her thighs.

None of us could speak but
strained to translate the acid etch
of tears unredeemed, the mystery
inside the marred grain of the oak floor,
but we couldn’t in our strictest scholarly logic
tame the icepick panic
chipping at our own hearts.

Then I whispered what earlier I’d seen —
the vapor trail of the matron
corseted in grim gray muslin,
a living cauldron of grief
boiling through the rooms downstairs,
clouding wallpaper, pink
and oblivious as a bouquet of carnations.

Was she looking for a daughter, hers, her maid’s?
We left the muffled screams of the attic floor,
stained so deep two pine boards had to be
    replaced
long after the Civil War. We left
with no real clues, just the urine reek
of terror leaking from the walls, the long echo
of screams beating like small fists
or an arrhythmic heart,
a temperature drop
none of us could shake, even when
we descended to the parlor and Teri’s quip
about the questionable ethnicity of Spectral
    Americans.

III

Accompanied by the sweet flutes of Carolina wrens
I unlock the President’s house
to clean up last night’s party, wondering
about the school’s boast of its underground
    railroad,
and how those who began this school had kept
    slaves.

I scan portraits decorating peppermint walls—
the magnolia blossom faces of gentlemen tobacco
    barons,
plantation owners who never pulled
a boll from a plant.

Back from the hunt, one gent leads
a dapple grey thoroughbred
to the livery’s whitewashed stalls, his fox hounds
splayed helpless as contorted cutouts
behind the thick black hooves.
The man’s face is pinched, his thin mouth
locked on lust’s hard verb,
eyes ashy, vest cinched tight
under the black waistcoat above white jodpurs
highlighting the bulge between the tops of his
    thighs,
the mahogany blur of a young girl
escaping around the corner
of the elegant white house, up the steps
just out of our sight.

Alegria Imperial: “To This We Wake”


Poet Alegria Imperial, a regular reader of this blog, was inspired by some recent posts to write these reflections and a poem, which she kindly shares with us:

“Reading more of gay marriage and its brambles, and knowing a few friends who in their quiet wordless moments peer beyond the seasons, I am convinced how unfair this world will always be.

“I believe that despite our knowing what in and how equality works, our friends will never attain it–not in our lifetime or even the next. But I suppose we can’t be more than our human nature limits us to be and yet, like you’ve shown in supporting their cause, we can by leaping beyond the barriers we’ve created be quite meta-human. Like compassion, understanding and the daring to break confines must be scary for those who can really make a difference but you have done it, are doing it.

“Yet in spite of their fractured world, here is what I sense is our friends’ legacy.”

To This We Wake
by Alegria Imperial

Scraps of purple on winter dawns
slung on arms of mornings–
a sun awaiting for us
in between strutting seagulls
pigeons braiding shadows–
we snuggle.

We trace our days in dreams we
birth at dawn
when swatches of light
tickle us out to walk
on grounds of endearments our steps
have marked engraved by winds.

We step on
shredded blooms the seasons
gift us, stealing kisses, time on
halved imperfect whispers, wishes we rip
off the day, their ends we spangle on
skies, our secret into stars.

We wake yet to another day–
what lies deeper than frost farther
than slumber, closer
to the core where
seasons sleep: to this, to this
we always wake.

Alegria is currently part of an editorial team assembling an anthology of women’s life stories. Women Elders in Action, the organization for which she volunteers in Vancouver, compiled 77 taped interviews of unattached elderly women living on low-income in the lower mainland of British Columbia.

Alegria writes, “What an amazing trove of childhood memories, broken dreams and marriages, turning points and awakenings to global needs. They have debunked the myths women are brought up on but in surviving and living lives more impressive in reality than myths could ever be, they have given rise or have created a “mythogyny”–the book title. We hope to launch it in mid-Sept. The book is funded by Status of Women Canada. By the way, one of them is the first lesbian couple to have won custody over their children in a court battle.”

Read more about this project here.

Francine Witte: “Alien Story”


Francine Witte’s First Rain won the 2009 Pecan Grove Press National Chapbook Competition. Her poems are spare yet filled with longing, like the empty rooms in an Edward Hopper painting. Their narrators reach for the unsentimental wisdom to be found on the far side of divorce, aging, and other losses. Thanks to Francine and publisher H. Palmer Hall at Pecan Grove for permission to reprint the excerpt below.

