Poem of the Day

Poem of the Day

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July Poems 2007

Insomnia

by Elizabeth Bishop

The moon in the bureau mirror

looks out a million miles

(and perhaps with pride, at herself,

but she never, never smiles)

far and away beyond sleep, or

perhaps she is a daytime sleeper.

By the universe deserted,

she'd tell it to go to hell,

and she'd find a body of water,

or a mirror, on which to dwell.

So wrap up care in a cobweb

and drop it down the well

into that world inverted

where left is always right,

where the shadows are really the body,

where we stay awake all night,

where the heavens are shallow as the sea

is now deep, and you love me.

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January Poems 2007

August 1999: Light Is a Measure of Time

by Ellen Wade Beals

Scientists have found the oldest

point in the universe: a galaxy filled

with new stars and all day long

I've been thinking about my mother.

How long it has been since

the nun came to fetch me from class

so I could wait for my brother to take me home,

even though I was in trouble

for using CliffNotes in my MacBeth paper.

I practiced driving on the way,

Jack tossed the keys to me, figuring, perhaps,

concentration would hold us together.

All of us kids orbited around

her bed. I drove pretty good, I said

and she told me, "That's nice, honey,

now go get something to eat."

This new galaxy, the paper says,

looks young to scientists because

the deeper they look back in space,

the further they look back in time.

When I look back, I see her

bald as an irradiated nestling,

not silver-haired and regal, not the young

woman with the finger-waved Marcel who smiles

from the photo in the scrapbook.

This new galaxy may look as it was

a few billion years after the Big Bang

so scientists are trying to see how worlds form,

how we coalesce from the sea of light elements.

My father and mother met reaching

for a piece of banana cream pie

at the cafeteria of the Edgewater

Laundry where they worked.

Along with the Hubble, astronomers use

a spectrograph and computers to separate

overlapping images and uncover the distant galaxy.

One day she'd wear blue shoes, the next,

the pumps were black, so she'd call from her closet,

asking would I be a good girl and transfer

things to her matching pocketbook.

I'd put in her wallet, the chintzy eyeglass and cigarette

cases, the lipstick worn to a parabola,

only tobacco bits, bobby pins,

or a sticky red pill left in the lining.

This oldest galaxy is called Sharon,

after the sister of one of the astronomers.

My mother and I have the same middle name: Marie.

Through my myopic lens of memory, I see my mother,

the shopping bag of library books at her feet.

She glances up from the pages to watch with me

Laugh-In, Burke's Law, or Man from U.N.C.L.E.

those waves still lingering somewhere perhaps.

It is not often I consider the heavens,

physics, or universal truths

but today it consoled me to think time never breaks

nor does light stop, but continues.

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October Poems 2006

somewhere i have never travelled...

by e.e.cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open alwyas petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skillfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending

nothing which we are to perceive in this world

equals the power of your intense fragility:whose texture

compels me with the colour of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens;only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

"a perfect day for bananafish..."