We asked poets associated with Poetry Matters to share poems that have been on their mind this Poetry Month. For us at Poetry Matters, every month is a celebration of poetry as it speaks to the different moments of our life and the world around us.
Claudia Rankine's
Whatever
contracts keep us social compel us now
to disorder the disorder. Peace. We’re out
to repair the future. There’s an umbrella
by the door, not for yesterday but for the weather
that’s here. I say weather but I mean
a form of governing that deals out death
and names it living. I say weather but I mean
a November that won’t be held off. This time
nothing, no one forgotten. We are here for the storm
that’s storming because what’s taken matters.
Agha Shahid Ali's
The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert
in great sheets, reams
of silver handmade by you.
The night is your cottage industry now,
the day is your brisk emporium.
The world is full of paper.
Write to me.
A translation of Aamir Aziz's by Yukti Saumya
And they live their life, smoke cigarettes for pleasure,
They too enjoy their leisure, these girls of Jamia.
They wear their opinions on their sleeves,
They wear hijabs, too, if they please,
They go into fine detail, these girls of Jamia.
On the pages of history that speak of revolution,
All those who appear are the girls of Jamia
And in the hearts of all the women in the world,
They, too, are the girls of Jamia.
Eunice de Souza's
Keep cats
if you want to learn to cope with
the otherness of lovers.
Otherness is not always neglect —
Cats return to their litter trays
when they need to.
A translation of Amrita Pritam's by D.H. Tracy & Mohan Tracy
Come, let's build a roof over our heads awhile.
Look, further on ahead, there
between truth and falsehood,
there's a little empty space.
Ocean Vuong's
-
[...] But don’t laugh / when these walls collapse / & only sparks / not sparrows / fly out. / When they come / to sift through these cinders—& pluck my tongue, / this fisted rose, / charcoaled & choked / from your gone
- mouth. / Each black petal / blasted / with what’s left / of our laughter. / Laughter ashed / to air / to honey to baby / darling, / look. Look how happy we are / to be no one / & still
- American.
Don McKay's ""
And what sort of noise would
the mind make, if it could, here at the brink?
Scritch, scritch. A claw, a nib, a beak, worrying
its surface. As though, for one second, it could let
the world leak back to the world. Weep.
Pat Lowter's "Coast Range"
Just north of town
the mountains start to talk
back-of-the-head buzz
of high stubbled meadows
minute flowers
moss gravel and clouds
They’re not snobs, these mountains,
they don’t speak Rosicrucian,
they sputter with
billygoat-bearded creeks
bumsliding down
to splat into the sea
They talk with the casual
tongues of water
rising in trees
They’re so humble they’ll let you
blast highways through them
baring their iron and granite
sunset-coloured bones
broken for miles
And nights when
clouds foam on a beach
of clear night sky,
those high slopes creak
in companionable sleep
Move through gray green
aurora of rain
to the bare fact:
The land is bare.
Even the curly opaque Pacific
forest, chilling you full awake
with wet branch-slaps,
is somehow bare
stainless as sunlight:
The land is what’s left
after the failure
of every kind of metaphor.
*
The plainness of first things
trees
gravel
rocks
naive root atom
of philosophy’s first molecule
The mountains reject nothing
but can crack
open your mind
just by being intractably there
Atom: that which can not
be reduced
You can gut them
blast them
to slag
the shapes they’ve made in the sky
cannot be reduced
Ezra Pound's translation of
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me.
I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Chō-fū-Sa.
A translation of Wislawa Szymborska's byĚýStanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.
Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn't feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.
Allen Ginsberg's
I’m with you in Rockland
Ěý Ěýwhere you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I’m with you in Rockland
Ěý Ěýwhere fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I’m with you in Rockland
Ěý Ěýwhere you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I’m with you in Rockland
Ěý Ěýwhere you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I’m with you in Rockland
Ěý Ěýwhere there are twenty five thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I’m with you in Rockland
Ěý Ěýwhere we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep
I’m with you in Rockland
Ěý Ěýwhere we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run
outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free
I’m with you in Rockland
Ěý Ěýin my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
Joseph Kidney's published inĚýDusie
What’s missing is muscle, and there’s so much
missing, you find it hard to comprehend the force
of that jaw. There’s a kind of religion in thinking
about things that have gone away. Take the sun,
for example, stashed away in smoke, its grey
glow cratering the high noon ambiguities, or else
on that florescent Wednesday, a broken yolk
and oozing orange runnily. Temperatures overnight
hit rock bottom and stuck the landing. The fires
kept shovelling scenery into their bellies. I was
reading the poems in which love is a horseman,
spurring with fire and bridling with ice. California
was burning. I was glad I packed sweaters.
Ben Robinson's
the fort this fort was a response to
stares back across the thawing river
a zodiac sits in the mouth
three figures aboard
possibly fishing
possibly agents of the same army
that burned the former capital, creating
the rubble that serves as this fort's foundation
the wind cuts through my throat
sends me back inland
I pack the car and we follow the shoreline home
along the Queen Elizabeth way
"Unlocking" by , published inĚýGrain Magazine
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"Aequora Mundi" by James Dunnigan, published inĚýWine and Fire
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Our sincere thanks to Hillary Muller, Gary Geddes, Sarah Wolfson, George Elliott Clarke, and Anushree Joshi for offering their recommendations.