Stanley Kunitz

Halley's Comet
by Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006)

Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk
across the board and told us
it was roaring down the storm tracks
of the Milky Way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course
and smashed into the earth
there'd be no school tomorrow.
A red-bearded preacher from the hills
with a wild look in his eyes
stood in the public square
at the playground's edge
proclaiming he was sent by God
to save every one of us,
even the little children.
"Repent, ye sinners!" he shouted,
waving his hand-lettered sign.
At supper I felt sad to think
that it was probably
the last meal I'd share
with my mother and my sisters;
but I felt excited too
and scarcely touched my plate.
So mother scolded me
and sent me early to my room.
The whole family's asleep now
except for me. They never heard me steal
into the stairwell hall and climb
the ladder to the fresh night air.

Look for me, Father, on the roof
of the red brick building
at the foot of Green Street --
that's where we live, you know, on the top floor.
I'm the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on this coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky,
waiting for the world to end.

Appears in the New Yorker, May 29, 2006.

Edward Hirsch

Self Portrait
by Edward Hirsch

I lived between my heart and my head,
like a married couple who can't get along.

I lived between my left arm, which is swift
and sinister, and my right, which is righteous.

I lived between a laugh and a scowl,
and voted against myself, a two-party system.

My left leg dawdled or danced along,
my right cleaved to the straight and narrow.

My left shoulder was like a stripper on vacation,
my right stood upright as a Roman soldier.

Let's just say that my left side was the organ
donor and leave my private parts alone,

but as for my eyes, which are two shades
of brown, well, Dionysus, meet Apollo.

Look at Eve raising her left eyebrow
while Adam puts his right foot down.

No one expected it to survive,
but divorce seemed out of the question.

I suppose my left hand and my right hand
will be clasped over my chest in the coffin

and I'll be reconciled at last,
I'll be whole again.

Special Orders: Poems (Knopf 2008)

Edward Hirsch

A New Theology
by Edward Hirsch

God couldn’t bear their happiness
when He heard them laughing together in the garden.
He caught them kneeling down in the dirt
(or worse) and letting pomegranate juice
run down their faces. He found them
breaking open a fig with fresh delight
as if something crucial had dawned upon them.
I think the whole shebang—the serpent, the apple
with knowledge of good and evil—was a setup
because God couldn’t stand being alone
with His own creation, while Adam and Eve celebrated
as a man and a woman together in Paradise,
exactly like us, love, exactly like us.

Special Orders: Poems (Knopf 2008)

Edward Hirsch

Special Orders
by Edward Hirsch

Give me back my father walking the halls
of Wertheimer Box and Paper Company
with sawdust clinging to his shoes.

Give me back his tape measure and his keys,
his drafting pencil and his order forms;
give me his daydreams on lined paper.

I don’t understand this uncontainable grief.
Whatever you had that never fit,
whatever else you needed, believe me,

my father, who wanted your business,
would squat down at your side
and sketch you a container for it.

Appears in The New York Review of Books, February 9, 2006. Editorial: Would seem to work for the living as well as the dead.

William Matthews

The Four Subjects of Poetry
by William Matthews

1. I went out into the woods today, and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious.
2. We're not getting any younger.
3. It sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey.
4. Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spent, and on what we know not what.

Gehenna

1. The valley of Hinnom, near Jerusalem, where propitiatory sacrifices were made to Moloch. [II Kings 23:10];
2. Hell;
3. Any place of extreme torment or suffering.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/gehenna

Gehenna (also gehenom or gehinom) is the Jewish equivalant to the Christian Purgatory. The name derived from the burning garbage dump near Jerusalem (the Valley of Hinnom), metaphorically identified with the entrance to the underworld. Gehenna is cited in the New Testament and in early Christian writing to represent the place where evil will be destroyed. It lends its name to Islam's hell, Jahannam. In both Rabbinical Jewish and Christian writing, Gehenna as a destination of the wicked is different from Sheol, the abode of all the dead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_Hinnom

encomium / Huguenot / cozen

encomium
Warm praise, especially a formal expression of such praise; a tribute (plural: encomiums or encomia).
Huguenot
A member of the Protestant Reformed Church of France during the 16th and 17th century.
cozen
To cheat; to defraud; to beguile; to deceive, usually by small arts, or in a pitiful way.

limn

1. To draw or paint; delineate.
2. To describe.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/limn

Philip Schultz

The God of Loneliness
by Philip Schultz

It’s a cold Sunday February morning
and I’m one of eight men waiting
for the doors of Toys R Us to open
in a mall on the eastern tip of Long Island.
We’ve come for the Japanese electronic game
that’s so hard to find. Last week, I waited
three hours for a store in Manhattan
to disappoint me. The first today, bundled
in six layers, I stood shivering in the dawn light
reading the new Aeneid translation, which I hid
when the others came, stamping boots
and rubbing gloveless hands, joking about
sacrificing sleep for ungrateful sons. “My boy broke
two front teeth playing hockey,” a man wearing
shorts laughs. “This is his reward.” My sons
will leap into my arms, remember this morning
all their lives. “The game is for my oldest boy,
just back from Iraq,” a man in overalls says
from the back of the line. “He plays these games
in his room all day. I’m not worried, he’ll snap out of it,
he’s earned his rest.” These men fix leaks, lay
foundations for other men’s dreams without complaint.
They’ve been waiting in the cold since Aeneas
founded Rome on rivers of blood. Virgil understood that
death begins and never ends, that it’s the god of loneliness.
Through the window, a clerk shouts, “We’ve only five.”
The others seem not to know what to do with their hands,
tuck them under their arms, or let them hang,
naked and useless. Is it because our hands remember
what they held, the promises they made? I know
exactly when my boys will be old enough for war.
Soon three of us will wait across the street at Target,
because it’s what men do for their sons.
The New Yorker, May 5, 2008
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2008/05/05/080505po_poem_schultz

Jim Hightower

Like daddy, George W. was born on third, but thinks he hit a triple.
October 21, 1989

Alice Walker

...One way of thinking about all this is: It is so bad now that there is no excuse not to relax. From your happy, relaxed state, you can model real success, which is all that so many people in the world really want. They may buy endless cars and houses and furs and gobble up all the attention and space they can manage, or barely manage, but this is because it is not yet clear to them that success is truly an inside job. That it is within the reach of almost everyone.
An Open Letter to Barack Obama, TheRoot.com, Nov. 5, 2008. Thanks, Em.

Andrew Marvell

To His Coy Mistress

by Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shoudst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time's wingéd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

omphaloskepsis

Contemplation of one's navel as an aid to meditation. From the Greek: omphalos (navel) + skepsis. The word has several other forms, such as omphaloskeptic, for someone who engages in navel-gazing, and omphaloskeptical, meaning to be in a self-absorbed state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphaloskepsis (thanks, bri)

lepidopterist / colocynth

lepidopterist
A person who catches and collects, studies, or simply observes lepidopterans, members of an order encompassing moths and the three superfamilies of butterflies, skipper butterflies, and moth-butterflies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepidopterist
colocynth
A viny plant native to the Mediterranean Basin and Asia. It produces a lemon-sized, yellowish, green-mottled, spongy, and extremely bitter fruit, a powerful hepatic stimulant and hydragogue cathartic used as a strong laxative. Also see vine of Sodom.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/colocynth