POETRY UNIT - FOR ENGLISH 11 2020 Revisions & Additions...POETRY UNIT - FOR ENGLISH 11 – 2020 Revisions & Additions TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Ode to Dirt 3 2. Our Other Sister 3 3. Dandelion

POETRY UNIT - FOR ENGLISH 11 – 2020 Revisions & Additions TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Ode to Dirt 3

2. Our Other Sister 3

3. Dandelion 4

4. Entrance 4

5. The Traveling Onion 4

6. Tuesday 9:00 AM 5

7. The Summer Day 5

8. Proof of Life 6

9. Slow Children at Play 6

10. The Grammar Lesson 6

11. The Kitchen Shears Speak 7

12. Do You Love Me? 7

13. Sure 8

14. Sentimental Moment or Why Did the Baguette Cross the Road? 8

15. The Bagel 8

16. Kinship 9

17. Turtle Came to See Me 9

18. So Much Happiness 10

19. Fly in Our Salad 10

20. Nature Knows Its Math 10

21. And Later . . . 11

22. Wondrous 11

23. You Go to My Head 11

24. Taking One for the Team 12

25. Ode to a Blizzard 12

26. genetics 12

27. Parents Poem 13

28. Rain Changing to Snow 13

29. Spanglish 14

30. Amores Perros 14

31. Sleeping with the Chihauhua 15

32. History Lesson 15

33. Frequently Asked Questions: #7 15

34. Freedom 16

35. Polaroid Ode 16

36. We Are Not Responsible 16

37. What’s Broken 17

38. AAA Vacation Guide 17

39. Choices 17

40. More Dangerous Air 18

41. Blind Curse 18

42. Caged Bird 19

43. Dream Song 14 19

44. Dust of Snow 20

45. Frederick Douglass 20

46. Elegy for Smoking 20

47. Swatting Flies 21

Poetry Book –Eng. 11: 2020 Additions & Changes Mrs. Hartnett - Roy High School

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48. Today 21

49. Ethics 22

50. Quiet Places 22

51. The Dead 22

52. The Golden Years 23

53. Salutation 23

54. Not Waving But Drowning 23

55. My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold 23

56. Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota 24

57. Essay on the One Hand and on the Other 24

58. Haikus 24

59. little prayer 25

60. Killdeer 25

61. Communication 25

62. Mambo 26

62. Mambo (Translation) 26

63. Seventeen Funerals 27

64. What It Comes Down To 27

65. The Herdsman 27

66. For the Anniversary of My Death 28

67. The Chairs That No One Sits In 28


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1. Ode to Dirt Dear dirt, I am sorry I slighted you, I thought that you were only the background for the leading characters—the plants and animals and human animals. It’s as if I had loved only the stars and not the sky which gave them space in which to shine. Subtle, various, sensitive, you are the skin of our terrain, you’re our democracy. When I understood I had never honored you as a living equal, I was ashamed of myself, as if I had not recognized a character who looked so different from me, but now I can see us all, made of the same basic materials— cousins of that first exploding from nothing— in our intricate equation together. O dirt, help us find ways to serve your life, you who have brought us forth, and fed us, and who at the end will take us in and rotate with us, and wobble, and orbit. —Sharon Olds

2. Our Other Sister for Ellen The cruelest thing I did to my younger sister wasn't shooting a homemade blowdart into her knee, where it dangled for a breathless second before dropping off, but telling her we had another, older sister who'd gone away. What my motives were I can't recall: a whim, or was it some need of mine to toy with loss, to probe the ache of imaginary wounds? But that first sentence was like a strand of DNA

that replicated itself in coiling lies when my sister began asking her desperate questions. I called our older sister Isabel and gave her hazel eyes and long blonde hair. I had her run away to California where she took drugs and made hippie jewelry. Before I knew it, she'd moved to Santa Fe and opened a shop. She sent a postcard every year or so, but she'd stopped calling. I can still see my younger sister staring at me, her eyes widening with desolation then filling with tears. I can still remember how thrilled and horrified I was that something I'd just made up had that kind of power, and I can still feel the blowdart of remorse stabbing me in the heart as I rushed to tell her none of it was true. But it was too late. Our other sister had already taken shape, and we could not call her back from her life far away or tell her how badly we missed her. —Jeffrey Harrison


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3. Dandelion My science teacher said there are no monographs on the dandelion.

