The Weary Blues         (Langston Hughes.   1902-1967)

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,

   I heard a Negro play.

Down on Lenox Avenue the other night

By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light

   He did a lazy sway...

   He did a lazy sway...

To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.

With his ebony hand so n each ivory key

He made that poor piano moan with melody.

   O Blues!

Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool

He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.

   Sweet Blues!

Coming from a black man’s soul.

   O Blues!

In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone

I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan-

   “Ain’t got nobody in all this world.

   Ain’t got nobody but ma self.

   I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’

   And put ma troubles on the shelf.”

Thump, thump. Thump, went his foot on the floor.

He played a few chords then he sang some more-

   “I got the Weary Blues

   And I can’t be satisfied.

   Got the Weary Blues

   And can’t be satisfied-

   I ain’t happy no mo’

   And I wish that I had died.”

And far into the night he crooned that tune.

The stars went out and so did the moon.

The singer stopped playing and went to be

While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.

He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

                                                (1925, 1926)

The Negro Speaks of Rivers   (Langston Hughes)

I've known rivers:

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

Flood of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the Pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

   Went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy

   Bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

                                                (1921-1926)

We Real Cool                (Gwendolyn Brooks. 1917-     )

                The pool players.

                Seven at the Golden Shovel

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

                1960

SESTINA        (Elizabeth Bishop)

September rain falls in the house.

In the failing light, the old grandmother

Sits in the kitchen with the child

Beside the Little Marvel Stove,

Reading the jokes from the almanac,

Laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears

And the rain that beats on the roof of the house

Were both foretold by the almanac,

But only known to a grandmother.

The iron kettle sings on the stove.

She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child

Is watching the teakettle's small hard tears

Dance like mad on the hot black stove,

The way the rain must dance on the house.

Tidying up, the old grandmother

Hangs up the clever almanac

On its string. Birdlike, the almanac

Hovers half open above the child,

Hovers above the old grand mother

And her teacup full of dark brown tears.

She shivers and says she thinks the house

Feels chilly, and puts more wood on the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.

I know what I know, says that almanac.

With crayons the child draws a rigid house

And a winding pathway. Then the child

Puts a man with buttons like tears

And shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother

Busies herself about the stove,

The little moons fall down like tears

From between the pages of the almanac

Into the flower bed the child

Has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.

The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove

And the child draws another inscrutable house.

Sestina: 39 lines of any length, divided into six sestets and a three-line concluding "envoy." The six words at the end of the first six-line stanza must be repeated in the other sestets as well; and in the "envoy", where they often resonate important themes. This form originated in the Middle Ages.

Justice Denied in Massachusetts *                (Edna St. Vincent Millay. 1892-1950)

Let us abandon then our gardens and go home

And sit in the sitting-room.

Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud?

Sour to the fruitful seed

Is the cold earth under this cloud,

Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot conquer;

We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.

Let us go home, and sit in the sitting-room.

Not in our day

Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before,

Beneficent upon us

Out of the glittering bay,

And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea

Moving the blades of corn

With a peaceful sound.

Forlorn, forlorn,

Stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow.

And the petals drop to the ground,

Leaving the tree unfruited.

The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed uprooted-

We shall not feel it again.

We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.

What from the splendid dead

We have inherited-

Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued-

See now the slug and the mildew plunder.

Evil does overwhelm

The larkspur and the corn;

We have seen them go under.

Let us sit here, sit still,

Here in the sitting-room until we die;

At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;

Leaving to our children’s children this beautiful doorway,

And this elm,

And a blighted earth to till

With a broken hoe.

                                                        1928

* Referring to the execution, on August 23, 1927, of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, after nearly seven years of litigation. Many liberals rallied to their defense, claiming that these two “radicals” had not been proved guilty of the payroll robbery and murder for which they were convicted, but were victims of a hysterical conservative reaction.

America                (Allen Ginsberg. 1926- 199 )

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.

I can’t stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

I don’t feel good don’t bother me.

I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskytes?^[1]

America why are your libraries full of tears?

America when will you send your eggs to India?

I’m sick of your insane demands.

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.

Your machinery is too much for me.

You made me want to be a saint.

There must be some other way to settle this argument.

Burroughs^[2] is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.

