Tag: workshop poem

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – Nov 1

Red Wheelbarrow Poets
Poem of the Week 11/01/2016

Claudia Serea

Ham and cheese sandwich

Once upon a time,
there was a country made of Swiss cheese
far, far away,
so far, the cheese never made it
to our stores.

We knew that Swiss cheese existed, though—
we saw it on the news.

Once a year, we took a class trip
to the Bucharest International Fair,
and we saw the huge wheels of cheese
and other miracles, like glazed hams,
pork shoulders, and meters of sausage,
and salami.

Throngs came to see the superstar foods,
glamorous and untouchable.

And, in the Swiss cheese country,
the king and queen were still alive,
but no one was allowed to see them,
or speak to them,
so they were invisible.

Moms never had to count
the slices of ham,
or measure the salami with a ruler
before cutting,
or hide the bananas
and chocolate in the armoire
behind linens and towels,
until Christmas.

I’m telling you these stories,
layering ham and cheese slices
like forbidden papers on a bun,

and you laugh—
Sure, mom,
you saw the Swiss cheese on the news,

and take a bite.

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RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – Oct 25

Red Wheelbarrow Poets
Poem of the Week 10/25/2016

Susanna Lee

Unspoiled

That doe, living in the woods behind my house, teaches her children:
how to lie perfectly still until she returns to nurse them;
how quick one must leap at the smell of wolf,
and how to trust one’s instinct to find the right direction to run away;
how to nudge aside the snow with the snout,
to nibble at the promise of moss beneath;
to believe that when the moss runs out,
the barren trees
will sustain life;
how to eat bark in the dead of winter,
and how long one must chew
before swallowing;
to trust in Nature,
to remain unspoiled.

I, too, am unspoiled, yet no wiser than the doe.

Her eldest,
this deer, lying on the far side of the road;
now mangled, twitching, splayed limbs akimbo;
gashes in his throat spewing, gushing red;
now stilling;
knew nothing of the factory wherein those headlights were manufactured.

I, too, am unspoiled, and no wiser than the doe.
I do not read what’s been written.
I say,
the view from atop the shoulders of giants
is directly above the spot where, once, they had decided it was the perfect place to firmly plant their feet.
They’ve now been rooted for thousands of years.

Those who’ve read all of what’s been written take this treasure trove seriously
and attempt to sequester it in an ark floating in gray matter.

However, that boat’s already leaking:
favorite recipes for chocolate chip cookies,
manuals for repairing Mac trucks,
guidebooks for traveling the Appalachian Trail,
poems sensing there are frays along the hems of bell-bottomed blue jeans;
all, stories we tell ourselves, over and over.

The better and better wars they, the learned, convince one another to create
are simply the bubbling over,
so much scum hovering atop the floating bits of ham in split pea soup.

I’m unlearned, fresh, unspoiled;
hoping to remain outside the box and discover why boxes are blinding.

I refuse to cede my innocent wholeness.
Like the doe, I retain the ideas I was born with,
those that sustained my forbears
when even the potatoes wouldn’t maintain their integrity.

In my poems, I do not make reference to ancient Greeks,
whose wisdom is said to be as yet unsurpassed.
I don’t read them.
I do not deny them their experiences. I take their word for it.
Or, rather, the word of those who’ve read them, studied them, recited by rote their verse,
then inevitably anguished over those ancient explorers’ deep voyages into meaning.

I do adore writers who cannot write an English line
without discovering the patterns of the shadows of Icarus’s wings
darkening their pages.
I enjoy imagining their privileged lives,
seeing how their curiosity led them to prowl through crumbling intellectual ruins.
I delight in finding evidence that dwelling on past writings has eviscerated their hearts.

I, on the other hand, will explore literary scholarship no further.
Unacquainted with history, science, mind-travelers, I’m untainted.
I cherish my own guile.

I will persevere.
I’ll never give up.
I will seek and discover the reason why
only the tears of dolphins and not elephants heal unicorns.

I will learn
how to move each of my own atoms independently of the others,
using nothing but the force of gluons.