Unlike the Venus fly-trap or Calopogon pulchellus, it is not a plant worthy of scrutiny.

It goes on television between the poison squirt bottles, during commercial breakaways from Ricki Lake.

But that's how life parachutes to my home.

Home, where they make you do what you don't want to do.

Moms with Uzis of reproach, dads with their silencers. (My parents watch me closely because I am their jewel.)

So no one knows how strong a dandelion is inside, how its parts stick together, bract, involucre, pappus, how it clings to its fragile self.

There are 188 florets in a bloom, which might seem a peculiar number, but there are 188,000 square feet in the perfectly proportioned Wal-Mart, which allows for circulation without getting lost.

I wish I could grow like a dandelion, from gold to thin white hair, and be carried on a breeze to the next yard. —Julie Lechevsky

4. Entrance Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight, Out of the room that lets you feel secure. Infinity is open to your sight. Whoever you are. With eyes that have forgotten how to see From viewing things already too well-known, Lift up into the dark a huge, black tree And put it in the heavens: tall, alone. And you have made the world and all you see. It ripens like the words still in your mouth. And when at last you comprehend its truth, Then close your eyes and gently set it free. (After Rilke) —Dana Gioia

5. The Traveling Onion When I think how far the onion has traveled just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise all small forgotten miracles, crackly paper peeling on the drainboard, pearly layers in smooth agreement, the way the knife enters onion and onion falls apart on the chopping block, a history revealed. And I would never scold the onion for causing tears. It is right that tears fall for something small and forgotten. How at meal, we sit to eat, commenting on texture of meat or herbal aroma but never on the translucence of onion, now limp, now divided, or its traditionally honorable career: For the sake of others, disappear. —Naomi Shihab Nye


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6. Tuesday 9:00 AM A man standing at the bus stop reading the newspaper is on fire Flames are peeking out from beneath his collar and cuffs His shoes have begun to melt The woman next to him wants to mention it to him that he is burning but she is drowning Water is everywhere in her mouth and ears in her eyes A stream of water runs steadily from her blouse Another woman stands at the bus stop freezing to death She tries to stand near the man who is on fire to try to melt the icicles that have formed on her eyelashes and on her nostrils to stop her teeth long enough from chattering to say something to the woman who is drowning but the woman who is freezing to death has trouble moving with blocks of ice on her feet It takes the three some time to board the bus what with the flames and water and ice But when they finally climb the stairs and take their seats the driver doesn't even notice

that none of them has paid because he is tortured by visions and is wondering if the man who got off at the last stop was really being mauled to death by wild dogs. —Denver Butson

7. The Summer Day Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? —Mary Oliver


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8. Proof of Life Those small cuts and infections on my hands from splinters and thorns that show I have been working out of doors this week. The maddening peculiar purgatory of Bob Seeger and the Silver Bullet Band playing “Against the Wind” continuously for three days inside my head until on the fourth day it finally stops. The sound of clothes going around in the dryer at the other end of the house. Wanting from a very young age not to be a zombie sleepwalking through time. Leaving people, and being left by them. This catch-and-release version of life. The kidnappers send out a photograph of the hostage, grimacing, holding up a newspaper from yesterday. They call this “proof of life.” It means the captive is still alive. The day is blue with one high white cloud like a pilgrim going to Canterbury. There is a bird half-hidden in the shrub outside. Something he has eaten has made his chest feathers red. —Tony Hoagland