Alien Story

Last night, it was
late, and this morning she points
where the earth sunk
in like a breakfast bowl.
A shape nothing human could have made.

No way to explain
how it filled itself
in like a love story.
The cops have heard
it all before, these open fields
and the lies they’d tell a woman.

How real it must have seemed
to her, the flashing lights,
the creatures
with their bumped, green skin.

Real as the dent
her last man left in the sofa. A space
carved out
as he sat and sat
explaining his way
towards the door.

A space she sees
even now, sometimes,
when she’s cleaning,
careful not to touch.

Six months gone,
each evening she’s by the window
framing the darkness.

Her eyes sweep
the sky like a searchlight.
She’s looking for something
that never heard of love.

Sunday Random Song: Charles Trenet, “Y’a d’la joie”


I’m not sure why I’m suddenly fascinated with Charles Trenet. The record-store clerk described him as a “French Sinatra”. That describes the genre of music pretty well, but where Sinatra always took his persona as a suave crooner quite seriously, Trenet seems to be laughing at the affectations of his own style. He’s having so much fun that he’d rather be part of the joke than pretend to be cool.

Y’a d’la joie! Bonjour, bonjour les hirondelles
Y’a d’la joie! Dans le ciel par dessus les toits
Y’a d’la joie! Et du soleil dans les ruelles
Y’a d’la joie! Partout, y’a d’la joie!

Tout le jour, mon coeur bat, chavire et chancelle
C’est l’amour qui vient avec “je ne sais quoi”
C’est l’amour… Bonjour, bonjour les demoiselles
Y’a d’la joie! Partout, y’a d’la joie!

Le gris boulanger bat la pâte à pleins bras
Il fait du bon pain, du pain si fin que j’ai faim
On voit le facteur qui s’envole là-bas
Comme un ange bleu portant ses lettres au Bon Dieu
Miracle sans nom à la station Javelle
On voit le métro qui sort de son tunnel
Grisé de soleil, de chansons et de fleurs
Il court vers le bois, il court à toute vapeur

Y’a d’la joie! La tour Eiffel part en ballade
Comme une folle, elle saute la Seine à pieds joints
Puis elle dit: « Tant pis pour moi si j’suis malade
J’m’embêtais tout’ seule dans mon coin… »

Y’a d’la joie! Le percepteur met sa jaquette
Plie boutique et dit d’un air très doux, très doux
« Bien l’bonjour! pour aujourd’hui fini la quête
Gardez tout Messieurs, gardez tout! »

Mais voilà soudain qu’je m’éveille dans mon lit
Donc, j’avais rêvé, oui car le ciel est gris
Il faut se lever, se laver, se vêtir
Et ne plus chanter si l’on n’a plus rien à dire
Mais je crois pourtant que ce rêve a du bon
Car il m’a permis de faire une chanson
Chanson de printemps, chansonnette d’amour
Chanson de 20 ans, chanson de toujours

Y’a d’la joie! Bonjour, bonjour les hirondelles
Y’a d’la joie! Dans le ciel par dessus les toits
Y’a d’la joie! Et du soleil dans les ruelles
Y’a d’la joie! Partout, y’a d’la joie!

Tout le jour, mon coeur bat, chavire et chancelle
C’est l’amour qui vient avec “je ne sais quoi”
C’est l’amour… Bonjour, bonjour les demoiselles
Y’a d’la joie! Partout, y’a d’la joie!…

(Lyrics courtesy of lyricsmode.com)

Charlie Bondhus: “Epithalamium to Myself and Walt Whitman”


Charlie Bondhus is a poet, fiction writer and literary critic who is currently pursuing a Ph.D at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The poem below is reprinted by permission from his new chapbook, What We Have Learned to Love, which won the 2008-09 Stonewall Competition from BrickHouse Books. Charlie’s full-length poetry book How the Boy Might See It will be out from Pecan Grove Press in October, and his novella Monsters and Victims will be published by Gothic Press in March 2010.

Epithalamium to Myself and Walt Whitman

As Adam early in the morning,
Walking forth from the bower refresh’d with sleep,
Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,
Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my
    body as I pass,
Be not afraid of my body.