Yes, and I will spend my free time in knitting,
out of the resounding echoes of the midnight howls of just seven coyotes,
enough joy and peace to blanket all the world.

This deer, lying on the far side of the road;
now mangled, twitching, splayed limbs akimbo;
gashes in her throat spewing, gushing red;
now stilling;
knew nothing of the factory wherein those headlights were manufactured.

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RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – Oct 11

Red Wheelbarrow Poets
Poem of the Week 10/11/2016

Janet Kolstein

A Stream of Alluring Things That Don’t Really Exist

Something raw and natural whirls
around the bedroom walls,
veined with deep blue, baby blue,
the blue of Naples Bay,
the blue of a jay.

There is no curse
in the fevered dreams of marble and alabaster,
timeless as light that streams though a rainbow.

Austin’s sleek young physique,
leather and wood smoke,
knit together crazy talk about matchups
and fans who smile louder
and play ball with punch.

They were all magically turned on —
drunken jet-lagged dancers in cowboy boots
ready to service every piece of art.

Couples were mirrors of desire,
buttery objects that slid
up and down against each other
into pools on the floor.

Such behavior is a form of surveillance
when just trust us isn’t enough,
and dubious passion,
a totem stained black,
ensures an absence of questions.

Walking such a fine line,
you have to live here to understand
their playground is a giant round bowl of music
open to the sky,

and contenders, hot or cold,
are sparkly, leopard-covered runners
twirling ritual above their heads.

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RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – Oct 04

Red Wheelbarrow Poets
Poem of the Week 10/04/2016

Arthur Russell

Faces

He was the brother to whom it fell
to sell his parents’ house, travelling down
to Charlottesville all those years, to visit
both, then one of them, then just the house.
In the room where he’d read books as a child,
other than the oxygen tank beside the recliner
that replaced the wing chair he liked,
very little had changed.

The innocence and scent had long since drained
from the dried hydrangeas and lilacs
in Roycroft vases on the glass front bookcase.
Floor-length brocade drapes hung shut, as always.
Light from leaded glass sconces above the mantle,
the same lamps he’d read by, lit an oil painting
of a clipper ship, square rigged, lunging forward
under a white sky and a chopped, green sea.

There were secret faces in the abstract pattern
of the wallpaper. He saw the first one
when he was seven, partial as the moon
behind a scrim of trees. He froze,
pretended to ignore, then peeked again, and saw
a whole tribe of faces around the room,
with crayon jaws and heavy eyes,

most somewhat obscured by drapes or chairs;
but the first one, over the radiator,
like an Easter Island moai, was his man,
the one he stared down, the one he reckoned
and then parlayed with, his counterpart,
the general and chief of the faces,
and though they never spoke, they did confer,
with eyes, on the articles of his leaving.

When, married, divorced and married again,
with a stepson playing football for State,
he returned to empty and sell the house,
he made his phone calls from the chair
beside the oxygen tank across from the chief
of the faces, who had a scarred cheek
from a raised seam in the paper after
years of darkening heat from the radiator.

This is how life found him that November,
talking to his sister in New York, to a broker
from Weichert and to Goodwill for a pickup date,
and gazing at the moai on the walls,
a sort of a class photograph.

The books he’d read were safe within him,
although dispersed by time.

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RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – Sep 27

Red Wheelbarrow Poets
Poem of the Week 9/27/2016

Mark Fogarty

Waiting to Cross the Water near the San Juan Islands

At Port Townshend, Washington,
I saw the best sunset there ever was.
Fire red, rippled by clouds
That made the reds dance like northern lights.

Now I’m ready to die.

But the skin doctor has taken a divot
From my hand, and I’d like to see it heal.
So, maybe not just yet.

There was time, waiting for the ferry,
To eat a meal by the waterside,
Scan the margins of the bay for riprap.

Georgia went ahead
To see about the car. We’d driven
Around the whole peninsula,
Seen the rain clouds in the rain forest,
Dipped a toe into the Pacific like Lewis and Clark.

I wish I’d valued her as much as she deserved.

There was time to see the sunset
Amid the riprap of bouncing thoughts
As we waited, becalmed, in the line of cars.

