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Poem In Your Pocket

Celebrate Ohio Poem in Your Pocket Day on Thursday, April 24, 2014, with a poem by an Ohio poet. Meet at the Main Library, 325 Superior Ave., at 12:00 noon to hit the streets and besprinkle downtown Cleveland with poetry.

Poem In Your Pocket

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View and print more poems at www.ohiocenterforthebook.org/pocket, then share them with others anywhere in Ohio. Send us your pictures and stories to [email protected].

Celebrate Ohio Poem in Your Pocket Day on Thursday, April 24, 2014, with a poem by an Ohio poet. Meet at the Main Library, 325 Superior Ave., at 12:00 noon to hit the streets and besprinkle downtown Cleveland with poetry. View and print more poems at www.ohiocenterforthebook.org/pocket, then share them with others anywhere in Ohio. Send us your pictures and stories to [email protected].

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THER’ ain’t no use in all this strife, An’ hurryin’, pell-mell, right thro’ life. I don’t believe in goin’ too fast To see what kind o’ road you’ve passed. It ain’t no mortal kind o’ good, ‘N’ I would n’t hurry ef I could. I like to jest go joggin’ ‘long, To limber up my soul with song; To stop awhile ‘n’ chat the men, ‘N’ drink some cider now an’ then. Do’ want no boss a-standin’ by To see me work; I allus try To do my dooty right straight up, An’ earn what fills my plate an’ cup. An’ ez fur boss, I’ll be my own, I like to jest be let alone, To plough my strip an’ tend my bees, An’ do jest like I doggoned please. My head’s all right, an’ my heart’s meller, But I’m a easy-goin’ feller.

AN EASY-GOIN’ FELLERP A U L L A U R E N C E D U N B A R

AUTUMN’S AUTHORA N D R E W H U D G I N S

In his dissolving mansion, autumn’s author is an exhausted autocrat, dying faster than the falling house is falling. Rainfall, raw and raucous, claws the roof as he dodders down broad halls, rattling knobs inalterably locked.Once all gloss, paunch, and wanton frivolity, he’s now all thought, not somersault or song,and he wonders what those lost enthrallments meant.He knows they weren’t false, though behind the last unlocked knob, a chalk-faced pallbearer coughs

Poem In Your Pocket


Poem In Your Pocket

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I thank thee for thy pleading For the helpless of our race; Long as our hearts are beating In them thou hast a place. I thank thee for thy pleading For the fetter’d and the dumb; The blessing of the perishing Around thy path shall come. I thank thee for the kindly words That grac’d thy pen of fire, And thrilled upon the living chords Of many a heart’s deep lyre.

For the sisters of our race Thou’st nobly done thy part; Thou hast won thyself a place In every human heart. The halo that surrounds thy name Hath reached from shore to shore; But thy best and brightest fame Is the blessing of the poor.

TO MRS. HARRIET BEECHER STOWEF R A N C E S E L L E N W A T K I N S H A R P E R

FOR MY SISTER IN THE RIVERD A N I E L L E D E U L E N I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness (John 1:23)

I was trying to be cruel when I threw the rhododendrons in her hair.It was spring and the petals were sticky, bruised and crimson against her dark hair, but instead of crying she laughed, spun herself into this photograph of a girl dancing in circles so fast her body blurs,her head a deep magenta and earth. My sister is small and strongerthan she looks. In a decade she’ll arrive late at the door, her lip split,eye swollen shut, her baby girl blushed with tears (wound around herlike a delicate vine.) She’ll walk into the kitchen, sit down on linoleum,say I’ll never go back. I’ll want to believe I hear her voice filling withher voice from the river we swam as girls, where we’d take turns beingJohn the Baptist, drenching each other in the muddy tide. Underwater,I could feel my sister’s skinny arms straining to pull me through currents,lift me through the dark surface, press her fingers to my forehead, sayYou’re forgiven. You’re healed. We were too powerless to be prophets.I don’t mean halos appeared above us in the river, or the kitchen was litby anything other than streetlight lost from the roads outside, just that we knew, without psalm or song to guide us, we had to save each other.