                        -Walt Whitman

I found Walt Whitman–

native and slithering in the tall grasses
au naturel save for beard,
true and biological son of Adam and Father Time.

Yet undivorced from the solid world, I
considered averting my eyes and crying:
“Come up from the fields, father!
Show your face
scraped in dead leaves
smudged with herb juice
and streaming with the sweet, gentle dew
of buttercups.”
Thinking book deals and self-promotion I
considered calling
The Daily Sun
The Hanover Press
The New York Times
to report this
cleft of time and space
this bit of transcendental news.
But something about his eyes,
weary and reckless,
stopped me.
I knew he was ashamed
to go naked about the world, though
clothing only constrained
his meadow meanders.
What wisdom, I thought, could be learned from this
grizzled young gray man?
What childless adventures?
Sensing my hesitation, Walt,
by way of greeting,
spooled his body about my own:
wrinkled ligaments and hairy appendages
encircling my boy-shape,
like Lucifer to Eve
in classical painting.

Grinding white teeth he
hissed affectionately:

To-day I go consort with Nature’s darlings, to-night too,
I am for those who believe in loose delights

Bowing then my head
to the priest of nature
unvested save for crabgrass and pinecones
I reverently uttered the responsorial:

For who but you or I understand lovers and all
    their sorrow and joy?
And who but you and I, dear grandpapa, ought
    be poets of comrades?

Much to do, needless to say.
Job had to be quit.
Buses had to be boarded.
Messages had to be left
on lovers’ answering machines.

I admit I initially judged Walt’s value
in terms of brand recognition.
Considering my new companion
a muscle for my rhetoric, I
dragged him on board a Greyhound
and bore him south.

Watching the 6 o’clock news in a D.C. hostel’s
    common room
I learned that we were in no way unique;
Melville was giving a lecture entitled “I am
    not Ishmael” in Boston,
Emerson was alive and well, already booked
    to speak at Dartmouth’s commencement,
and the Enquirer reported that Isherwood and Auden
    had gotten a civil union
in Los Angeles.

Appointing himself captain and helmsman
of brotherly mayhem, Walt drew up blueprints
of the White House, shared his plan
to invade the Oval Office
and recite “The Song of the Broad Axe”
interpolated with “I Hear America Singing”
to protest outsourcing, encored
by a brideless wedding march.

But, as it turned out, Walt had been
too long in the ground
to remember his own words.

Later that night at the hostel, lying awake
back-to-back in a twin bed, I
heard him singing in his sleep
reimagined refrains about New York City.

Next day on the plane he
pried open my lap-top
with a butter knife he had somehow gotten past
    security,
found the porn,
and spent the whole flight in the bathroom,
revising every poem in Calamus
to assimilate bears and twinks.

Approaching the gray and brown skyline,
noses and beards pointed towards JFK, I
described the violent rise and sudden crash of
    the towers,
the significance of which he appreciated,
though not the stark irony of 9-1-1.

That night at CBGB’s he got in for free
just for having the gumption
to say he was Walt Whitman
later corroborated
by an NYU adjunct
who happened to be standing near the door.

Wiggling like Mick Jagger
to the rhythm of an all girl rock band
(called, I think, “The Flaming Cunts”)
he danced his hips into my crotch and,
diving from the stage, cried:

I am Walt Whitman! Liberal and lusty as nature!

After the set and two rounds of cosmopolitans,
the moment splintered away as Walt
sustained an unfortunate groin injury
after propositioning the drummer—
a pink haired girl in zebra halter top.

There was also a moment of jealousy
when my companion fell
fascinated in love
with a leather queen
named Boddi Elektrique.
The divine nimbus of the female form, he proclaimed
    in amazement,
wedded to the action and power of the male…

Grabbing his freckled arm, I
assured a miffed Ms. Elektrique that
yes his words were complimentary and
yes she could’ve fooled me.

(Privately got revenge later
by making out with a poet of lesser talent
while Walt was in the bathroom.)

Tired of the East Coast and low on provisions we
    went shopping,
arm in arm at a supermarket in California.
Naturally, we ran into Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady,
just out of hell and trying to be domestic.
We chatted about their new home in P-Town and
graciously declined an offer of mescaline and a four way.

At a poetry slam in San Francisco I
introduced him as a cousin to Dodie B.
and later caught him in the bathroom
peeking at Dennis Cooper
on the other side of the divider.