9. Slow Children at Play All the quick children have gone inside, called by their mothers to hurry-up-wash-your-hands honey-dinner’s-getting-cold, just-wait-till-your-father-gets-home- and only the slow children out on the lawns, marking off paths between fireflies, making soft little sounds with their mouths, ohs, that glow and go out and glow. And their slow mothers flickering, pale in the dusk, watching them turn in the gentle air, watching them twirling, their arms spread wide, thinking, These are my children, thinking, Where is their dinner? Where has their father gone? —Cecilia Woloch

10. The Grammar Lesson A noun's a thing. A verb's the thing it does. An adjective is what describes the noun. In "The can of beets is filled with purple fuzz" of and with are prepositions. The's an article, a can's a noun, a noun's a thing. A verb's the thing it does. A can can roll — or not. What isn't was or might be, might meaning not yet known. "Our can of beets is filled with purple fuzz" is present tense. While words like our and us are pronouns — i.e. it is moldy, they are icky brown. A noun's a thing; a verb's the thing it does. Is is a helping verb. It helps because filled isn't a full verb. Can's what our owns in "Our can of beets is filled with purple fuzz." See? There's almost nothing to it. Just memorize these rules...or write them down! A noun's a thing, a verb's the thing it does. The can of beets is filled with purple fuzz. —Steve Kowit


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11. The Kitchen Shears Speak This division must end. Again I'm forced to amputate the chicken's limb; slit the joint, clip the heart, snip wing from back, strip fat from flesh, separate everything from itself. I'm used, thrown down by unknown hands, by cowards who can't bear to do the constant severing. Open and close! Open and close. I work and never tell. Though mostly made of mouth, I have no voice, no legs. My arms are bent, immobile pinions gripped by strangers. I fear the grudge things must hold. I slice rose from bush, skin from muscle, head from carrot, root from lettuce, tail from fish. I break the bone. What if they join against me, uncouple me, throw away one-half, or hide my slashed eye? Or worse, what if I never die? What I fear most is being caught, then rusted rigid, punished like a prehistoric bird, fossilized, and changed into a winged lizard, trapped while clawing air, stuck in stone with open beak. —Christianne Balk

12. Do You Love Me? She's twelve and she's asking the dog, who does, but who speaks in tongues, whose feints and gyrations are themselves parts of speech. They're on the back porch and I don't really mean to be taking this in but once I've heard I can't stop listening. Again and again she asks, and the good dog sits and wiggles, leaps and licks. Imagine never asking. Imagine why: so sure you wouldn't dare, or couldn't care less. I wonder if the dog's guileless brown eyes can lie, if the perfect canine lack of abstractions might not be a bit like the picture books she "read" as a child, before her parents' lips shaped the daily miracle of speech and kisses, and the words were not lead and weighed only air, and did not mean so meanly. "Do you love me?" she says and says, until the dog, sensing perhaps its own awful speechlessness, tries to bolt, but she holds it by the collar and will not let go, until, having come closer, I hear the rest of it. I hear it all. She's got the dog's furry jowls in her hands, she's speaking precisely into its laid-back, quivering ears: "Say it," she hisses, "say it to me." —Robert Wrigley


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13. Sure I miss my brother sure he drank Robitussin washed down with beer sure he smoked dope & shot heroin & went to prison for selling to an undercover cop & sure he robbed the town’s only hot dog stand, Gino’s like I overheard while I laid on my bed staring up at the stars under slanted curtains & sure he used to leave his two year old son alone so he could score on the street but before all this my brother sure used to swing me up onto his back, run me around dizzy through hallways and rooms & we’d laugh & laugh fall onto the bed finally and he’d tickle me to death sure —Arlene Tribbia

14. Sentimental Moment or Why Did the Baguette Cross the Road? Don't fill up on bread I say absent-mindedly The servings here are huge My son, whose hair may be receding a bit, says Did you really just say that to me? What he doesn't know is that when we're walking together, when we get to the curb I sometimes start to reach for his hand —Robert Hershon

