Forest Whitaker by Brother Ali

Dependin' on the day, and dependin' on what I ate
I'm anywhere from twenty to thirty-five pounds overweight
I got red eyes and one of them's lazy
And they both squint when the sun shines so I look crazy
I'm albino, man, I know I'm pink and pale
And I'm hairy as hell, everywhere but fingernails

I shave a cranium that ain't quite shaped right
Face type, shiny, I stay up and write late nights
My wardrobe is jeans and faded shirts
A mixture of what I like and what I wear to work

I'm not mean and got a neck full of razor bumps
I'm not the classic profile of what the ladies want
You might think I'm depressed as can be
But when I look in the mirror I see sexy-ass me

And if that's somethin that you can't respect then that's peace
My life's better without you, actually
To everyone out there, who's a little different
I say damn a magazine, these is God's fingerprints
You can call me ugly but can't take nothing from me
I am what I am, doctor, you ain't gotta love me
I'ma be all right
You ain't gotta be my friend tonight
And I'ma be okay
You would probably bore me anyway
I'ma be all right
You ain't gotta be my friend tonight
And I'ma be okay
You would probably bore me anyway

Small Kindnesses by Danusha Lameris

  

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.  We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

He estado pensando en el camino, cuando caminas  por un pasillo lleno de gente, la gente tira de sus piernas para dejarte pasar. O cómo los extraños todavía dicen "te bendigo" cuando alguien estornuda, un sobrante de la peste bubónica. "No te mueras", decimos.  Y a veces, cuando derramas limones de tu bolsa  de supermercado, alguien más te ayudará a recogerlos. Sobre todo, no queremos hacernos daño el uno al otro.  Queremos que nos entreguen nuestra taza de café caliente  y agradecerle a la persona que la entrega. Sonreírles y que les devuelvan la sonrisa. Para que la camarera nos llame cariño cuando deja el tazón de sopa de almejas, y para que el conductor de la camioneta roja nos deje pasar. Ahora tenemos muy poco el uno del otro. Tan lejos de la tribu y el fuego.  Solo estos breves momentos de intercambio.  ¿Qué pasa si son la verdadera morada de los santos, estos templos fugaces que hacemos juntos cuando decimos: "Aquí, toma asiento", "Adelante, tú primero", "Me gusta tu sombrero".

Fireworks By Babette Deutsch

Not guns, not thunder, but a flutter of clouded drums
That announce a fiesta: abruptly, fiery needles
Circumscribe on the night boundless chrysanthemums.
Softly, they break apart, they flake away, where
Darkness, on a svelte hiss, swallows them.
Delicate brilliance: a bellflower opens, fades,
In a sprinkle of falling stars.
Night absorbs them
With the sponge of her silence.

“Intro to Poetry” by Billy Collins

 

“Intro to Poetry” by Billy Collins

"Introducción a la poesía" por Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

Les pido que tomen un poema y sostenlo a la luz como una diapositiva de color o presione una oreja contra su colmena. Digo soltar un ratón en un poema y mire cómo él busca su camino, o caminar dentro de la habitación del poema y siente las paredes por un interruptor de luz. Los quiero a waterski a través de la superficie de un poema saludando al nombre del autor en la orilla. Pero todo lo que quieren hacer está vinculado el poema a una silla con cuerda y torturar una confesión de ello. Comienzan a golpearlo con una manguera para descubrir lo que realmente significa.

Country by Billy Collins

I wondered about you
when you told me never, to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a.cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time—-

now a fire-starter, now a torch-bearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what was once your house in the country?

Refrigerator, 1957 by Thomas Lux

More like a vault — you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company, ajar
of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,
the only foreign word 1 knew. Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
on a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.
The same jar there through an entire
childhood of dull dinners - bald meat,
pocked peas and, see above,
boiled potatoes. Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child's?
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

The People of the Other Village

The People of The Other Village
hate the people of this village
and would nail our hats
to our heads for refusing in their presence to remove them
or staple our hands to our foreheads
for refusing to salute them
if we did not hurt them first: mail them packages of rats,
mix their flour at night with broken glass.

We do this, they do that.

They peel the larynx from one of our brothers' throats.
We devein one of their sisters.
The quicksand pits they built were good.
Our amputation teams were better.
We trained some birds to steal their wheat.
They sent to us exploding ambassadors of peace.

They do this, we do that.

We canceled our sheep imports.
They no longer bought our blankets.
We mocked their greatest poet
and when that had no effect
we parodied the way they dance
which did cause pain, so they, in turn, said our God
was leprous, hairless.

We do this, they do that.

Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand (10,000) brutal, beautiful years.