Category Archives: Great Poems Online

Poetry Roundup: Smith, Backer, Roeske


Some favorite picks from recent browsing of online journals. I’ve just quoted a few lines of each for copyright reasons; visit the journals’ websites for the whole poem.

Character Study
by Patricia Smith

…He was scarred
by every change I’d made, every strike-through,
cut/paste, backspace, delete, all the unleased
betrayal that roars through prose. I built him
from a knowing of adjectives, piled on detail
and declaration, and now he is overdone, dragging
all that weight and wheezing when he breathes.
The boy patiently loads his pockets with stones,
bottle caps and jagged pieces of glass, waiting
for the moment when the skin of my neck is exposed.
Only 11, he scans me with man eyes and says it,
claiming my nights, advancing the plot in a way
that can’t be undone. He says: Give me a name.

   Read the whole poem, plus an interview with acclaimed performance poet Smith, at Torch, a journal of creative writing by African-American women.

****

The Fourth Nest
by Sara Backer

It hurts to cut an old rose bush
into trash-can pieces,
but the backhoe comes tomorrow
to carve blue lines on paper
into trenches in the ground.
To make a new dream happen,
you must give up the one you’re living in.
…

   Read this poem in the new issue of The Pedestal Magazine.

****

Cold Snap
by Paulette Roeske

In the news, a woman’s frozen to her floor
in the usual attitude of prayer. Taking her
for dead, the medics joke over a joint
while they chip at the ice. Consider
their surprise when she mumbles an invocation
to whatever saint knows firsthand
cold that cuts to the bone.
When he appears, she holds out a hand
she expects to be taken.
The medics, who think she is waving, wave back,
although she has already boarded a ferry
to nowhere they can imagine.
…

   Read this poem at The Diagram.

“This New Armada” by Conway


My correspondent “Conway,” a prisoner at a supermax facility in central California who’s serving 25-to-life under the state’s three-strikes law for receiving stolen goods, reports in his July 13 letter that conditions have improved since his transfer to a new facility. He now has a job as education clerk, grading GED’s, and access to a typewriter and a library of donated books. (Unfortunately, I have no way for readers of this site to send him books without revealing his name and location, which he’s asked me not to do; instead, if you are so moved by this post, donate some quality reading materials to a prison in your area.) Here’s one of his latest poems, written on the back of a news story from several years ago about brutality at Corcoran prison:

This New Armada

I never understood this loss
   till cuffs were locked behind my hands;
I should’ve seen it comin along
   slidin past my hourglass’ sands.
Inside heaped stones, heavy of time
   forever life’s boulders climb
out of reach my memories leach
   reminisce the cloudless sky
clinging to my heart, like a lover apart
   caught in a hurricane’s eye…

Treading the sweating dust, with lust
   after a desert storm,
bringing the singing lightning along
   in its jagged twisted form.
On this unwholesome Armada —
   of prisons, marching across the land
waiting to crush the abandoned souls
   into miniscule grains of sand
These inescapable islands adrift
   dark sentinels of injustices thirst
a land of chain webs-n-mazes
   cunning nets, sworn to catch you first…

High walls with strung wires
   broken strings on an old guitar
reminding the unforgiven alone
   left serenading “The Morning Star”
it is bad when you run away
   “They say” that Razor wire hurts
Those ominous ropes reveal —
   past attempts, you can see
their decomposing crucified shirts…

J.T. Milford: “The Dream Pond”


Sitting on the marshy bank
with maiden cane and water hyacinths
I watch a yellow leaf float
in aimless circles
of stillness
a summer-like stillness

And feel a sudden wind
that moves ripples
across the water
near a willow
a brown-green willow

And without apparent cause, it stops

As I gaze across the pond
I am overtaken by a dream
that the marsh pond is still
when death is near
with feelings of joy and loneliness
A wild sort of reverie
with cormorants, marsh marigold
and dark woods
For a dream star
that sits on the eye of the 
   pond’s light
has awakened me to the 
   possibility
of an early night
a winter’s night
The kind of darkness
which offers no escape

As I am awakened by the changing light
darkness slowly falls upon the still 
   marsh pond
and in a sudden sweep of wind
the willow surrenders its leaves
down to the earth
a sad weeping earth


Read my critique of J.T.’s poem “Under the Arbor” at WinningWriters.com.

Sydney Lea: “Ghost Pain” (excerpt)


This poem from the Winter 2003-04 issue of Image Journal is too long to reprint here, but here is a characteristically lovely excerpt:

A dear friend down south has gone;
his church’s prayer chain couldn’t hold him.
Not this time. People die.