15. The Bagel I stopped to pick up the bagel rolling away in the wind, annoyed with myself for having dropped it as if it were a portent. Faster and faster it rolled, with me running after it bent low, gritting my teeth, and I found myself doubled over and rolling down the street head over heels, one complete somersault after another like a bagel and strangely happy with myself. —David Ignatow


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16. Kinship Two sets of family stories, one long and detailed, about many centuries of island ancestors, all living on the same tropical farm... The other side of the family tells stories that are brief and vague, about violence in the Ukraine, which Dad's parents had to flee forever, leaving all their loved ones behind. They don't even know if anyone survived. When Mami tells her flowery tales of Cuba, she fills the twining words with relatives. But when I ask my Ukrainian-Jewish-American grandma about her childhood in a village near snowy Kiev, all she reveals is a single memory of ice-skating on a frozen pond. Apparently, the length of a grown-up's growing-up story is determined by the difference between immigration and escape. —Margarita Engle

17. Turtle Came to See Me The first story I ever write is a bright crayon picture of a dancing tree, the branches tossed by island wind. I draw myself standing beside the tree, with a colorful parrot soaring above me, and a magical turtle clasped in my hand, and two yellow wings fluttering on the proud shoulders of my ruffled Cuban rumba dancer's fancy dress. In my California kindergarten class, the teacher scolds me: REAL TREES DON'T LOOK LIKE THAT. It's the moment when I first begin to learn that teachers can be wrong. They have never seen the dancing plants of Cuba. —Margarita Engle


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18. So Much Happiness It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. With sadness there is something to rub against, a wound to tend with lotion and cloth. When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up, something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change. But happiness floats. It doesn’t need you to hold it down. It doesn’t need anything. Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing, and disappears when it wants to. You are happy either way. Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house and now live over a quarry of noise and dust cannot make you unhappy. Everything has a life of its own, it too could wake up filled with possibilities of coffee cake and ripe peaches, and love even the floor which needs to be swept, the soiled linens and scratched records . . . Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you into everything you touch. You are not responsible. You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it, and in that way, be known. —Naomi Shihab Nye

19. Fly in Our Salad The sweet greens we spun—the baby kale and baby chard, beet greens also in their infancy, oak leaf lettuce in two varieties, littlest shoots of arugula—and the last red onion from the skin-littered bin,

the grape tomatoes and gherkins. All of it so tender so early in spring, everything eager to grow, and the two of us eager to eat them dressed in a mustard vinaigrette and plated at the outside table. Good china and white cloth napkins. Your wine breathing in its glass. And just as we toasted the season with a clink, there arrived a fat, black fly, which licked its chops and gazed at us and winked its many eyes. —Gary Whitehead

20. Nature Knows Its Math Divide the year into seasons, four, subtract the snow then add some more green, a bud, a breeze, a whispering behind the trees, and here beneath the rain-scrubbed sky orange poppies multiply. —Joan Graham


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21. And Later . . . I take my kaleidoscope off the shelf, look through the little hole at the end of the cardboard tube; I turn and turn and turn and turn, letting the crystals shift into strange and beautiful patterns, letting the pieces fall wherever they will. —Jen Bryant

22. Wondrous I’m driving home from school when the radio talk turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit the here and now of the freeway at rush hour, travel back into the past, where my mother is reading to my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggs and dying, and though this is the fifth time Charlotte has died, my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math, how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief multiplies the one preceding it, how the author tried seventeen times to record the words She died alone without crying, seventeen takes and a short walk during which he called himself ridiculous, a grown man crying for a spider he’d spun out of the silk thread of invention— wondrous how those words would come back and make him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice ten years after the day she died—the catch, the rasp, the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m OK. —Sarah Freligh

23. You Go to My Head I sang my songs so much that they became the soundtrack for my dreams, the melody of my moods, a room I lived in, and a balm for my wounds. I sang my songs enough to know them backward and forward, enough to wonder if they could lift me from hometown haunts to center stage. I’d sung my songs enough to think I could take on Baltimore’s best talent at the Harlem Theatre Amateur Hour and maybe even win. If you sing a song enough, it can go to your head that way. —Carole Boston Weatherford


