"See You Soon" by Sophia Manubay

Today's poem is by a former student of mine who just graduated and is starting a new step in her journey. Congratulations, Sophia! I'm so proud of you!

See You Soon
by Sophia Manubay

It's a bittersweet moment
Leaving the single thing you grew to know.
But also knowing that there is a lot out there past the horizon.
The goodbyes are always hard
No matter where you're leaving from.
It's like the world you once lived in has turned black and white
Like the old photographs your parents showed you when you were a little kid.
These goodbyes aren't always permanent, though.
They are "see you soon's."
One day or another, you'll be able to return.
Return to the black and white world, but discover that it's in color again.
The joy and laughter returns along side it.
These situations create memories that'll stick with us forever
No matter how big or small they are.
Even if you're out living your own life and even if it's just for a moment
You can still return to the place you called home.





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"Amazing Peace: a Christmas poem" by Maya Angelou

Amazing Peace: a Christmas poem
by Maya Angelou

Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
Flood waters await us in our avenues.

Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to avalanche
Over unprotected villages.
The sky slips low and grey and threatening.

We question ourselves.
What have we done to so affront nature?
We worry God.
Are you there? Are you there really?
Does the covenant you made with us still hold?

Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship. 

It is the Glad Season.
Thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.
Flood waters recede into memory.
Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us
As we make our way to higher ground.

Hope is born again in the faces of children
It rides on the shoulders of our aged as they walk into their sunsets.
Hope spreads around the earth. Brightening all things,
Even hate which crouches breeding in dark corridors.

In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.
At first it is too soft. Then only half heard. 
We listen carefully as it gathers strength.
We hear a sweetness.
The word is Peace.
It is loud now. It is louder.
Louder than the explosion of bombs. 
We tremble at the sound. We are thrilled by its presence.
It is what we have hungered for.
Not just the absence of war. But, true Peace.
A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.
Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.

We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.
We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.
We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come. 
Peace.

Come and fill us and our world with your majesty.
We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
implore you to stay awhile with us
so we may learn by your shimmering light
how to look beyond complexion and see community.

It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.
On this platform of peace, we can create a language
to translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.
At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ

Into the great religions of the world.
We jubilate the precious advent of trust.
We shout with glorious tongues the coming of hope.
All the earth’s tribes loosen their voices to celebrate the promise of
Peace.

We, Angels and Mortals, Believers and Nonbelievers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace.

We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace.

We look at each other, then into ourselves,
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation: 

Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul.





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"The Cold Heaven" by William Butler Yeats

The Cold Heaven
by William Butler Yeats

Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven
That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,
And thereupon imagination and heart were driven
So wild that every casual thought of that and this
Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season
With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;
And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,
Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,
Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,
Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent
Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken
By the injustice of the skies for punishment?






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"10-Year-Old Shot Three Times, but She’s Fine" by Patricia Smith

10-Year-Old Shot Three Times, but She’s Fine
by Patricia Smith

Dumbfounded in hospital whites, you are picture-book
itty-bit, floundering in bleach and steel. Braids untwirl
and corkscrew, you squirm, the crater in your shoulder
spews a soft voltage. On a TV screwed into the wall
above your head, neon rollicks. A wide-eyed train
engine perfectly smokes, warbles a song about forward.

Who shot you, baby?
I don’t know. I was playing.
You didn’t see anyone?
I was playing with my friend Sharon.
I was on the swing
and she was—
Are you sure you didn’t—
No, I ain’t seen nobody but Sharon. I heard
people yelling though, and—

Each bullet repainted you against the brick, kicked
you a little sideways, made you need air differently.
You leaked something that still goldens the boulevard.
I ain’t seen nobody, I told you.
And at A. Lincoln Elementary on Washington Street,
or Jefferson Elementary on Madison Street, or Adams
Elementary just off the Eisenhower Expressway,
we gather the ingredients, if not the desire, for pathos:

an imploded homeroom, your empty seat pulsating
with drooped celebrity, the sometime counselor
underpaid and elsewhere, a harried teacher struggling
toward your full name. Anyway your grades weren’t
all that good. No need to coo or encircle anything,
no call for anyone to pull their official white fingers
through your raveled hair, no reason to introduce
the wild notion of loving you loud and regardless.

Oh, and they’ve finally located your mama, who
will soon burst in with her cut-rate cure of stammering
Jesus’ name. Beneath the bandages, your chest crawls
shut. Perky ol’ Thomas winks a bold-faced lie from
his clacking track, and your heart monitor hums
a wry tune no one will admit they’ve already heard.