The stars outdoors are sharp as razors,
and Orion the Hunter huge and bold above 
   the river—
as if he could send an arrow flying right 
   through us here.
All manner of things fly through the no-fly zone
elsewhere, the homeless huddle under cardboard,
all the brutal rest, and no, since you inquire,

we can’t account for it. It’s Pearl Harbor Day,
hours of light down to nine, to fewer.
If God be for me, whom then shall I fear?
Easy enough to say, the mockers might say, 
   from in here.
I might be out there among them
were the world not served,

we have to believe, in there being
one more safe tiny place amid the 
   great unsafe.

Read the whole poem here, and visit Image’s artist page on Lea, the editor of the New England Review, here.

Helen Bar-Lev: “Two Zinnias”


Two zinnias in a glazed vase
clipped by nuns’ careful scissors,
are the only decoration in this spartan 
   room
in a convent in Jerusalem
but it is clean, the mattresses comfortable
flagstone floors, yellow- and red-ochre,
have been polished to a gleam by 
   passing shoes
these one hundred years, even more

We have returned to Jerusalem
after an absence of some months –
a jittery city, it is more intolerable 
   than ever
horns constantly honk, faces do not 
   smile
congestion and pollution, agitation,
congregate in its centre
together with beggars,
street musicians, religious Jews, Arabs
an incongruent conglomeration
which beckons in a manner I cannot 
   fathom
and repulses with vengeance,
as though one reaction triggers 
   its opposite,
a contradiction of emotions
that is disturbing considering I 
   lived here
for so long and loved it with passion,
wrote love poems in dedication,
painted its landscapes from every angle
until my ability wilted and the brush
could no longer respond to my commands

So that earlier today when I walked
through this city in the heat of its summer
and watched dusk extinguish the gold 
   from its stones,
I noticed a nostalgia for it – for the 
   once-Jerusalem,
almost expecting the present
to disappear behind a curtain
and lo! enter the Jerusalem of old,
the city I knew and yearned to return to,
smaller, happier, more beautiful

These are my thoughts now, late,
in this sanctuary amidst this city’s insanity,
this secluded quaint convent,
where quail and jay and gay flowers 
   reside,
whose energies are lovely, light,
a place that does not disturb
nor disappoint my memories

While the two zinnias in the vase
blink red and pink
in the heat of the night
and soothe me


Copies of Helen and Johnmichael Simon’s illustrated poetry book Cyclamens and Swords are still available from Ibbetson Street Press. Order yours today.

Elisha Porat: “An Early Call”


      to Aharon Amir

Yes, he recalled also a day of enlightenment:
the imagined skeleton of his future life
suddenly cleaved and he saw
the innards of his life, the innards of his 
   years, the
innards of the innards of himself in a sort 
   of mirror.
Walking in green citrus groves
whistling himself a tune, crying secretly,
remembering words, packing them into 
   his notebook:
collect, compile, convey, repeat. Seeing
his days growing short and his nights 
   becoming petrified.
And from afar, from the hill, a sudden sorrow
pulls him: that time ran out and he did not
finish and did not understand and already 
   he is called.


Read more work by Israeli poet Elisha Porat at Magnapoets.

Poems and Songs by Judith Goldhaber


The sonnet comes as naturally as ordinary speech to poet Judith Goldhaber. I’ve enjoyed her versified retellings of classic fables in the book Sonnets from Aesop, illustrated with charming Chagall-like paintings by her husband Gerson. This YouTube video shows the Oakland Symphony Chorus performing “The Power of Light” from the musical “Falling Through a Hole in the Air: The Incredible Journey of Stephen Hawking” (book and lyrics by Judith Goldhaber, music by Carl Pennypacker). Judith is the lady with dazzling red hair who is standing behind the famous physicist. Here are the lyrics:

The Power of Light

i.
To touch the heart of a star,
To feel the ground of being in the boundless,
The edge of space,
The edge of time,
The edge of eternity…

CHORUS:
Feel the power of light
Feel the depth of the night,
Long is the journey to our distant home,
Worlds spin ‘round us but we’re still alone,
Darkness, silence, and the end so far,
Who will speak to us and tell us where we are?
And then…

Comets and candles,
Starlight and diamonds,
Glimmer and glitter and glisten and gleam,
Torches and campfires,
Lanterns and moonlight,
Showery arrows that shine in our dreams —

Moon in a halo
Shedding your luster
Bathing the earth
In your luminous glow…
Carry me
O carry me higher
Carry me,
O carry me further
Carry me upward
Carry me into the light!

ii.
Feel the power of light
Feel the depth of the night
Now we’re moving toward that distant star
Towards the mystery of who we are,
When we’ll reach it we can never know
The path is dark but now we see the way to go
Lit by…
Prisms and rainbows
Opals and sunbeams,
Crimson and orange and yellow and green,
Fountains of color,
Flashes of fire,
Indigo, violet, and ultramarine.
Light more radiant than the sun and moon
Grant us now the eyes to see!
Carry us, O carry us homewards,
Carry us, O carry us starwards,
Carry us Godwards,
Into the source of the light!


