Tag: Rutherford

Poem of the Week 10/3/17

Russell Francis

More Steam

In the “Heart of America-66” I, the brigand, tell my tale
in Pirates Cove; near Robins Reef, they sing to Valhalla.
I, brigand, tell my tale of you.
Those were times told by few here; I toiled.
Sweat-stained hands hard on course and stay the helm.
America, you sweat me hard those years. Heat.
The heat is hot, your engines roar, more steam!
If this place be Hell, if Hell I live, more steam!
Boilers pant and mud plates scream, and the capt’n rings down.
More steam! I hold the helm and answer true, more steam!
Men go mad, and death takes its due, and engines roar all pride
taken to Valhalla.
For pride, I broke your back; I broke your heart; I stole your soul.
More steam!

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Poem of the Week 9/26/17

Della Rowland

Riding With Will

In a fever,
we cram into Will’s little red car —
him, Martha, and me in the front seat,
Sarah and two others in the back —
our squeezed-in elbows poking out the windows,
bound for a cowboy store where he’s sure
we’ll buy a hat, maybe boots.

Will pops the clutch,
leaving babies and children behind, playing
in the yard, all over the yard,
patting soft dirt into piles,
making perfect sentences as only children can,
scooped up by grandmas and uncles and who-all else
when we lurch off fervently,
bucking down the driveway
toward our hilarious destination only Will knows where
while the radio blares “Listen To The Mockingbird”
and the wind rolls through the rolled-down windows
and our waving hair,
and Will hunches back and forth over the tiny steering wheel
whooping and swerving down field-flanked roads,
beating the big trucks to the next intersection
every time.

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Poem of the Week 8/1/2017

Claudia Serea

Ode to beer

Beer the color of summer,
dusk-colored beer
with golden feet
and foamy beard,

blue-collared beer,
honest
and filling,

loud,
and gregarious,

and cool,

here’s to you.

I love you more than wine
because you’re cold
and clear,
waiting on ice
on a hot day
with, or without shade,
with, or without a lime,
or a beach.

Because wine is pretentious
and water too plain,

and you’re humble,
and taste of grain.

Because nobody writes you odes
although you buzz,
pop, and fizzle,

and rise from yeast
like life.

Because your name is simple.

Because you hail from Mesopotamia
where Gilgamesh drank you
with Enkidu.

Because you’re best sipped
in the haunts of the Old City,
on a terrace in Bucharest
or Madrid,

with a brother
or best friend.

Here’s to you, old god
who takes the tiredness away
after a long day walking,

who takes the years
we’ve been apart away,

and makes us young,
laughing,
happy again

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Poem of the Week 7/25/2017

Della Rowland

Some Moment Shining As Your Hair

What came together,
some moment strong and careless as your arms,
to overthrow my admirable adequacies?

What perilous relinquishing,
some moment green and hungry as my fears,
allowed desire to be my need?

Some moment,
small and covert as your moustached mouth,
made a song my heart beats out
in its unmeasured time,
despite the truth —
relentless as suspicion,
resourceful as a fantasy —
that all its red and silver lyrics
would both warm and disquiet you.

I think what came together once,
some moment shining as your hair,
will never wane
and will require surveillance,
a constant steeling against
some moment blind and glorious
as your eyes.

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Poem of the Week 7/18/2017

Arthur Russell

Improvisation

I love my guitar, but I haven’t learned
to improvise.
However you conceive
of boundaries on the other side
of which something like my facility in speech
would begin to emerge in music, on guitar,
I’m just a trained monkey.

I can muck around with volume, rhythm,
syncopate a song, but when it’s my turn
to take a solo after a chorus,
the scales that match the chord elude
me, or I need to start at the tonic
or I’ve lost the beat, which is so not me,
or I simply have nothing to say.

I stopped writing this poem
the last two days to take out my guitar. I can’t believe
I would need to write a
poem
about a problem that clogs my music.
That’s like complaining to your mom about a bully.

I took out Jobim’s Corcovado for which I have a nice arrangement.

This doesn’t sound like poetry, does it?

I figured out the keys
it moves through, worked the scales in those keys up
and down the fret board,
and found snatches of melody to dip
into when I got to those bars.

God, this is killing me; it’s so embarrassing.
My music-literate friends
would read this and say: “What an idiot!”

After two days, I had nothing but
the arrangement I’d worked out six years ago.
Then I went back to this poem.

I hate
the way it feels to hate a thing I love
because it won’t give me the thing I want from it
the most.

That last stanza
gave me no trouble.

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