Poem-A-Day April 23: Two kinds of insects

Haiku

Two kinds of insects
The ones who sing at night
And the ones who don’t

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Today’s haiku is by the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828). Several poets circulated this translation on Twitter, but I don’t know who the original translator is. If you’d like to learn more about what makes a haiku a haiku, please visit the Why “No 5-7-5”? page of the National Haiku Writing Month website.

—Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 22: Beauty is its own excuse for Being

Hello Friends,

For Earth Day, we are going to visit Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1834 — with thanks to my high school English teacher, Mrs. Hackett, for introducing me to this poem. “Beauty is its own excuse for Being” has stuck with me all these years later.

Is there a line from a poem that’s stuck with you since high school or earlier? Or do you have a favorite Earth Day poem?

Enjoy.
Ællen

The Rhodora

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals fallen in the pool
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask; I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.

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Poem-A-Day April 21: Yellow on yellow

Hello Friends,
Today’s poem comes with thanks to Amber and Jeremy, who gave me my copy of The Hurting Kind, Ada Limón’s 2022 collection in which this poem appears.
Enjoy.
Ællen

Invasive

What’s the thin break
inescapable, a sudden thud
on the porch, a phone
vibrating with panic on the night
stand? Bury the broken thinking
in the backyard with the herbs. One
last time, I attempt to snuff out
the fig buttercup, the lesser celandine,
invasive and spreading down
the drainage ditch I call a creek
for a minor pleasure. I can
do nothing. I take the soil in
my clean fingers and to say
I weep is untrue, weep is too
musical a word. I heave
into the soil. You cannot die.
I just came to this life
again, alive in my silent way.
Last night I dreamt I could
only save one person by saying
their name and the exact
time and date. I choose you.
I am trying to kill the fig buttercup
the way I’m supposed to according
to the government website,
but right now there’s a bee on it.
Yellow on yellow, two things
radiating life. I need them both
to go on living.

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Poem-A-Day April 20: 67,000 helpful suggestions

Questions

If there’s one true thing, it’s that
Google will make money off us no matter what.
If we want to know
what percentage of America is white
(as it seems we do)
what percentage of the population is gay
(as it seems we do)
what percentage of the earth is water:
the engine is ready for our desire.
The urgent snow is everywhere
is a line by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and
many have asked, apparently,
where am I right now. Also
when will I die. Do you love me
may be up there, generating
high cost-per-click, but not
as high as how to make pancakes,
what time is it in California.
So many things I wanted to ask you,
now that you’re gone, and your texts
bounce back to me
undeliverable. Praise to
the goddess of the internet search, who returns
with her basket of grain,
67,000 helpful suggestions
to everything we request:
how to solve a Rubik’s Cube,
what to do when you’re bored,
how old is the earth,
how to clear cache,
what animal am I,
why do we dream,
where are you now, come back.

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Today’s poem by Rachel Richardson was first published as part of the Academy of American Poets (poets.org) Poem-a-Day series on June 15, 2018.

Poem-A-Day April 19: the perfection of paper

Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper

At sixteen, I worked after high school hours
at a printing plant
that manufactured legal pads:
Yellow paper
stacked seven feet high
and leaning
as I slipped cardboard
between the pages,
then brushed red glue
up and down the stack.
No gloves: fingertips required
for the perfection of paper,
smoothing the exact rectangle.
Sluggish by 9 PM, the hands
would slide along suddenly sharp paper,
and gather slits thinner than the crevices
of the skin, hidden.
Then the glue would sting,
hands oozing
til both palms burned
at the punchclock.

Ten years later, in law school,
I knew that every legal pad
was glued with the sting of hidden cuts,
that every open lawbook
was a pair of hands
upturned and burning.

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Today’s poem by Martín Espada can be found in his 1993 collection City of Coughing and Dead Radiators.

Poem-A-Day April 18: splendiferously, you

Summer

You are the ice cream sandwich connoisseur of your generation.

Blessed are your floral shorteralls, your deeply pink fanny pack with travel size
     lint roller just in case.

Level of splendiferous in your outfit: 200.

Types of invisible pain stemming from adolescent disasters in classrooms,
     locker rooms, & quite often, Toyota Camrys: at least 10,000.

You are not a jigglypuff, not yet a wigglytuff.

Reporters & fathers call your generation “the worst.”

Which really means “queer kids who could go online & learn that queer
     doesn’t have to mean disaster.”

Or dead.

Instead, queer means, splendiferously, you.

& you means someone who knows that common flavors for ice cream
     sandwiches in Singapore include red bean, yam, & honeydew.

Your powers are great, are growing.

One day you will create an online personality quiz that also freshens the
     breath.

The next day you will tell your father, You were wrong to say that I had to change.

To make me promise I would. To make me promise.

& promise.

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Today’s poem by Chen Chen can be found in his 2022 collection Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency. You can find more poems by Chen Chen at chenchenwrites.com.

—Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 17: Abecedarian

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem by torrin a. greathouse is one of my favorite poetic forms: the abecedarian. Each line of the poem begins with A, B, C, D, E, F, all the way through Z. (Some of the lines are long, so they may appear to wrap onto a second line on your screen.) The poet cites specific inspiration from an abecedarian by Natalie Diaz, “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation.”

torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. She teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. You can find more of her work at torringreathouse.com.

As a reminder, this poem-a-day series is strictly for personal use only; in almost all cases, I do not have poets’ nor poetry publishers’ permission to reproduce their work. For a more official poem-a-day email list, you can always visit the Academy of American Poets (poets.org), the creators and sponsors of National Poetry Month.

Enjoy.
Ællen

Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination Before a Diagnosis Can Be Determined

After Natalie Diaz

Antonym for me a medical
book. Replace all the punctuation—
commas, periods, semicolons—with question marks.
Diagnosis is just apotheosis with sharper
edges. New name for a myth already lived in.
For the sake of thoroughness, I have
given until my veins cratered. Tests administered for:
HIV, cirrhosis, glucose, cancer, creatine, albumin, iron, platelets.
I’ve slept for days, wired to machines. Had my piss filtered for stray proteins
just to be safe. Still, inside my body—
kingdom with poisoned wells. I want anything but an elegy
lining my bones. I just want to be a question this body can answer.
My new doctor writes on referral, then another, still
no guesses. A man in a scowl & lab coat
offers yoga, more painkillers. Suggests
PTSD could be the cause—of chronic pain, my limp, of migraines,
quickened pulse & blood-glittered coughs, of seizures
rattling me inside my skin—O,
syndrome of my perfect & unbroken
transgender arm. They checked my hormones too. Yes.
Unfathomable—a suffering I did not choose. Must be gender, this
vacancy my body makes of its own flesh. How I vanish from myself.
We search for a beginning to this story & find only a history of breakage
X-rays cannot explain. Some girls are not made, but spring from the dirt:
yearling tree already scarred from its branch’s severance.
Zygote of red clay that rain washes into a river of blood.

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Poem-A-Day April 16: Shape of the Invisible

Shape of the Invisible

At dawn
Upon the snow
The delicate imprint
Left by the sleeping body of
The wind.

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Today’s poem by Dudley Randall can be found in his 1971 collection Move to Remember: Poems of Four Decades. I love that the shape of this poem mimmicks the sweep of the wind imprint on snow.

In addition to being a poet, Dudley Randall was also a librarian and the founder of Broadside Press, which published the work of many influential African American writers, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Hayden, Audre Lorde, and Sonia Sanchez.

—Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 15: Everything hurts

Hymn for the Hurting

Everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed and strange,
Minds made muddied and mute.
We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.
And yet none of it is new;
We knew it as home,
As horror,
As heritage.
Even our children
Cannot be children,
Cannot be.

Everything hurts.
It’s a hard time to be alive,
And even harder to stay that way.
We’re burdened to live out these days,
While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.

This alarm is how we know
We must be altered —
That we must differ or die,
That we must triumph or try.
Thus while hate cannot be terminated,
It can be transformed
Into a love that lets us live.

May we not just grieve, but give:
May we not just ache, but act;
May our signed right to bear arms
Never blind our sight from shared harm;
May we choose our children over chaos.
May another innocent never be lost.

Maybe everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed & strange.
But only when everything hurts
May everything change.

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Hello Friends,
Today’s poem by Amanda Gorman appeared in the New York Times on May 27, 2022, a few days after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
—Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 14: Mami Tita once told me

Hello Friends,
Today’s poem by Tatiana Figueroa Ramirez appears in Split This Rock’s The Quarry Social Justice Poetry Database. Content warning: Today’s poem references forced sterilization.
—Ællen

En la Casa de Mami Tita

I wake up to the alarm clocks
of cocks & gallinas struggling
for their corner of the callejón.
Step out
on the preheated concrete.
Stray kittens cross my path.
I evade chicken excretions.
Lizards stand still
as I walk the length of three houses.

A pale jade home smiles at me in the sun
a ramp welcoming me onto her balcón.
I remember her skin as guayaba
with steps signaling the start to her porch.
Her front door is blessed
with the smell of fresh habichuelas.
Open windows & curtains flirt
with the morning breeze.

I enter home & hear
songs of small white houses & jíbaros.
Songs of forgotten writers & my mother’s voices.
Clanking pots & a cucharón serve me a meal
only this home knows.
Metal cups keep water cool.
A ceiling fan fights off mosquitos.
Chanclas gently shuffle over
linoleum covered concrete floors
the start to a tale on the tip of her tongue.

Mami Tita once told me
“You know, they operated on me?
That’s why I only had Teddy, Cuco, & Taty.
After that, I couldn’t have any more kids,
but, at least, it was free & I didn’t die.”
She said this with rice sticking to her lips
& caldo dripping from her bowl.

Outside, cars honk past,
neighbors yell from porch to porch,
& chickens cluck along.
Inside, I spend daylight listening
to songs I’ll never hear again,
tasting food I hope I’ll learn to cook,
& waiting for shuffling chanclas to sit
& tell me a story once more.

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