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24. Taking One for the Team We practiced together, sweat and stained. We pummeled each other and laughed off pain. Teams may disagree, may tease, may blame. Teams may bicker and whine, but get down for the game. You had my back. We fought the fight. And though our score was less last night, we're walking tall. Our team came through and stuck together like Crazy Glue. I'm proud to say I lost with you. —Sara Holbrook

25. Ode to a Blizzard O! wonderful for weight and whiteness! Ideolog whose absolutes Are always proven right By white and then More white and white again, Winning the same argument year After year by making the opposition Disappear! O! dear miniature of infinity with no End in sight and no snow- Flake exactly like Another, all A little different no Matter how many may fall,

Just like our own DNA or the human face Eternal! O! still keep covering the street And sidewalks, cemeteries, even Our twice-shoveled drive, And all that is alive, With geometries that sleet Will freeze into Death's Impromptu vision of a heaven Wholly white! For we know who your sponsor is, whose will You so immensely serve, Whose chill is more severe Than any here. Though his name may be unspoken, His commandments are unbroken, And every monument that you erect Belongs to him! —Tom Disch

26. genetics My mother has a gap between her two front teeth. So does Daddy Gunnar. Each child in this family has the same space connecting us. Our baby brother, Roman, was born pale as dust. His soft brown curls and eyelashes stop people on the street. Whose angel child is this? they want to know. When I say, My brother, the people wear doubt thick as a cape until we smile and the cape falls. —Jaqueline Woodson


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27. Parents Poem When people ask how, I say a fire took them. And then they look at me like I'm the most pitiful thing in the world. So sometimes I just shrug and say They just died, that's all. A fire took their bodies. That's all. I can still feel their voices and hugs and laughing. Sometimes. Sometimes I can hear my daddy calling my name. Lonnie sometimes. And sometimes Locomotion come on over here a minute. I want to show you something. And then I see his big hands holding something out to me. It used to be the four of us. At night we went to sleep. In the morning we woke up and ate breakfast. Daddy worked for Con Edison. You ever saw him? Climbing out of a manhole? Yellow tape keeping the cars from coming down the block. An orange sign that said Men Working. I still got his hat. It's light blue with CON EDISON in white letters. Mama was a receptionist. When you called the office where she worked, she answered the phone like this

Graftman Paper Products, how may I help you? It was her work voice. And when you said something like Ma, it's me. her voice went back to normal. To our mama's voice Hey Sugar. You behaving? Is the door locked? That stupid fire couldn't take all of them. Nothing could do that. Nothing. —Jaqueline Woodson

28. Rain Changing to Snow He came home from middle school with a wet kitten tucked inside his black leather jacket. He'd found it shivering in the tall grass flattened by rain. It could only belong to him for fifteen minutes and it understood that, I think. Though just a few weeks old, already it expected disappointment. Yet it began to purr, this scrap of cloud-gray fur, as he drew it forth to show me. Castaway (its name he said), so lonely and hungry after the shipwreck of another day at school. —Connie Wanek


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29. Spanglish pues estoy creando spanglish bi-cultural systems scientific lexicographical inter-textual integrations two expressions existentially wired two dominant languages continentally abrazándose en colloquial combate en las aceras del soil imperio spanglish emerges control pandillaje sobre territorio bi-lingual las novelas mexicanas mixing with radiorocknroll condimented cocina lore immigrant/migrant nasal mispronouncements baraja chismeteos social club hip-hop prieto street salsa corner soul enmixturando spanish pop farándula standard english classroom with computer technicalities spanglish is literally perfect spanglish is ethnically snobbish spanglish is cara-holy inteligencia which u.s. slang do you speak? —Tato Laviera