The San Juan Islands, bruited as
The loveliest on earth,
Do not start there, but they’re not far.

Georgia was killed by a drunk driver,
Some riffraff who walked away untouched.
I never think anyone will die.

If you take a divot from the land,
You must replace it. That’s the rule.

So I’d like to return to the bay,
Add a stone or two
To buttress the wall that holds back the sea.

Most times the most beautiful islands on earth
Are right where you are.

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Workshop – new day and new location

Workshops will now be conducted every Tuesday (including the first week of the month), and will now meet in the Kindergarten room, first floor of the Williams Center, Rutherford. Be there or be un-workshopped.

RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – Sep 14

Red Wheelbarrow Poets
Poem of the Week 9/14/2016

Janet Kolstein

Pound of Poems

I wish the piano
could gun the engine
under the hood,
and the choir could
raise the roof on
a fortress of words.

I wish the drums
could pound out
a pound of poems
without spilling
a drop of blood.

Let the theremin
quiver in my hands,
shaping a heart
with a dagger
written in it.

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RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – Aug 31

Red Wheelbarrow Poets
Poem of the Week 8/31/2016

Mark Fogarty

Thin Blooded

I don’t know if I’m thin skinned or not
But there isn’t any doubt I’m thin blooded.
In the hospital once the CNA roused me
As I was lying in a puddle of blood.
I’d slept on the IV works
And enough blood had started out
I thought someone had stabbed me,
Or put a horse’s head in my narrow bed.

The thin blood keeps the clots in place
So they don’t break away like Baltic republics
And steer for your heart, brain or lungs.
I netted two out of three, and it wasn’t good.

No razors on me, I tell the barber.
Be careful if you floss your teeth.
That blood bubble on your hand, beware.

I need to be more thick skinned,
If just to keep the allotted blood in.

Here’s my song on the internet:
I’m thin blooded, check it and see
I’ve got a fever of a hundred and three.

I’ve had a fever every day for three months
As my body wrestles down the invaders.
It’s nothing to sing about, really.

In narrow sleep I dream of Lara, and Zhivago,
Writing poetry with the wolves at the door,
The commies not far behind.
The wolf came to my door, growled a couple of times,
And settled for a bowl of blood.

My God, says the father.
They’ve killed the Czar and his family.
I think of the Czarevich, who bled
At every fall, and his sexy madman monk,
Whose blood was so thick they had to poison,
Shoot and drown him. Son, it doesn’t do
To be thinblooded in this world,
Where night brings the night horses,
The bloody sheets, the empty wells.

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RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – Aug 17

Red Wheelbarrow Poets
Poem of the Week 8/17/2016

Arthur Russell

Summer Solstice, 1974

On West 36th Street,
in the strange, back apartment
over the wholesale button shop
you took me home to,
and pissed with the bathroom door open,
and returned to bed when we
should have been dressing to go,
the dirty window blurred
the crazy view up the air shaft
to the top of the Empire State Building,
while the radio insisted
that its love was like a ship on the ocean,
and my cheek lay on your thigh.

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RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – Aug 10

Red Wheelbarrow Poets
Poem of the Week 8/10/2016

Janet Kolstein

Zarafa

In captivity, she sailed down the Nile
far, far away from her home
and across the Mediterranean Sea,
Africa behind her, Marseille ahead,
the first giraffe ever seen in France.

A sight of wonder and delight
the moment her hooves touched land,
she walked to Paris to be
another jeune fille
in the king’s menagerie
in the Jardin des Plantes.

A star, an oddity, an obsession,
alone in her sphere,
she would live out her life
in solitude
among the hundreds of thousands
who came to stare
and buy wares with her likeness.

Was there a man, woman, or child
who pitied her plight,
looked into her unguarded gaze and wondered
if giraffes can dream of herds on savannas
and other long necks to nibble
and twine?

(A gift from Muhammed Ali Pasha to King Charles X, Zarafa (“lovely one”) landed in Marseille on October 1826 and inspired “giraffemania” until becoming passe. She died in 1845.)

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