My Laureate's Lasso: Christmas gift lists!

Literary NEWS and EVENTS

I will be away for the next week visiting my friend, poet Penelope Scambly Schott in Portland, Oregon. When I return, I will pick up the Lasso again. You can find a post about Penelope on my Here, Where I Am.

GO TO POETIC ASIDES where Robert Brewer has just posted this interview: http://blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides/2009/07/07/InterviewWithPoetKathrynStriplingByer.aspx.

Go to Here Where I Am for more poems and photos from my own poet's place.

Robert Brewer's POETIC ASIDES offers interviews, daily poem challenges, and other tips.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Christmas gift lists!

------------------------------------------------
Thought keeper
Bring me all your thoughts,
you thinkers.
Bring me all your brain storms,
that I can put them in a safe.
Only for you to see. -SD (Sugar Loaf Elementary School)

-----------------------------------------------

If you could have seen how many gift catalogs we lugged home from the post office this morning, you'd know that each year Christmas shopping begins earlier and earlier. Well, I have some gift suggestions that I will be sharing with you over the next few weeks. How about books? How about poetry?
Speaking of which, how about some books by Carole Boston Weatherford? She has just published a new book, Becoming Billie Holiday, but she has many others suitable for all ages. Here are some of them arranged on my bed. I will be posting more about Carole's books and other books by NC writers just waiting for you to add them to your Christmas gift list.

Poems of the Day from April

bullfrog
breath
on moon

wind chimes
a robin stops
to listen

Lenard Moore
from The Open Eye

KILLDEER

Here on the edge
of the world we give
way to the tide
that takes us
beyond the familiar,
past what is never
past, the undertow
under the moon
carrying us over
a horizon where
we swim, turning
and turning
our bodies into
the cries of birds.

---DIANA PINCKNEY

Mariah Cashman
of The Basketball Poets, Supply Elementary School

Look up, look down
Look all around.
Go here, go there
Go everywhere.
Learn the words of a poet you know.
Learn them so well, so well, so well
Learn the motto
As if the bark on the tree
Was as soft as the sky.
And when the woodpecker sighs
It's heard mile after mile.

You Can’t Write Off the Dead

A friend wrote me off once, as did a cousin,
and I was as good as dead to them
but infinitely better
because I kept my distance.
The dead don’t.
They’re invasive, like those scilla I’m still digging out
of my garden, wheeling the clumps
across the street onto city property, where they’ll bloom
their blue heads off long after I‘m gone.
The dead won’t go
across the street. They hate city property.
True, you no longer have to trim their thick toenails
or yank the
stiff hair that grows straight out
of the chin. But you remember
how you lofted the tweezers to the brazen light,
triumphant,
while the stunned air radiated pain.

by Danny Romine Powell, from A NECKLACE OF BEES

Easter Morning on the Hairpin Curve
Smoky Mountains

Is it water or
phacelia that tumbles
down the banks,
overflowing its rocky
creel, water
or trillium,
merging this morning
in one brim-
ful flagrant
resounding of
yes, She lives,
does the Earth,
our longsuffering
handmaiden raising
up dipper
by dipper the day
for us out of
her dark womb.

----KS Byer
(first published in Kakalak)

There is an indescribable in my heart
A thicket of light perhaps,
an early morning siesta.
And I am so excited
I want to run the plain to the edge, the mountain to the top.
There is a voice in the distance, a voice that calls on me.

---Suhrab Sepehri, from "The Call to Start," translated by Fatemeh Keshavarz
(Recite in the Name of the Red Rose: Poetic Sacred Making in 20th Century Iran)

Shiraz

Held up to gods in the palm of a giant's hands
A rare handcrafted marble cup brimming with sunshine
Defined at the outer edges with tall Cyprus trees
That line up at dawn reverently
To interpret the horizon in their meticulous green thoughts
My city is that cup of sunshine I can drink to the last drop
And be thirsty for more.

--Fatemeh Keshavarz, author of Reading More than Lolita in Tehran, among other books.

MOTHER

I have never seen my mother swimming in the ocean or pond.
She almost drowned when she was young.
Her eyes always kept a lifeline to her children.
She shakes her hair.
She is old now.
Water and moonlight, she holds for me in her eyes.

Emoke B'Racz, from Every Tree is the Forest, 2002

SMALL TOWNS

They are gone now, those neighborhood sages.
The streets are quiet, each house keeps to its own.
Doors and windows are closed, no one has spoken in ages.
They are gone now, the eyes and ears of neighborhood sages.
We grew up under their noses, went through all our stages,
lived in and out and through their houses like home.
They heaped advice, handed out warnings, those sages.
All the streets are quiet now. Each house lives alone.

--by Ruth Moose

First Memory

Dragonflies dip, rise. Their backs
catch light, purple like church glass.
Gray barn planks balance on stilts,
walk toward the pond’s deep end.
A green smell simmers shallows,
where tadpoles flow like black tears.
Minnows lengthen their shadows.
Something unseen stirs in the reeds.

RON RASH

The Past
from THE RED GAZE, Wesleyan U. Press
by Barbara Guest

The form of the poem subsided, it enters another poem.

A witness was found for the markings inscribed upside-down.

It might have been a celebration, so strong the presence

of the poem. The sky sinks slowly inside the past.

--------
Barbara Guest was born in Wilmington, NC.

Needlework

My walls are paperered in mourning.
Count the rpeats. Willow weeping,
Woman bending beside an urn--
Sun on her gown, rain on her cheek.
I pull my needle through the cloth:
Same woman, same willlow, same loss.

Dede Wilson

from Eliza and Caleb

coming off the drums

like the ruby water rimming Abyssinia/she bows without breaking/
gyrating to kebero improvisations/she is coming to travel me/
to atlas me with a griot’s tongue/and feed me like yams to Oshun

the waiting seethes like semolina steam

Shirlette Ammons, from Matching Skin, Carolina Wren Press

Craft

Move the thread
she did tied a
thousand, thousand
knots, chains, flowers
What do you
make I said
A snare Oh I
thought it was lace
She held it to her face
What do you think
lace is anyway

-- Isabel Zuber, from RED LILY

My Laureate's Lasso

Literary NEWS and EVENTS

Monday, November 17, 2008

Christmas gift lists!

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