30. Amores Perros Sometimes I love you the way my dog loves his all-beef chew bone, worrying the knuckled corners from every angle, mandibles working like pistons. His eyes glaze over with a faraway look that says he won’t quit till he reaches the soft marrow. His paws prop the bone upright, it slips—he can’t clutch it tight enough, bite hard enough. A dog’s paws weren’t meant for gripping. And sometimes I love you the way my dog brushes his flank nonchalant against my legs, then flops on the floor beside me while I read or watch TV. His heft warms. One of us is hungry, the other needs to pee. But we sit, content as wildflowers. Minutes pass. Hours. —Angela Narciso Torres


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31. Sleeping with the Chihauhua In the evening she comes to me like a child ready for bed. She slips under covers, curls into my curves or stretches against my spine. Some have said they fear I might crush her, but we're a tender pair, each aware of the warmth and the other. I knew a woman once who kept an orphaned antelope, let it roam her kitchen, sleep in her bed, musky scent and hooves. This dog looks like a small deer, poised and silent in the lawn, but at night, she is a dark body, lean and long against the lavender cotton of my summer sleeping. We are bone and bone, muscle and muscle, and underneath each surface a quiet and insistent pulse. —Tami Haaland

32. History Lesson I am four in this photograph, standing on a wide strip of Mississippi beach, my hands on the flowered hips of a bright bikini. My toes dig in, curl around wet sand. The sun cuts the rippling Gulf in flashes with each tidal rush. Minnows dart at my feet glinting like switchblades. I am alone except for my grandmother, other side

of the camera, telling me how to pose. It is 1970, two years after they opened the rest of this beach to us, forty years since the photograph where she stood on a narrow plot of sand marked colored, smiling, her hands on the flowered hips of a cotton meal-sack dress. —Natasha Trethewey

33. Frequently Asked Questions: #7 Is it difficult to get away from it all once you’ve had a child?

I am swaying in the galley—working to appease this infant who is not

fussing but will be fussing if I don’t move— when a black steward enters the cramped space

at the back of the plane. He stands by the food carts prepping his service. Then he is holding his throat

the way we hold our throats when we think we are going to die. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. He is crying. My God. What they did to us.

I am swaying lest my brown baby girl make a nuisance of herself, and the steward is crying honest man tears.

Seeing you holding your daughter like that—for the first time, I understand what they did to us. All those women sold away

from their babies, he whispers. I am at a loss now. Perhaps I could fabricate an image to represent this

agony, but the steward has walked into the galley of history. There is nothing figurative about us. —Camille T. Dungy


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34. Freedom Freedom will not come Today, this year Nor ever Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right As the other fellow has To stand On my two feet And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I’m dead. I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread. Freedom Is a strong seed Planted In a great need. I live here, too. I want my freedom Just as you. —Langston Hughes

35. Polaroid Ode O four cornered room in which we tuck the ever- developing light of our warm bodies. O snapshot, O ether -ized flash of childhood—swarm of chemicals murmuring together to form empty sky, exposing day’s blue dissolve from blue. O bad 70s plaid sofas & pearl snapshirts, costumes fading like fisher-price cars on washed out lawns. O moon

boots without stars. O family re-gathering as light- seep, as grief. O ablation & emulsion & actual moon— you day-lurker, you— balloon I imagine deflating above our duplex—why the resistance? Tell me who was in our living room to capture this instant, whose hand was shaking us into existence. —Cori Winrock

36. We Are Not Responsible We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives. We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions. We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.

Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honor your reservations. In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on. Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments.

If you cannot understand English, you will be moved out of the way. In the event of a loss, you’d better look out for yourself. Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle your frightful claims. Our handlers lost your luggage and we are unable to find the key to your legal case.

You were detained for interrogation because you fit the profile. You are not presumed to be innocent if the police have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet. It’s not our fault you were born wearing a gang color. It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights.

Step aside, please, while our officer inspects your bad attitude. You have no rights we are bound to respect. Please remain calm, or we can’t be held responsible for what happens to you. — Harryette Mullen


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37. What’s Broken The slate black sky. The middle step of the back porch. And long ago

my mother’s necklace, the beads rolling north and south. Broken

the rose stem, water into drops, glass knobs on the bedroom door. Last summer’s

pot of parsley and mint, white roots shooting like streamers through the cracks.

