“breakings” by henry taylor

Long before I first left home, my father
tried to teach me horses, land, and sky,
to show me how his kind of work was done.
I studied how to be my father’s son,
but all I learned was, when the wicked die,
they ride combines through barley forever.

Every summer I hated my father
as I drove hot horses through the dusty grass;
and so I broke with him, and left the farm
for other work, where unfamiliar weather
broke on my head an unexpected storm
and things I had not studied came to pass.

So nothing changes, nothing stays the same,
and I have returned from a broken home
alone, to ask for a job breaking horses.
I watch a colt on a long line making
tracks in dust, and think of the kinds of breakings
there are, and the kinds of restraining forces.

- Henry Taylor

poems on the underground

Reader John Heyderman recently tipped me off to a project I think is one of the coolest I’ve heard of: Poems on the Underground, founded by Judith Chernaik and sponsored by the London Underground, is a program designed to expose wide-ranging audiences to, well, poems. The Underground donates advertising space, and Chernaik, Cicely Herbert, and Gerard Benson select rotating sets of poetry both classic and emergent to be displayed throughout the system. You can view a selection from the project’s archive, from William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney, here, and head over to the London Transport Museum Shop to buy posters or books of the poems. Again, thanks to John for pointing it out.

“buying rations in kabul” by eliza griswold

The Uzbek boys on Chicken Street
have never had enough to eat.
They stock from shelf to shining shelf
these G.I. meals, which boil themselves
in added water (bottled, please).
In twenty minutes, processed cheese
on jambalaya, followed by
a peanut-butter jamboree.

The boys, polite,
advise on which we might prefer —
beef teriyaki, turkey blight —
and thank us twice for bringing peace
as, meals in hand, we leave the store.
Of course they know that any peace
that must be kept by force
contains another name. It’s war.

- Eliza Griswold

“flying at night” by ted kooser

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

- Ted Kooser

“this web” by howard levy

You knew how things open,
a flower, a jail, an eye,
and at the very last, a hand.

It is already evening when the hand
opens. The streetlights have come on,
people absorbed into their coats
and scarves hurrying along the street.
No one speaks, not many even
look around them, they spare themselves
the torments of community.

In a small restaurant off the Central Square,
the first diners of the evening have entered.
A waiter who only this morning dreamed
of the exhaustion of his charity rises.
As he stands over them, you write —
their hands poised to eat, his poised
to serve, the cook’s to cook —

this intimate whisper of revelation:
this web of hands.

- Howard Levy

“god says yes to me” by kaylin haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

- Kaylin Haught

“monet refuses the operation” by lisa mueller

Doctor, you say there are no halos
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors; fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

- Lisa Mueller

“the station” by tomas tranströmer

A train has rolled in. Carriage after carriage stands,
but no doors open, no one gets off or on.
Are there no doors to be found at all? In there it is crowded
with locked-in people who are moving to and fro.
They are staring out through the immovable windows.
And outside a man goes along the train with a hammer.
He strikes on the wheels, which toll faintly. Except right here!
Here the ringing swells incomprehensibly: a thunderclap,
a cathedral-bells-sound, a world-circumnavigating-sound,
that lifts the whole train and the neighborhood’s wet stones.
Everything is singing. You will remember this. Proceed!

- Tomas Tranströmer, trans. John F. Deane