PROFILE
Your framed profile sits beneath
a bunch of tightly shut anemones.
By the time they blossom
you will lie beside another.
Bloody purples, pinks and reds—
even virgin whites—
will trumpet your
betrayal.
All attempts to hold you
or to leave you have failed.
I watch the tender petals spread
raining spores upon your photo.
Each reveals a layered center,
each one brilliant,
each distinct.
Baseball Bards
No, that is not a typo, it really does say Baseball Bards, not Cards.
Turns out I wasn’t so off the wall when I paired baseballers and poets as Uncommon Laborers on Labor Day. A few of these guys write poetry, and a few more of them read it.
Below, a few highlights from Bards of [...]
Writing about Michael Jackson and We Are the World yesterday, I wanted to post the second poem below, but since it makes more sense with the first one, I waited to post them together.
The Peddlers I
All that midtown weekend
when I walked
from hotel room
to tobacconist
to hotel room
to cafeteria
young black men
tried to sell me sunglasses.
From 34th to [...]
Five Mornings With and Without the Moon in Santa Cruz
1.
Morning moon winks through the trees.
Hummingbirds disturbed
by smoky air abandon me.
2.
Silver ceiling sky covers
full moon hiding as
clouds mushroom far too quickly.
3.
Relentless gray clouds hide her
from view—a loss much
too soon. She rides with my dead.
4.
Morning moon shrouded in fog.
She hovers so high
you would think it was midnight.
5.
Gone [...]
I thought this poem that I wrote c. 1982 was outdated, but unfortunately, today’s news about a plan to bomb synagogues in the Bronx, where I was born, made me think of it again.
A Failure of Imagination
Like John Lennon
I imagined no religion.
I dreamed of a world
free of polarity
where spirituality
replaced secularism
and I was annoyed when radicals
embraced [...]
Hard to believe, but the United Kingdom just named the first female Poet Laureate, after almost 400 years of male poets holding the post. I guess we’ve finally arrived–you can’t get much higher than Poet Laureate, right? Hey, it pays around five thousand pounds a year, in exchange for which she has to write odes [...]
As a daughter I was always leaving.
Then I became a mother and I learned you can’t leave, but you have to let go.
You have to be there like a rock letting go.
I had to let my babies out when it was time. For nine months my body held another, the most perfect union I‘d known, [...]
Regular readers may recall that last year I wrote new lyrics to old tunes, one for each Yankee player. Below are a few more, written for new players, plus one for Melky Cabrera, for whom I never came up with anything last season. Also, Robinson Cano’s song has been changed from “Anything you can do [...]
