Dream Journal (Monday Poem)

 

By Kareem Tayyar

 

If you’re swimming
then you have lost something important.

If you’re flying
then your heart’s been broken.

If you sit at a table before a deck of cards
then you are afraid of getting older.

If you undress beneath a single spotlight
then you are about to commit a crime.

If you are singing while holding a Spanish guitar
then someone you know has passed away.

If you are preparing to leap from a balcony
then you are mourning the loss of your childhood.

If you place your lips to the breast of a cloud
then you have forgotten to say your prayers.

If you run three red lights in a row
then there is a lesson you still haven’t learned.

If you pull water from an old well
then your father is preparing to call you long distance.

If you hear music playing from another house on your street
then your sister is about to come back from the dead.

If you cup your hands as a hard rain begins
then you are days away from falling in love.

If you find that you cannot run when you want to
then there is a book that you need to reread.

If you awaken in a field of strawberries
then a long  journey awaits you.

If you eat the strawberries
then you won’t be going alone.

from Poetry, January 2022

Double Dutch (Monday Poem)

 

By Gregory Pardlo

 

The girls turning double-dutch

bob & weave like boxers pulling

punches, shadowing each other,

sparring across the slack cord

casting parabolas in the air. They

whip quick as an infant’s pulse

and the jumper, before she

enters the winking, nods in time

as if she has a notion to share,

waiting her chance to speak. But she’s

anticipating the upbeat

like a bandleader counting off

the tune they are about to swing into.

The jumper stair-steps into mid-air

as if she’s jumping rope in low-gravity,

training for a lunar mission. Airborne a moment

long enough to fit a second thought in,

she looks caught in the mouth bones of a fish

as she flutter-floats into motion

like a figure in a stack of time-lapse photos

thumbed alive. Once inside,

the bells tied to her shoestrings rouse the gods

who’ve lain in the dust since the Dutch

acquired Manhattan. How she dances

patterns like a dust-heavy bee retracing

its travels in scale before the hive. How

the whole stunning contraption of girl and rope

slaps and scoops like a paddle boat.

Her misted skin arranges the light

with each adjustment and flex. Now heather-

hued, now sheen, light listing on the fulcrum

of a wrist and the bare jutted joints of elbow

and knee, and the faceted surfaces of muscle,

surfaces fracturing and reforming

like a sun-tickled sleeve of running water.

She makes jewelry of herself and garlands

the ground with shadows.


 

 

 from Totem, by Gregory Pardlo. 

The American Poetry Review, 2007

At the Airport Security Checkpoint (Monday Poem)

 

By Claudia Rankine

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked to drink from my water bottle.

                   This water bottle?

                   That's right. Open it and drink from it.

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked to take off my shoes.

                   Take off my shoes?

                   Yes. Both Please.

At the airport-security checkpoint on my way to visit my grandmother, I am asked if I have a fever.

                   A fever? Really?

                  Yes. Really.

 My grandmother is in a nursing home. It's not bad. It doesn't smell like pee. It doesn't smell like anything. When I go to see her, as I walk through the hall past the common room and the nurses' station, old person after old person puts out his or her hand to me. Steven, one says. Ann, another calls. It's like being in a third-world country, but instead of food or money you are what is wanted, your company. In third-world coun­tries I have felt overwhelmingly American, calcium-rich, privileged, and white. Here, I feel young, lucky, and sad. Sad is one of those words that has given up its life for our country, it's been a martyr for the American dream, it's been neutralized, co-opted by our culture to suggest a tinge of discomfort that lasts the time it takes for this and then for that to happen, the time it takes to change a channel. But sadness is real because once it meant something real. It meant dignified, grave; it meant trustworthy; it meant exceptionally bad, deplor­able, shameful; it meant massive, weighty, forming a compact body; it meant falling heavily; and it meant of a color: dark. It meant dark in color, to darken. It meant me. I felt sad.

from Don't Let Me Be Lonely, by Claudia Rankine

Graywolf Press, 2004

1988 Sabbath IV (Monday Poem)

by Wendell Berry

 

The world of machines is running

Beyond the world of trees

Where only a leaf is turning

In a small high breeze.

 

 

from This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems, by Wendell Berry

Counterpoint, 2013 

 

 

This Morning (Monday Poem)

 by Mary Oliver

This morning the redbirds' eggs

have hatched and already the chicks

are chirping for food. They don't

know where it's coming from, they

just keep shouting, "More! More!"

As to anything else, they haven't

had a single thought. Their eyes

haven't yet opened, they know nothing

about the sky that's waiting. Or

the thousands, millions of trees.

They don't even know they have wings.

And just like that, like a simple

neighborhood event, a miracle is

taking place.

from Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, by Mary Oliver

Penguin Press, 2019