It seems like we've got a month for everything now, from turkey lovers (June) to Hemochromatosis Screening Awareness Month (July). April is Alcohol Awareness Month, National Autism Awareness Month, Home Improvement Safety Month, Animal Cruelty Prevention Month, National Lawn and Garden Month and National Poetry Month. Like Black History Month, Poetry Month has its detractors for its tendency to ghettoize poetry and give more attention to sponsors and sales than to actual poets. But the truth is, this art form probably wouldn't get any attention at all from most publications — and most people — without having a designated month.
In recognition of National Poetry Month, the Hillsborough County Library hosts Poetry & Jazz, a reading at the Brandon Regional Library Sunday, April 27 at 2:00 p.m. (619 Vonderburg Drive, 813-744-5630). The reading will feature jazz by bassist Michael Ross and saxophonist Jack Wilkins and readings by two well-known poets who live in the area and two up-and-coming poets. Their work is featured on these pages. The reading also presents the winners of the library's Wit Lit Poetry Contest, in which contestants were instructed to write their own humorous poem or a parody of a well-known poem. George M. Jenner won first place for "The Shell Game," a sibilant parody of "She Sells Seashells," and Thomas E. Schott won second place for "He Sawed off the Limb He Was Sitting On," a take off "Jack Be Nimble" and other children's rhymes.
Poetry takes a little more concentration to appreciate than other forms of creative writing, but it doesn't have to be as difficult (or as boring) as your ninth grade teacher may have led you to believe.
Here's a tip: Think of poetry as music, something to be heard more than seen. Read the following poems out loud. Don't worry about what they mean. Just enjoy the feel of the words on your tongue, their sound in your ears. Allow them to evoke images in your mind.—Susan F. Edwards
To work against the light. There is no other reason for coming this
far, this early. To work against the grain. To listen. To rescue the kite cut
loose from its string. To rescue the string when the kite's beyond
you. These are not reasons, but give them time and they will rise like
a small army. To believe that what you know is somehow better off
without you. There's enough here to make your house stand up to
the more ambitious winds of the season. Enough for you to take up your
father's cause, finish the long walk he was on when he slipped into
the white fields of reason. Into the trout stream. Into the music of his
numbers. There's still enough light to make the most of an unfinished
moment, to blur the voices so that the conversation is always
sfumato, each day a witness to the rise and fall of severed
words reconstructing themselves like starfish. Possible sounds emerge
slowly, gathering strength as they approach you like the passerby, years
ago, who asked you for directions to the very spot where he
stopped you, then moved on, occasionally looking over his shoulder at
you looking over your shoulder at him until the night reduced the man
to footsteps, and distance reduced his footsteps to the night you
claim when you remember—but refuse to believe—how dark it was, how
far you walked before you lost him, how long before he found you again.
—Dionisio D. Martínez (originally published in The New Republic)
Immediately after the war we became obsessed with the enemy, lighting
votive candles and filling the pages of our history with the many names
we'd erased. (To this day, most of us think we fought a single thing that
answered to whatever we called it—to distract us, we assume; to keep us
from gathering strength or momentum; to keep in check what little morale
we still had.) There wasn't much to celebrate, but we sacked a handful
of stores, taking home the finest suits, the latest dresses. We carefully put
away our stolen clothes. Even though the ball was postponed, we polished
the dance floor, scrubbed the walls, made sure each painting was hanging
level and at the end of the appropriate beam. The calculations took
decades. By now our clothes were sadly anachronistic and our bodies had
forgotten how to move in them. The day I ripped the sleeves from my
shirts, a box of cufflinks arrived in the mail. Postage due. We didn't know
what to make of such a generous summer, what games to teach our
children, how to invest this sudden wealth of days chasing us the way
the eyes of Rimbaud in nearly every photograph seem to chase some
misguided messenger of silence flying backwards. Even at its clearest
moment, victory was only implied. We fill the trenches with seeds; watch
nothing grow; blame the richness of our failure on the enemy who retreats
without notice, leaves weapons in our hands, and blesses our neglect.
—Dionisio D. Martínez (originally published in Poetry Miscellany)
Migrants
Three in the back of a pick-up:
blonde as butter,
with brown-eyed susan faces;
their mama looking empty as a bucket,
their daddy with his beef jerky arms and tattoos
driving them into the deep
farmland heart.
The littlest can just toddle
through the rows,
the older two have arm muscles
the size of dinner rolls,
strong, broad feet.