Originally published in Lovely Asunder, University of Arkansas Press, 2011.

Poem In Your Pocket


Poem In Your Pocket

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Whoever decides what is lostand what is saved, I’d ask you notto break the smallest bonesjust for the sake of expediency,or the larger ones for spite.When the grey squirrel fallsfrom the wire, or the raccoonmeanders into oncoming traffic,or the wren mistakes cloudsin the plate-glass for sky,I don’t presume to understandyour plan set in place, delicateas any crystal polished to a thread.And when every Spring the crocusunfurls its brilliant blue flag,offering the first nectarto the early-risers, first signof no more winter cold and ice,like any other naked animalwithout feather or fur or shell,I only ask for the opportunityto be amazed and beg for my life.

ANIMAL SOULT I M O T H Y G E I G E R

MIDWESTERN CITIESD A V E L U C A S

You Midwestern cities, you threadbare capitals,lost satellites, will your outskirts never end?Will your suburbs run each other throughand your accents bleed into a slang of silk and husk?Dawn is slipping across the chain-smoking factoriesof Pittsburgh and Cleveland, where the third shiftsleeps off its Yuengling, where pierogi boil and stanch.Wake, Detroit, the morning molts over 10 Mile.Rise, parched Indianapolis; rise, great skyscrapingChicago, the odors of your millions soap the El.Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis,your waters run on. Your congregations hymn,the billboards declare The Second Comingcould come at any second. From anywhere,Akron or Grand Rapids. From Gary, Kenosha, Duluth.

Poem In Your Pocket


Poem In Your Pocket

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The waitress took my order, her writing like chicken tracks.

Was this where I first chose chicken, and then again and again?

And if everything tastes like chicken, haven’t I sampled all?

Cleveland fried bird—I hadn’t heard of the Colonel.

My choice had two syllables, not like beef or veal or fish.

The chicken marched out keeping time with the drumsticks.

Wishing well mash, some gob-morsels of corn.

Two joints, if a leg, moved uneasily on my plate.

Half a bird nests on the table, a bird that won’t sing.

CLARK’S RESTAURANT AND LOUNGE BAR, U.S. RT. 42—5608 PEARL AVENUES U S A N G R I M M

THE POET WAITS WITH EVERYONE ELSE FOR THE MEAN STREAK AT CEDAR POINT F R A N K G I A M P I E T R O

rain fell our chewing gum stuck said if we are struck let’s be gum not dipping dotsno matterno matter howno matter how weirdthe snake tattoo still winds around how many armsno matter how many colors we dye our red beard we are still not talentednor beautiful nor young not for long not for this long

Poem In Your Pocket


Poem In Your Pocket

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Her father would always be a story. A plantless zone at the bottom of a lake:

Aphytal -- . But she’s never really seen one. She wonders if fathers are to blame for the lack of vegetation. A man can’t die and not leave a note on how to keep the garden growing.

Her mother tells her that he loved the huskiness in Billie’s voice. He’d come home from work, hold his gin in one hand,

lady day. lady day. lady day. The swaying of his head is a mantra of jazz, held tight in the rain outside.

She tells her that he hated the dry season. The harmattan dust triggered his aunt’s epilepsy. So she tries to hate these summers but they aren’t the same. These summers

that wear floral dresses with doc martens.

Strange Fruit sounds like grandma talking but somehow it’s Papa. The seeds in her papaya remind her of her father’s childhood.

He was a papaya tree climber, a papaya fruit eater. Persephone. Persephone. Persephone,stuck in an underworld.

She wishes for anemophily...wind pollination for the little black seeds. This strange fruit. She wants to climb like her father and tell him it’s okay.

Her mother tells her that he never sang his blues. Her preferred the color of light in his mouth: the way Casablanca lilies bloomed only in the night.