Read more of Judith’s poetry at WinningWriters.com (here and here).

Philip Nikolayev: “Ideers”


Bash’um hard with a hunk o’ lard, cowboy,
when they come ‘ere to seduce our sons and daughters,
the only sons and daughters we have,
with their damn ideers. They think ideers
are worth somethin’ like a Bushel O’Pork
per each. Trahahahaha. They eschew
the feelin’s of patriotism, peals of chivalry
‘n’ private property like. So what does we care
to preserve them as a subspecies? Bein’ ourselves
of solid as rock good local stock
‘n’ rooted in these very hills that we cultivate,
bein’ so local that the mind races over
aeons of banjo-tinklin’ memory of roots
like echoes in the prairied valley, being
precisely that kinda stock, honest blue grass treadin’,
we’re buyin’ none of that Uruguay political correctness.
None, I be tellin’ ya m’s’ladies!
We automatic’ly
put that subspecies under suspicion, zitwere.
The shmuck (pardon me, Sir, me
umbilical vernacular) hadta be tryin’ to
spray us around wi’ hi’ curlture.
He said he be a-dribblin’ learnin’ into our heads
wi’ like critical thinkin’ routines.
But without shittn’ y’uns, I muss hereinafter d’claire
his reasonin’ ta be sorely wrong an’ fallaiches.
In fact, it is beyond fallaiches. Whatever.
Y’uns havin’ troubles hearin’ or somethin’? We been
on this land for gwerk knows how many a century,
from eras immemorable, and we know,
havin’ built these here barns and infrastructure,
we know without prejudice
and in good shape ‘n’ hope ‘n’ faith ‘n’ all
of mind and body like, we know
exact what the heck it cost to keep
the streets of our polity clean,
Partridge and Dingleberry Rock Village Plaza,
positively speakin’ straight narrow clean.
I do repeat, straight narrow clean,
of all yum culturevultures with all yum
cloggin’ dog’s doo an’ piece o’shit ideers.


(Philip was my classmate at Harvard in the 1990s, but despite that early disadvantage in life, he is now the proud editor of Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics and the author of several poetry books including Letters from Aldenderry, from which “Ideers” is reprinted by permission. Visit his MySpace page here.)

“Lonely Tier” and “Flash” by Conway


Here are some new poems by “Conway,” a prisoner at a supermax facility in central California who’s serving 25-to-life under the state’s three-strikes law for receiving stolen goods. In his May 2 letter, he writes that he was recently relocated to a new cell block whose yard has a much-appreciated view of the outside world:

“I have moved to another place and the cages we get to go to for yard for four hours two or sometimes three times a week, are in perfect view of the entrance road to this facility, so we get to see cars trucks and motorcycles drive in and out and there are these trees along the outside perimeter that are shedding these seeds when the wind blows, thousands of little paper flowers searching for a home to grow roots, a very nice change of scenery from being behind the wall for so long. I saw a woman ride by the other day on a bicycle and wrote a poem about her, not sure if you would approve though, kind of racy :)”

Lonely Tier

Each night I sleep on this stony bed
passing me by, is a world in my stead
with the sounds of defiance corrupting our day
encroaching that compliance along the way
this cave made daily being dug so deep
hungry and craving we wander and weep
a concrete tomb constructed by tears
secreted from waves of trembling fears
it flows through those gates of wrath
on the golden coast it reaps this path
for a tear is an indestructible thing
the brilliance in there can make angels sing
But, when it’s reaped with bad intent
that lonely tier breeds wicked sentiment
a tear falls in the wind    blows back to me again
as forgiveness for my sin
returns to me as a priceless gem…

********

Flash

She was bent in half as she rode
peddling fast our sublime sweet dream
time flew past under white garments seen
flashing the hint of something in-between
at the speed unattainable you’d need
to ever accomplish that deed.
   But, we all watched her blast
furtive glances traded as she passed
Those in the know, enjoyed the show
igniting our memory of those
fires down below, shaped right
on desire’s one handlebar.
   Who is that lucky star
who opens that locket
shared in the pocket compared
behind curious door, while garments mingle
tumbled wreckless on carpeted floor.
   Always seeking release
or a little more pleased
as those others teased, so much
wished for just a little touch
offered in a flash…

Prison Poetry by Shrong Clemons


The PBS documentary series NOW ran an episode this week about an innovative program in the Sheridan Correctional Center of Illinois that aims to reduce recidivism by combining therapy, education and follow-up counseling for released convicts. In this video clip, former drug dealer and gang member Shrong Clemons, who became a model prisoner during his 20-month stay at Sheridan, performs three of his poems. Watch the whole episode here.