Are you being sinister or is this some kind of practical joke?

I’m trying to come the point.

I refuse to give up by obsession.

America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.

America the plum blossoms are falling.

I havent’ read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.

America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.^[3]

America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.

I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.

When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.

My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.

You should have seen me reading Marx.

My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.

I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.

I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.

America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.

I’m addressing you.

Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?

I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.

I read it every week.

Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.

I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.

It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers

        are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.

It occurs to me that I am America.

I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.

I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.

I’d better consider my national resources.

My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable

        private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental

        institutions.

 I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in my

        flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.

I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.

My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individuals as his automobiles more

        So they’re all different sexes.

America I will sell your strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe

America free Tom Mooney^[4]

America save the Spanish Loyalists^[5]

America Sacco & Vanzetti^[6] must not die

America I am the Scottsboro boys^[7]. America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings  

they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835^[8] Scott Nearing^[9] was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor^[10] the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche^[11] made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel  Amter^[12] plain. Everybody must have been a spy.

America you don’t really want to go to war.

America it’s them bad Russians.

Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.

The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.

Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big

        bureaucracy running our fillingstations.

That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work

        sixteen hours a day. Help.

America this is quite serious.

America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.

America is this correct?

I’d better get down to the job.

It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision part factories, I’m nearsighted and

        psychopathic anyway.

America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

BERKELEY, JANUARY 17, 1956

Her Kind    (Anne Sexton)

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods;

fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

whining, rearranging the disaligned.

A woman like that is misunderstood.

I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,

waved my nude arms at villages going by,

learning the last bright routes, survivor

where your flames still bite my thigh

and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

I have been her kind.

Having Lost My Sons, I Confront the Wreckage of the Moon: Christmas, 1960

James Wright (1927-1980)

After dark

Near the South Dakota border,

The moon is hunting, everywhere,

Delivering fire, and walking down hallways

Of a diamond.

Behind a tree,

It lights on the ruins

Of a white city:

Frost, frost.

Where are they gone,

Who lived there?

Bundled away under wings

And dark faces.

I am sick

Of it, and I go on,

Living, alone, alone,

Past the charred silos, past the hidden graves

Of Chippewas and Norwegians.

This cold winter

Moon spills the inhuman fire

Of jewels

Into my hands.

Dead riches, dead hands, the moon

Darkens,

And I am lost in the beautiful white ruins

Of America.

                                                1963

Diving into the Wreck  (by Adrienne Rich)

First having read the book of myths,

and loaded the camera,

and checked the edge of the knife-blade,

I put on

the body-armor of black rubber

the absurd flippers

the grave and awkward mask.

I am having to do this

not like Cousteau with his

assiduous team

aboard the sun-flooded schooner

but here alone.

There is a ladder.

The ladder is always there

hanging innocently

close to the side of the schooner.

We know what it is for,

we who have used it.

Otherwise

it is a piece of maritime floss

some sundry equipment.

I go down.

Rung after rung and still

the oxygen immerses me

the blue light

the clear atoms

of our human air.

I go down.

My flippers cripple me,

I crawl like an insect down the ladder

and there is no one

to tell me when the ocean

will begin.

First the air is blue and then

it is bluer and then green and then

black I am blacking out and yet

my mask is powerful

it pumps my blood with power

the sea is another story

the sea is not a question of power

I have to learn alone

to turn my body without force

in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget

what I came for

among so many who have always

lived here

swaying their crenellated fans

between the reefs

and besides

you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail.

I stroke the beam of my lamp

slowly along the flank

of something more permanent

than fish or weed

the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth

the drowned face always staring

toward the sun

the evidence of damage

worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty

the ribs of the disaster

curving their assertion

among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.

And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair

streams black, the merman in his armored body.

We circle silently

about the wreck

we dive into the hold.

I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes

whose breasts still bear the stress

whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies

obscurely inside barrels

half-wedged and left to rot

we are the half-destroyed instruments

that once held to a course

the water-eaten log

the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are

by cowardice or courage

the one who find our way

back to this scene

carrying a knife, a camera

a book of myths

in which

our names do not appear.

The question of Loyalty                (Mitsuye Yamada. B. 1923)

I met the deadline

for alien registration

once before

was numbered fingerprinted

and ordered not to travel

without permit.