They ought to be bending over
a spelling test or doing math
other than how many bushels equals 5 bucks:
tomatoes, cukes, berries, beans,
north in summer, south in winter,
in between
it's back of the truck;
they know what counts:
cold potatoes for supper,
bumpy roads
with me or someone else staring
like a landscape they can't touch.
At the market
I pick out what's firm, what's ripe
and keep my mind on strawberries.
How sweet they will taste with cream.—Gianna Russo
(previously published in The Sun)
Admit
An admit (pronounced ad'mit) is a pass which allows a student back into class after an absence.
Yeah, there's a reason:
four pieces of white bread
wrapped in a napkin
saltines wrapped the same
canned pork and beans in my underwear drawer
a apple in the toe of my boot
raisins under the couch cushion
packet of soup mix in my coat pocket
tea bags in there too
'cause momma don't buy no soda
the only treats is Snickers
I got one of them hid in my pillow
gonna have it tonight
rice tied in a old handkerchief
dried peas and a onion tied
in the foot of a old stocking
(I washed it good)
at the foot of my bed's a potato or two
and that's why
I stayed out
to tuck away something all over that house
'cause once momma goes shopping you
don't know the next time food
will find its way home
and I don't like figuring on groceries
or the remembrance of supper
when the food's long gone
—Gianna Russo
Sleep is a Thin Country on the Horizon
You leave
the way a childless woman leaves
A kind of forgetting, perhaps
a wrong turn
a cloudless sky
a strange town
Your husband's name
on the tip of your tongue
The engine hums
A shoebox full of photographs
an empty notebook
a full tank
This is truth waiting to be named
You are a clean stretch of highway
tires erasing
mile after mile
In the rearview mirror
a dark river opens, turns
its back on dry land
The lonely skyline
history, all begging
to be lost
—Melissa Fair
FUEL
He rubs his lighter
behind your house at midnight
His heart is an oily rag
someone has forgotten
The cobalt air is orange-blossomed, trees
heavy with the weight of a thousand suns
sing, Something round burns
in his open palm
Stars blink their silent dares
do it if you can
Imagine the first lick of flame
kissing the kitchen curtains
Family photos curling
and then gone
The luminous bed
The television's last blue flash
The red cocktail dress
All transformed
Your home no different
than any other
love has burned down
His thumb rubs cool metal
To your neighbor peeking
out her bedroom window
he is a bruised shadow, maybe
your husband thinking
In the quiet of night
he could be any man
thinking
lit with desire
An impulse so simple
it's almost breath
—Melissa Fair
Old Phone Numbers
There are times when God
Shouldn't have granted robed vision.
The men sleeping downtown and old phone numbers
that should've been forgotten but never are,
stand testimony.
Caitlin lived with us during the summer,
the day drank away over a hundred degrees. Through the
stick of humidity and silence of no air conditioning she
told me about the man
on the same corner
everyday
who sang her a song for an offering.
It is always the heart that leads the fingers
to push a sequence of buttons,
that lead to the right voice.
But instead, think of our bodies, strong,
decorated by pigeons
and sight as martyrdom.—Susan Tyler
I.
She is standing in the kitchen
legs apart and sturdy
the A-frame roof of 1936 farmhouse
The heat of Americus Georgia drafting up
red clay thighs
Slicing slicing
the damp meadow flesh
Waiting for bucky to take leave of the railroad
A simpler time
Where love was in cooking and clean sheets
There are drops of sweat kissing their way down her neck
dancing to the tune she hums off key
Meeting at the base
another frame
another cut made into the fruit
The traces of human perspiration leaving a
path for the rosary
hung backwards
Her left shoulder blade, a misshapen wing
bones construed as the shirt factory down the road.
the right, is a bare sky
waiting for the constellations of her life to be born.
and I know the ending of this industrial revolution
I was born from it
the importance here lies in the
waiting
and the sweetness of the avocado
II.
I am playing poker down by the tracks
making bets I know I'll lose
shootin' the shit with the local color
With a house down by the river waiting …
It is your mother I see with her hands together
in the sky
The white of her knuckles uninterrupted
by the same shade of gray your eyes hold
It has been years since I held the memory
of the green skin in my mouth
How I could not bear the taste
still I wanted its soft reminder
of clean sheets
and the melody I too hum off key
With each kiss I steal from you
the rough sandpaper around your chin and cheeks
is the same as the gravel my feet walk backwards
leading to food rations and sweatshops
So, I am on my knees again
the avocado's seeds waking inside
where you too lie
Waiting for the engines to come
And in between the places where your old man
long belly rubs the small of my back in sleep
A solar system is waiting for its moon
—Susan Tyler
This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2003.