Elsewhere, 23 seconds rumble again and again through
Sharon’s body. Boom, boom, she says to no one.





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"Wheel of Fire" by Ishion Hutchinson

Wheel of Fire 
by Ishion Hutchinson

They flared on the sea green
of the Subaru that seemed netted
under the unleafing maple,

a limestone moulage cut
from a quarry and cast
in immemorial arrest behind

Pete’s Absolute Asphalt truck,
throttling still when I alighted
and said, besides, in Aleppo once —

to nothing but the wind
photographed in sunlight;
the pavement’s watery brier

and children and their ghosts
and the air-raid screams of mothers,
once, in Aleppo, altered

that moment in history
when titihihihihi titihihihihi
those white houses,

stiffened with silence, broke
the private change, the public good
to dive into pits of leaves.





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“Your Luck Is About To Change” by Susan Elizabeth Howe

“Your Luck Is About To Change”

BY SUSAN ELIZABETH HOWE

(A fortune cookie)

Ominous inscrutable Chinese news 

to get just before Christmas, 

considering my reasonable health, 

marriage spicy as moo-goo-gai-pan, 

career running like a not-too-old Chevrolet. 

Not bad, considering what can go wrong: 

the bony finger of Uncle Sam 

might point out my husband, 

my own national guard, 

and set him in Afghanistan; 

my boss could take a personal interest; 

the pain in my left knee could spread to my right. 

Still, as the old year tips into the new, 

I insist on the infant hope, gooing and kicking 

his legs in the air. I won't give in 

to the dark, the sub-zero weather, the fog, 

or even the neighbors' Nativity. 

Their four-year-old has arranged 

his whole legion of dinosaurs 

so they, too, worship the child, 

joining the cow and sheep. Or else, 

ultimate mortals, they've come to eat 

ox and camel, Mary and Joseph, 

then savor the newborn babe.

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"Legacy" by Amiri Baraka

Legacy
by Amiri Baraka

(For Blues People)

In the south, sleeping against
the drugstore, growling under   
the trucks and stoves, stumbling   
through and over the cluttered eyes   
of early mysterious night. Frowning   
drunk waving moving a hand or lash.   
Dancing kneeling reaching out, letting   
a hand rest in shadows. Squatting   
to drink or pee. Stretching to climb   
pulling themselves onto horses near   
where there was sea (the old songs   
lead you to believe). Riding out   
from this town, to another, where   
it is also black. Down a road
where people are asleep. Towards   
the moon or the shadows of houses.   
Towards the songs’ pretended sea.

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"Filming the Doomsday Clock" by Mary Jo Bang

Filming the Doomsday Clock 
by Mary Jo Bang

We were told that the cloud cover was a blanket
about to settle into the shape of the present
which, if we wanted to imagine it
as a person, would undoubtedly look startled—
as after a verbal berating
or in advance of a light pistol-whipping.
The camera came and went, came and went,
like a masked man trying to light a too-damp fuse.
The crew was acting like a litter of mimics
trying to make a killing.
Anything to fill the vacuum of time.
The wind whirred and tracked the clouds.
The credits, we were told, would take the form
of a semi-scrawl, urban-sprawl, graffiti-style
typography. The soundtrack would include
instrumental versions of "Try a Little Tenderness."
Our handler, who was walking backward
in order to maintain constant eye contact with us,
nearly stumbled over a girl in a sheath and pearls
who was misting a shelf of hothouse flowers.
While the two apologized to each other,
we stood and watched the fine spray settle
over the leaves and drip onto the floor.
On the way out, we passed a door
with a small window reinforced with wired glass
through which we could see a nurse
positioning a patient on a table. We swore
afterward we'd heard her say, "Lie perfectly still
and look only inward." A clock chimed and
as the others were audibly counting backwards
from five to zero, I thought I heard someone say,
"Now let go of this morbid attachment to things."





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"sideshow" by Danez Smith

sideshow
by Danez Smith

Have I spent too much time worrying about the boys
killing each other to pray for the ones who do it
with their own hands?

Is that not black on black violence?
Is that not a mother who has to bury her boy?

Is it not the same play?
The same plot & characters?

            The curtain rises, then:

                          a womb
                          a boy
                          a night emptied of music
                          a trigger
                          a finger
                          a bullet

            then:

                          lights.