But alien still they said I must

forswear allegiance to the emperor.

For me that was easy

I didn’t even know him

but my mother who did cried out

         If I sign this

        What will I be?

        I am doubly loyal

        to my American children

        also to my own people.

        How can double mean nothing?

        I wish no one to lose this war.

        Everyone does.

I was poor

At math.

I signed

my only ticket out.

                                (1976)

The Idea of Islands        (Judith Ortiz Cofer. 1952-     )

The place where I was born,

that mote in a cartographer’s eye,

interests you?

Today Atlanta is like a port city

enveloped in mist. The temperature

is plunging with the abandon

of a woman rushing to a rendezvous.

Since you ask, things were simpler

on the island. Food and shelter

were never the problem. Most days,

a hat and a watchful eye were all

one needed for protection, the climate being

rarely inclement. Fruit could be plucked

from trees languishing under the weight

of their own fecundity. The thick sea

spewed out fish that crawled into the pots

of women whose main occupation was to dress

each other’s manes with scarlet hibiscus,

which as you may know, blooms

without restraint in the tropics.

I was always the ambitious one, overdressed

by my neighbors’ standards, and unwilling

to eat mangoes three times a day.

In truth, I confess to spending my youth

guarding the fire by the beach, waiting

to be rescued from the futile round

of paradisial life.

How do I like the big city?

City lights are just as bright

as the stars that enticed me then;

the traffic ebbs and rises like the tides

and in a crowd,

everyone is an island.

                                                1989

In the Library  (Charles Simic) 

                for Octavio

There's a book called

"A Dictionary of Angels."

No one has opened it in fifty years,

I know, because when I did,

The covers creaked, the pages

Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful

As species of flies.

The sky at dusk

Used to be thick with them.

You had to wave both arms

Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining

Through the tall windows.

The library is a quiet place.

Angels and gods huddled

In dark unopened books.

The great secret lies

On some shelf Miss Jones

Passes every day on her rounds.

She's very tall, so she keeps

Her head tipped as if listening.

The books are whispering.

I hear nothing, but she does.

Late September   (Charles Simic)

The mail truck goes down the coast

Carrying a single letter.

At the end of a long pier

The bored seagull lifts a leg now and then

And forgets to put it down.

There is a menace in the air

Of tragedies in the making.

Last night you thought you heard television

In the house next door.

You were sure it was some new

Horror they were reporting,

So you went out to find out.

Barefoot, wearing just shorts.

It was only the sea sounding weary

After so many lifetimes

Of pretending to be rushing off somewhere

And never getting anywhere.

This morning, it felt like Sunday.

The heavens did their part

By casting no shadow along the boardwalk

Or the row of vacant cottages,

Among them a small church

With a dozen gray tombstones huddled close

As if they, too, had the shivers.

Prose- Poems from The World Doesn’t End, by Charles Simic

The city had fallen. We came to the window of a house drawn by a madman. The setting sun shone on a few abandoned machines of futility. “I remember,” someone said, “how in ancient times one could turn a wolf into a human and then lecture it to one's heart's content.”

*************

The dead man steps down from the scaffold. He holds his bloody head under his arm.

The apple trees are in flower. He's making his way to the village tavern with everybody watching.There, he takes a seat at one of the tables and orders two beers, one for him and one for his head. My mother wipes her hands on her apron and serves him.

It's so quiet in the world. One can hear the old river, which in its confusion sometimes forgets and flows backwards.

***********

Things were not as black as somebody painted them. There was a pretty child dressed in blackand playing with two black apples. It was either a girl dressed as a boy, or a boy dressed as a girl. Whatever, it had small white teeth. The landscape outside its window had been blackened with a heavy and coarse paint brush. It was all very teleological, except when the child stuck out its red tongue.

**************

It was the epoch of the masters of levitation. Some evenings we saw solitary men and women floating above the dark tree tops. Could they have been sleeping or thinking? They made no attempts to navigate. The wind nudged them ever so slightly. We were afraid to speak, to breathe. Even the nightbirds were quiet. Later, we’d mention the little book clasped in the hands of the young woman, and the way the old man lost his hat to the cypresses.