“The Physics of Losing a Father” is reprinted by permission from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.

THE PHYSICS OF LOSING A FATHERS O J O U R N E R A H E B E E

TREEJ I L L B I A L O S K Y

Look at the solid tree dug into earththrough eternity grandly observing the world from the perch of its highest bloom.Would we not all desire to end our daysat this height, happy to sway, to not judgethe way things come and go. No longer dependent upon this one or that.What would it be like to be without thought? To feel wind slash the throat? To be empty of all memory. To be without love or regret or ego? To never suffer the grief of others? Or would our days be long, nights restless with only a simple bandto mark the significance of our passage?

from The Players, forthcoming from Knopf in January 2015

Poem In Your Pocket


Poem In Your Pocket

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Know me? I am the ghost of Gansevoort Pier. Out of the Trucks, beside the garbage scow where rotten pilings form a sort of prow,I loom, your practiced shadow, waiting here

for celebrants who cease to come my way, though mine were limbs as versatile as theirs and eyes as vagrant. Odd that no one caresto ogle me now where I, as ever, lay

myself out, all my assets and then some, weather permitting. Is my voice so faint? Can’t you hear me over the river’s complaint?Too dark to see me? Have you all become

ghosts? What earthly good is that? I want incarnate lovers hungry for my parts, longing hands and long-since lonely hearts!It is your living bodies I must haunt,

and while the Hudson lugs its burdens past, having no hosts to welcome or repel disclosures of the kind I do so well,I with the other ghosts am laid at last.

From The New Yorker, August 9, 1993

AMONG THE MISSINGR I C H A R D H O W A R D

THE BALLAD OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., 1963

Ten thousands join ten thousands Without goading police.The singers sing, their anthems ring, The speakers say their piece.

Around the world astonishment – The ceremonies heardOr seen on every continent, And still to come: The Word.

Spectators waving handkerchiefs, Small children, hearts to seize,Will tell it taller years from now, Grandchildren at their knees.

Blue sunshine worships morning, No cloud would dare to rainFor in his jacket mercy And in his pocket pain.

Equality his brother And sisterhood his prideMeet common sense, nonviolence, The means he’s deified.

The afternoon is dying down, The Reverend takes the stage.George Washington spreads out the book, Abe Lincoln turns the page.

He reads his notes religiously, An old familiar theme.“But please, Martin,” Mahalia yells, “Tell ‘em about the dream!”

And first he puts away his speech Then sweeps away the crowd:The memory of his remarks Peals like a thundercloud.

“The content of our character” Personifies a sage.One day in 1963 Belongs to every age.

J . P A T R I C K L E W I S

Poem In Your Pocket


Poem In Your Pocket

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The tiny womenmuster green, leaf

They do not celebrate more

They will not hill or pillow

The tiny women slipunder doors, windowwalls, disturb

They forage time, rest at attention, stirup stalled airTogether, they lift

dust, ashes, build

In breaks they see through(there there)

The tiny women do not walk on air

They tread light

TINY WOMENM A R T H A C O L L I N S

first published in Massachusetts Review

SUMMER PLANNINGM A R K H A L L I D A Y

My father and I on the sofa talked about summer plans,would he drive from New York to Ohio?It seemed doubtful (he was eighty-six)and he said We’ll see what comes to pass.For a minute we were silent.He said, That’s an interesting idiom, isn’t it.To come to pass. “It came to pass.”There’s a feeling of both coming and goingat the same time.Yeah, I said. I wondered what movie we might see.He said, It’s quite different to say “It happened” –that sounds like a stop, like a fixed point.But “It came to pass” – there’s almost a feeling of“It came in order to pass.”Yeah, I said, that’s right.He said, You get a sense of the transience of everything.Yes, I said.Cleo the black cat lay snoozing across my father’s legs.My father stroked her gently.I finished my raspberry iced tea.

from Jab, University of Chicago Press, 2002

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