It always drives the crowd to their feet.

An encore
of boy after boy
after sweet boy            — their endless, bloody bow.

They throw dirt on the actors like roses
until the boys are drowned by the earth

& the audience doesn’t remember
what they’re standing for.







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"That autumn was abundant" by Marjorie Agosín

That autumn was abundant
by Marjorie Agosín
translated by Jacqueline Nanfito

That autumn was abundant
In Istanbul the ancient and platinum
Women with their faces covered and discovered

My grandfather arrived on foot to this Ottoman city

From the desolate Sebastopol and from other burned villages,
From the bloody snow.

He spoke about its minarets
Certainly he loved the fields of leaves. Autumn, like a river or
    a glowing bonfire
And I don't know where he went to pray,
Or perhaps he no longer did so in the city of the sultans

But I know in his mouth he carried a needle
Noble metaphor of his trade.

Perhaps he wandered astonished throughout lovely Istanbul
Searching for sustenance or clients
Perhaps inclined, he entered one of the thousand mosques
Where he prayed
While the clocks stood still,
Geographies were erased.
Because the city was merely a golden breeze falling upon the
     leaves

A multitude of lights upon the holy minarets,
My grandfather,

A Jewish tailor also took refuge in Istanbul
Also another small Jewish city
Among the thresholds of history.





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"The Road Not Taken " by Robert Frost

The Road Not Taken 
by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.





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"The Nightmare: Oil on Canvas, Henry Fuseli, 1781" by Paul Tran

The Nightmare: Oil on Canvas, Henry Fuseli, 1781

by Paul Tran

Too hot to

rest, I toss

my arms off

the bed. My night-

gown wet with

sweat. I feel you

— a sack of

scavenged skulls

on my chest

— sipping

the salt from

my breasts. Imp.

Incubus. Im-

pulse. You and

me like a mare

that must be

broken in

by breaking in-

to. Tamed is

how fire is

by giving itself

something to destroy:

it destroys it-

self. But who

can deter-

mine what’s inside

another?

What is risked

when we enter    ...    

Caliper. Forceps.

Scalpel. Oculus.

Perhaps you’re

the wilderness

that waits with-

in me. Perhaps an

other mystery, I

open beneath

you. Yoked. Harnessed.

Paralyzed.

At once a-

wake and a-

sleep. I nay.

I knock

over the kerosene

lamp. Light of

the rational

mind snuffed. Shadow

of shadows.

Because I can’t

see, I sense.

Your thumb

thrumming

my mouth. A

command. Arch-

angel. Vision

of invasion.

Insemination.

My horse

heart beating

with yours.

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"Chanukah Lights Tonight" by Steven Schneider

Chanukah Lights Tonight
by Steven Schneider

Our annual prairie Chanukah party— 
latkes, kugel, cherry blintzes. 
Friends arrive from nearby towns 
and dance the twist to “Chanukah Lights Tonight,” 
spin like a dreidel to a klezmer hit. 

The candles flicker in the window. 
Outside, ponderosa pines are tied in red bows. 
If you squint, 
the neighbors’ Christmas lights 
look like the Omaha skyline. 

The smell of oil is in the air. 
We drift off to childhood 
where we spent our gelt 
on baseball cards and matinees, 
cream sodas and potato knishes. 

No delis in our neighborhood, 
only the wind howling over the crushed corn stalks. 
Inside, we try to sweep the darkness out, 
waiting for the Messiah to knock, 
wanting to know if he can join the party.





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"December" by Michael Miller

December
by Michael Miller

I want to be a passenger
in your car again
and shut my eyes
while you sit at the wheel,

awake and assured
in your own private world,
seeing all the lines
on the road ahead,

down a long stretch
of empty highway
without any other
faces in sight.

I want to be a passenger
in your car again
and put my life back
in your hands.





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"dive for dreams" by e.e. cummings

dive for dreams
by e.e. cummings

dive for dreams
or a slogan may topple you
(trees are their roots
and wind is wind)

trust your heart
if the seas catch fire
(and live by love
though the stars walk backward)

honour the past
but welcome the future
(and dance your death
away at this wedding)

never mind a world
with its villains or heroes
(for god likes girls
and tomorrow and the earth)






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"November for Beginners" Rita Dove

November for Beginners
by Rita Dove

Snow would be the easy
way out—that softening
sky like a sigh of relief
at finally being allowed
to yield. No dice.
We stack twigs for burning
in glistening patches
but the rain won’t give.