Faced with expository verse
self-serving metaphor
and the slack-jawed applause of tongue-pierced
    teenagers
Walt didn’t need to be cajoled
into reciting “Whoever You are Holding Me Now
    in Hand.”

The reigning champion, a
heavy girl in black jeans named Rain
(spelled “R-A-Y-N-E”)
was surprisingly fine with losing,
dutifully informed me that she’d “SO do” me if I
    wasn’t gay,
thought it was cool that I hung out with Walt
    Whitman,
and asked us if we knew Poe’s number.

Bivouacing the next afternoon on Newport Beach,
we witnessed no solemn and slow procession
no halting army
save that of surfer boys, comrades to be,
capped in hair gel and highlights (which I patiently
    explained)
and garbed in soft herbages of chest bristle
that sprang forth from breasts
like joyous leaves.
All the while
a pink umbrella grew,
as a lone oak in Louisiana,
behind and above us, as I wondered,

what could I, poet who has come,
do to justify his one or two indicative words?

Leaning over, Walt slipped a ring on my finger, then
    growled:

All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d

Overcome by the passionate surreality of it all
I fell back crying:

“Dear father graybeard! Lonely old courage teacher!
I ride tonight and every night with you,
spooned
in ecstasy
with the evening star on my lips
the thrush warbling in my breast pocket
and lilacs spread across my trembling hand,
inside a wooden box across the open roads of
    sombre America!”

Tim Mayo: Poems from “The Kingdom of Possibilities”


Tim Mayo’s first full-length poetry book, The Kingdom of Possibilities, was published this April by Mayapple Press. It was also a finalist for the May Swenson Award. Mayapple Press is a small press established in 1978 by poet and editor Judith Kerman. Editors say, “We specialize in contemporary literature, especially poetry and works that straddle conventional categories: Great Lakes, women, Caribbean, translations, science fiction poetry, recent immigrant experience, Judaica.” Tim has kindly permitted me to reprint two poems from his collection below. His finalist poem from our 2007 Winning Writers War Poetry Contest can also be read here.

The Wild Boy of Aveyron

         (Paris, 1801)

I named him Victor to vanquish the animal in him.
I tried to teach him to name his own needs,
to have his words rise up from the core
of his body, ball up in his throat, then push out
in well formed vowels quelling the inarticulate.

But all he could gargle out was the word lait
as if somewhere between tongue and throat
the muscles that made his words had lost their way.

Lait became his insistent call for love
and the angry expression to all the words
neither my little briberies of milk nor
my punitions could ever make him say.

Later, I tired and returned to Paris,
but sometimes, in the dark non sequitur
of night, when dreams should take me away,
Victor comes and shakes me. I watch him
press his nose against the window,
confused by its impenetrable glass,

and I see the moon’s milk-glow fracture
down upon his face and the hills, caged
between the mullions, huddling outside.

Then grinning with a feral joy, he pulls
again at my sleeve saying his one word
over and over, until he turns back, and tilting
his head up, he opens his mouth wide and waits
for the moon to pour in…and I fall asleep.

****

The Beautiful Woman

You stare at the jagged tic-tac-toe of her scars
where once a downy peach fuzz grew, and you
    realize
how beauty is an emotion from which desire
    splurges
like a prodigal. How it often burgeons, a sudden
    flower
from a dark and unexpected place where you
    believed
nothing grew.

                   But here…now…the livid white knots
of her skin seem to muscle into purple before your
    eyes
all of that past pain which, to you, is only the
    discomfort
of what you see and the embarrassment of being
    caught
as you imagine the indignities she suffered for
    each mark.

So you glance up at her face hoping she hasn’t
    noticed how
the un-erasable remnants of her past have kept
    you transfixed.
You look into those eyes, dreading the wise, sad
    look back,
the dismissal of it all that will scar you, too, possibly
    for life.

Poetry by Conway: “Flicker Out”


Correspondence with my prison pen pal “Conway” has been irregular this spring because of the ever-shifting regulations that can cause mail to be blocked without warning. His latest letter shows that he continues to take refuge in his art and to help others do the same.

