On Sundays, We Read Poetry
Breaking poetry from Devon Balwit, Kim Harvey, Norma Smith and Albert Haley
Dear Reader,
I am very proud to share the Poets Reading the News nominees for the Pushcart Prize. Congratulations to Tara Campbell, Akua Lezli Hope, Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Clare Welsh, Kurt Cole Eidsvig and Vivian Parkin DeRosa! Each name links to the respective works that stole our hearts and headlines in 2018.
Our latest poetry by Kim Harvey, Devon Balwit, Norma Smith and Peggy Brightman spans California's Camp Fire (announced as 100% contained just a few hours ago), the distant juxtaposition of needs within the migrant discourse (a timely read on the day that U.S. border agents teargassed migrant mothers in Tijuana), the discovery in Borneo of the world's oldest figurative art, and some prospective destinies for America's most idealized monuments. Since this week the U.S. government released the Fourth Annual Climate Assessment, I'm featuring an Albert Haley environmental poem from the archives.
Yours in poetry,
Elle Aviv Newton
Editor
Poets Reading the News
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We Know
By Devon Balwit
Even across 40,000 years, the ochre’s eloquent.
Haloed by breath, the hands stake claim. Death
has not erased all trace. How dense the doctors
if they must puzzle over motivation. It’s clear
enough: One spokesperson or many. One event
or many. The urge—not to stay forever unchanging
but to have one’s changing captured in stone.
To call out to the future and say, I understand. I also.
The upheavals of our kind may eddy us,
yet eventually we settle. Flowstone seeps
across relic, and we are fixed. Look.
I wave at you down the millennia. I draw
my spindly-legged animals. I do what I can.
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Some Things Only God Can Do
By Kim Harvey
As if the hills themselves were vermillion
waves, a liquid blaze. The things
they saved: cell phone and chargers, laptop,
wedding bands, handgun, three pairs
of underwear, a towel, their two dogs if
they were lucky. Left behind, everything
else: baby book, passports, family
heirlooms, guitar, photos on the wall.
Then the world disappeared
around them, the steering wheel
melted in her hands, the rubber soles
of his shoes dissolved into the asphalt. It started
with a spark, as all fires do, small brush ignited, maybe
a downed power line they say. Now we’re naming
the dead: Carl, Ernest, Jesus. You want to
call your people, hold them close, even the ones
who are no longer there, or anywhere.
I mean, what would you do? All the neighbors’
houses are gone, Black Bear Diner, Safeway
gone, Jack in the Box, the kids’ school, the hospital
where a baby boy was born just hours before, all gone,
horses and mules jumped into swimming pools
to escape the flames. Strange terrain, this
panorama of disaster, of total darkness, exploding
of propane tanks, car tires popping from the heat
of the canyon vortex, of the Jarbo devil wind,
of chaos, of choking black smoke hundreds of
miles away, the ash on our windshield
we recognize as human
remains, the grace of God or the lack of it,
the growing list of the missing, singed
cats in the grasses, of the waiting, of all
the not knowing, of sleeping in cars
and tents, prayers of thanksgiving
in a Walmart parking lot, of a place called
home that suddenly no longer exists.
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Grounded
By Norma Smith
There are still birds in the smoke-heavy air
flying blind, still following the sharp
edge of the V. They falter, as if to
crash against another message-
bearing flock, another formation still searching
for dry land after so long on the water
now that the last olive tree
has been uprooted in the holy land
and burns in the strangely
bitter neighbor’s field.
We are clueless.
We send another—
this one a lone, leather-winged,
saber-beaked raptor
out into the parched wilderness. She searches
for moisture. She returns
from the desert, un axolotl
held gently aloft,las dosluchando
por vida.
The two swim toward us
through the acrid
heaven. Someone must learn
to welcome our distant
relatives, who can teach us
to breathe again, as we move
overland, just above the ground,
in flight, crying,
Ojalá! Ojalá!
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The Tolling of the Bell
By Peggy Brightman
Still, steel gray, old, corroded, it hangs
as bodies of innocents have hung down the centuries;
suddenly now the bell begins to toll.
The striking of the clapper spills fear into our veins.
Children hide behind their parents.
The world we call home is vanishing.
Where to turn? Heat a can of soup?
Listen to music of long-dead composers?
Gaze out over this valley half-clad
in golden leaves, waiting for winter?
Like the glaciers, public trust is melting fast.
In the speed of events, emergency brakes are failing.
Hands at the throat of Lady Liberty
are throttling her into silence.
We imagine her headlong fall:
her bronze-green beauty— born of a dream
“Liberté, egalité, fraternité” so often betrayed.
Enfeebled, will she collapse in a heap of rubble,
drown in the rising waters of New York Harbor—
extinguishing that light we steered by?
Is country a place simply to live?
Or a dream, folded carefully, stored half-forgotten in a vault,
its essence rising from the Lincoln Memorial,
dappled with fallen cherry blossoms?
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FROM THE ARCHIVES
Global
By Albert Haley
Environment, 11 May 2017
This morning, beneath a haze
of sunlight, they trench the earth
on the vacant lot across the street.
A 4-bedroom, 3-garage with a lake
view, city permitted, ready to rise.
A man with bandana leans
beside the rumbling truck, sweat
contouring his brow. Thumps
a leather glove against the chained
load and tells me tales of no pitting,
no corrosion, offering a pure
working soul’s homage to polyvinyl
chloride. Superior to copper
or galvanized steel, it will persist
without flaw, flex, keep
its peace should the earth quake.
“Gonna last a hundred years.”
He bootprints his way past,
leaving me to stare at clods,
wish I could return ten decades
from now and be the one to turn
the tap, the liquid testimony still
pouring out, urging the coolness
of liberty and not submitting
to anything but engineered
efficiencies routed underground.
My glass filling up with the sheen
of life that coats a thirsty throat
and inspires a person to look out
a window at the scoured desert
where the wind blows its own low
tune, whipping whiskers of sand
against abandoned bricks, stones,
the shallow wells of our intentions
mounding over grain by grain.
So different from today when
I notice the cloud puffs linking arms
at the horizon, hear welcome
drumbeats of thunder. Then comes
the rain and all of us take shelter.