So we wait, breeding
mood, making music
of decline. We sit down
in the smell of the past
and rise in a light
that is already leaving.
We ache in secret,
memorizing

a gloomy line
or two of German.
When spring comes
we promise to act
the fool. Pour,
rain! Sail, wind,
with your cargo of zithers!


November 1981






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"Garden of Eden" by Tracy K. Smith

Garden of Eden
by Tracy K. Smith 

What a profound longing
I feel, just this very instant,
For the Garden of Eden
On Montague Street
Where I seldom shopped,
Usually only after therapy
Elbow sore at the crook
From a handbasket filled
To capacity. The glossy pastries!
Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!
Once, a bag of black beluga
Lentils spilt a trail behind me
While I labored to find
A tea they refused to carry.
It was Brooklyn. My thirties.
Everyone I knew was living
The same desolate luxury,
Each ashamed of the same things:
Innocence and privacy. I'd lug
Home the paper bags, doing
Bank-balance math and counting days.
I'd squint into it, or close my eyes
And let it slam me in the face—
The known sun setting
On the dawning century.

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"In November" by Lisel Mueller

In November
by Lisel Mueller

Outside the house the wind is howling 
and the trees are creaking horribly. 
This is an old story 
with its old beginning, 
as I lay me down to sleep. 
But when I wake up, sunlight 
has taken over the room. 
You have already made the coffee 
and the radio brings us music 
from a confident age. In the paper 
bad news is set in distant places. 
Whatever was bound to happen 
in my story did not happen. 
But I know there are rules that cannot be broken. 
Perhaps a name was changed. 
A small mistake. Perhaps 
a woman I do not know 
is facing the day with the heavy heart 
that, by all rights, should have been mine.

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"The Puppy" by Wesley McNair

The Puppy
by Wesley McNair

From down the road, starting up
and stopping once more, the sound 
of a puppy on a chain who has not yet 
discovered he will spend his life there.
Foolish dog, to forget where he is 
and wander until he feels the collar 
close fast around his throat, then cry 
all over again about the little space
in which he finds himself. Soon,
when there is no grass left in it 
and he understands it is all he has, 
he will snarl and bark whenever
he senses a threat to it. 
Who would believe this small 
sorrow could lead to such fury 
no one would ever come near him?






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"Thanksgiving Turkey" by George Parsons Lathrop

Thanksgiving Turkey
by George Parsons Lathrop

Valleys lay in sunny vapor,  
   And a radiance mild was shed
From each tree that like a taper
   At a feast stood. Then we said,
   “Our feast, too, shall soon be spread,
          Of good Thanksgiving turkey.”

And already still November
   Drapes her snowy table here.
Fetch a log, then; coax the ember;
   Fill your hearts with old-time cheer;
   Heaven be thanked for one more year,
          And our Thanksgiving turkey!

Welcome, brothers—all our party
   Gathered in the homestead old!
Shake the snow off and with hearty
   Hand-shakes drive away the cold;
   Else your plate you’ll hardly hold
          Of good Thanksgiving turkey.

When the skies are sad and murky,
   ‘Tis a cheerful thing to meet
Round this homely roast of turkey—
   Pilgrims, pausing just to greet,
   Then, with earnest grace, to eat
          A new Thanksgiving turkey.

And the merry feast is freighted
   With its meanings true and deep.
Those we’ve loved and those we’ve hated,
   All, to-day, the rite will keep,
   All, to-day, their dishes heap
          With plump Thanksgiving turkey.

But how many hearts must tingle
   Now with mournful memories!
In the festal wine shall mingle
   Unseen tears, perhaps from eyes
   That look beyond the board where lies
          Our plain Thanksgiving turkey.

See around us, drawing nearer,
   Those faint yearning shapes of air—
Friends than whom earth holds none dearer
   No—alas! they are not there:
   Have they, then, forgot to share
          Our good Thanksgiving turkey?

Some have gone away and tarried
   Strangely long by some strange wave;
Some have turned to foes; we carried
   Some unto the pine-girt grave:
   They’ll come no more so joyous-brave
          To take Thanksgiving turkey.

Nay, repine not. Let our laughter
   Leap like firelight up again.
Soon we touch the wide Hereafter,
   Snow-field yet untrod of men:
   Shall we meet once more—and when?—
          To eat Thanksgiving turkey.





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