Poetry of the Week
Shewolf
What luminary essence lifts my pen to breathe again,
tongue to drip,
beyond the wave of man and kingdom,
friendship,
come to drum the beat of Nature
in she-wolf,
howling closer canyon.
She will always blow in winter,
distant noise caressing moon,
calling pack to gather poetry
in worlds of river, flowing spirit.
Soul of fur, circle round me,
in wiser wave of rustic embrace,
Maine’s lost face,
syllabic alpha, panting education,
you are huntress,
a wilder creature holding secret,
to bare my witness in feeble manifestation,
raising limb in wistful progress
to know its place in herd of hunted.
Invite me now to join your following,
crying lunar lungs to open,
for I am grateful line of star shine,
when night is right
to grow in wisdom,
this silver solitude, exploding,
to feed this ache of earth eroding.
© Kaibab at Allpoetry http://allpoetry.com/kaibab
Knowing A Kaibab’s Keening
Creative spirits conceived of shooting stars,
womb-taught language of this earth
and music of words, phrases, stanzas;
his cells remembered hearing
heavenly verses and images
strung on lines that leaned onto each other
like best friends, like lovers, like soul mates’
breaths that were layered upon him before he breeched
waves of unqualified time between there and earth.
There is sunlight in his poetry; a greening of thoughts
that spring from near-dead trees that lean hard
towards heaven and wait for a dew-drop of his design
to soften her tough skin.
There are luminaries on dark nights;
pinpricks of hope, scattered on black velvet
provoking a poem of passion about how moon-sighs
move the earth…and me.
Sands of desert are shaped into lines of beauty;
olive oil, honey and slow wine of his study
waken taste buds for truth and testaments.
I am a forest, a plain, a rolling hill of refinement
when riding a frenzy of his writing about how lovely
a billowing dust storm can be when taken to task
by his pen that journeys a thousand thousand nights
to reach that exact moment when what is shaped
In his mind is scrolled to its end line.
He is sound of water; lake, stream, river,
ocean lapping at salient shores for new ways
to define themselves at his tutelage.
Oh, Kaibab, what wisdom flows from your fingertips
is but a drop in seas of silent coaching
Creator bent your hand to. We are your students,
your mentors, your friends, who hang on to your thoughts
as if they were the last lines attached to heaven ;
the very strands of light that nourish us
and cause us to put our own insignificant etchings
at your feet and ask that you consider them
poor as they are, as tokens of our gratitude
for teaching us the sounds of things we may have missed
while scratching our thin thoughts on tarnished paper.
©Carol Desjarlais
Real Poet
Staring at a page, blank of all except the word “TITLE”
and that meticulous calligraphy my best writing in weeks,
I try to find words in this perfect square, four walls
lined ceiling to floor with shelves filled with books
of poems, and books about poems, and books about what the really smart people
think about poets and poems.
Time taunts, but the sheet stares back at me, more blank
than that lonely feeling I get anymore, each time I hear
a hymn or a church bell toll; burns hotter than hands reaching in
to sneak out a piece of Sunday roast before supper.
Hands have closed calloused around my pen. Poet eyes
are long too dim to search out that face–
the visage that first shoved words into my soul
until it was so full up that fingers ached from squeezing
them out again–the face of the scrawny little Blackfoot girl, so bent
on tasting mud through every pore, that essence matted into her hair in clumps
as she rolled about in the bank of Otatso Creek,
daring Old Chief Mountain to lean further down to scold her poem,
knowing by his sloping grin he never would.
Page still empty,
the sun resurrects and glares through my library
blinds; settles again like dust on Eliot’s The Waste Land,
catalogued there, by some gross mistake, upon the shelf of books
with my name on the spine, behind an ornately framed
piece of paper also bearing my name, deeding the shelf
to me.
In that moment, I realize, the girl is now grown
and has my words tied up loosely in an old red bandanna
dangling out of her back pocket. But at least I know
she is still running–letting them slip out on the wind
and never, ever trading them for deadlines of a publisher.
©ten thousand cicadas http://allpoetry.com/ten%20thousand%20cicadas
Bruised But Bent To Paper ©Carol Desjarlais
While real poets were pouring pale-skinned sonnets
over smooth paper, I was skinning my brown knees
on my mother’s prayers. While they wrote
long letters to wise professors, and waited for replies,
I was rolling in green grass, watching clouds
take flying lazy leaps off Old Chief Mountain.
When their fingers were stained with ink,
mine were busy molding clay in half-dry river banks.
I was transcribing songs of birds while they practiced
perfecting their calligraphy. I lay sweating in shadows
of leaves, trying to see if God was peering through
woven branches and they were whittling words
to thrum of church hymns. Diverted passions pulsed
like water surged from a fresh spring, on my father’s ranch,
and phrases muddied my body as if I had rolled in them.
They drank from fountains of bookish breasts
their mothers placed before them like a fine Sunday meal.
They weakened in glare of God’s staring face,
while I grew strong and tan and tendered
by running through sprinklers on Sunday’s lawn.
I may never be a real poet, but I know what poetry feels like
when it skates on a pond. I know how a fine poem,
about horse sweat and cow manure, can fling me
into orgasmic ecstasy in remembrance of a rancher I loved.
I can wake in dark night and pen a poem about how it sounds
when a house breathes about death lying next door.
I can tell you, I would rather die, myself, than trade
a beating for a violin bow when my song might just be lovelier
because I know how to print bruises on paper.