Several of his poems have just been published in “Paper Thin Walls”, a magazine produced by the Artist Pen-Pal Mutual Aid Project. This project is one of the social justice initiatives from the BuildingBloc Arts Collective, which is also sponsoring a touring exhibit of prisoners’ art, titled “Our Dreams Don’t Fit in Your Cages”. From their website:

BuildingBloc is a collective of artists dedicated to using art to explore
the social inequalities in our society. Through experimentation,
collaboration, and performance, we inform, provoke, and inspire ourselves
and our audiences. We aim to spark dialogue, to create and sustain
relationships between artists and community organizations, to support
existing struggles for social justice, and to erase the boundaries between
art and activism.

In a letter I sent Conway in March, I confided my concerns about a friend in trouble, and my frustration that I couldn’t do more to help her: “I wrote a poem about it this morning but poetry is empty compared to taking action in the world. Or is it? Is poetry second-rate action, the last resort of the powerless, or does it create change?”

His response, in this month’s letter:

I believe that as a blossoming poet myself, I can faithfully say that (for sure) each poem that I write. Creates a change in my growth & understanding of this world and even if Nobody ever reads these scratchings that I’ve tried to conceive; painting pictures with words. That at least I have taught myself to define this world in this moment, and basically that is my first duty. To understand my place and to act accordingly with my fellow travelers.

Once more, my long-distance friendship with Conway has brought me back to my core mission. Options are distracting. When there’s no motive for writing except soul-survival, one sees that this is the motive that breathes life into poetry, the one truly essential objective.

Flicker Out
by Conway

When, one jealous Moon
gathered its courage (prepared to die)
refused to share anymore, twilight Sky.

It was a last ditch-
gilded dream
another early, end of things.

Feeling betrayed
by a star’s bright glow
another globe was caught up
before it really could know.

Like a thief contesting desire
lurking through church
to own everlasting fire.

While another Heart, fell from its perch
unclad night slept fulfilled–
nuzzling against the hurdles
of squandered adolescence.

Despite this Roaring avalanche
there was not a sound
or whimpering illusion
to be swept along.

No one to miss
or hear the splendor,
the desperate kiss of dawn.

So; In the mornings mist
among abundant bird’song,
this sacrifice too, was forgotten.

The face of a Soul disgraced
sufferingly stares, beyond vanishing sight
trembling through tonight.

As that once flawless jewel
now shares–
nothing; Nothing at all…

Lesléa Newman: “The Last Supper”


Northampton, Mass. Poet Laureate Lesléa Newman is the author of over 50 books for children and adults. This poem is reprinted with permission from her latest poetry collection, Nobody’s Mother (Port Orchard, Wash.: Orchard House Press, 2009). Read my review here.

The Last Supper

Victor was dying
to go out
one last time
so I yanked
a t-shirt over his head
that said, “I’m Looking for Mr. Right
Away” and rolled
his wheelchair
down the bumpy street
to his favorite place to eat:
a dumpy pizza joint
with a lovely view of the sea.
Our waiter was a prince
and didn’t wince at the sight
of Victor’s frail frame,
be he failed to notice
his sexy shirt and didn’t flirt
with him either. “Something
to drink?” he asked,
all business behind
the safety of his order pad.
“Coke” Victor rasped
and then gasped for breath.
“Regular or Diet?”
That got Victor’s attention.
He raised his phantom eyebrows
straightened his bony shoulders
and cocked his hairless head
as if this was a life
or death decision.
Our waiter waited
wrapped in the banner
of his impossible youth
the truth of which was painful
to see. Victor did not look
away. He took the time
it took to utter his first
complete sentence
of the year. “My dear
boy,” Victor poked
an Ichabod Crane finger
into his own concave chest.
“Do I look like someone
who has anything left
to lose?” Victor croaked
and then choked on a throat
full of phlegm. “Ahem.”
Silence from the boy
toy who might have gone home
with Victor a few years ago
when he was the queen
of Provincetown and ate boys
like this for breakfast.
Dinner was a sad affair:
Try as he might,
Victor couldn’t bite
the slice of pizza I held
to his chapped lips. Small sips
of Coke were all he could manage
and the ride home hurt his hips.
Ships passing in the night
I thought as another man
was pushed toward us
waving from his wheelchair
as though he were floating by
in a gay pride parade. Victor stayed
with us for two more weeks
though he did not speak
or drink again. The End.