Years ago the cat’s tail, the bird bath, the car hood’s rusted latch. Broken

little finger on my right hand at birth— I was pulled out too fast. What hasn’t

been rent, divided, split? Broken the days into nights, the night sky

into stars, the stars into patterns I make up as I trace them

with a broken-off blade of grass. Possible, unthinkable,

the cricket’s tiny back as I lie on the lawn in the dark, my heart

a blue cup fallen from someone’s hands. —Dorianne Laux

38. AAA Vacation Guide “Philadelphia isn’t as bad as Philadelphians say it is.” —Billboard on Interstate 95 Paris in the Spring, Autumn in New York, Singers pair a city with a season As though it belonged to it all year long. They should try to put a few more to work: Trenton in winter needs a good reason; Scranton in summer seems so very wrong. How about Cincinnati in the spring? Autumn in Passaic, or in Oakland? Some cities just lack glamour and appeal, And there is no point arguing the thing. No one reads through stacks of brochures to spend A honeymoon in Allentown. Let’s get real. Most places on the map, you must believe, No one wants to visit, only to leave. —Ernest Hilbert

39. Choices I go to the mountain side of the house to cut saplings, and clear a view to snow on the mountain. But when I look up, saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in the uppermost branches. I don’t cut that one. I don’t cut the others either. Suddenly, in every tree, an unseen nest where a mountain would be. —Tess Gallagher


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40. More Dangerous Air Newsmen call it the Cuban Missile Crisis. Teachers say it's the end of the world. At school, they instruct us to look up and watch the Cuban-cursed sky. Search for a streak of light. Listen for a piercing shriek, the whistle that will warn us as poisonous A-bombs zoom close. Hide under a desk. Pretend that furniture is enough to protect us against perilous flames. Radiation. Contamination. Toxic breath. Each air-raid drill is sheer terror, but some of the city kids giggle. They don't believe that death is real. They've never touched a bullet, or seen a vulture, or made music by shaking the jawbone of a mule. When I hide under my frail school desk, my heart grows as rough and brittle as the slab of wood that fails to protect me from reality's gloom. —Margarita Engle

41. Blind Curse You could drive blind for those two seconds and they would be forever. I think that as a diesel truck passes us eight miles east of Mission. Churning through the storm, heedless of the hill sliding away. There isn’t much use to curse but I do. Words fly away, tumbling invisibly toward the unseen point where the prairie and sky meet. The road is like that in those seconds, nothing but the blind white side of creation. You’re there somewhere, a tiny struggling cell. You just might be significant but you might not be anything. Forever is a space of split time from which to recover after the mass passes. My curse flies out there somewhere, and then I send my prayer into the wake of the diesel truck headed for Sioux Falls one hundred and eighty miles through the storm. —Simon J. Ortiz


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42. Caged Bird A free bird leaps on the back of the wind and floats downstream till the current ends and dips his wing in the orange sun rays and dares to claim the sky. But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom. The free bird thinks of another breeze and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn and he names the sky his own But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. The caged bird sings with a fearful trill

of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom. —Maya Angelou

43. Dream Song 14 Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes as bad as achilles, who loves people and valiant art, which bores me. And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into mountains or sea or sky, leaving behind: me, wag. —John Berryman


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44. Dust of Snow The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued. —Robert Frost

45. Frederick Douglass When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all, when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole, reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians: this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien, this man, superb in love and logic, this man shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric, not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone, but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing. —Robert Hayden

46. Elegy for Smoking It’s not the drug I miss but all those minutes we used to steal outside the library, under restaurant awnings, out on porches, by the quiet fields. And how kind it used to make us when we’d laugh and throw our heads back and watch the dragon’s breath float from our mouths, all ravenous and doomed. Which is why I quit, of course, like almost everyone, and stay inside these days, staring at my phone, chewing toothpicks and figuring the bill, while out the window the smokers gather in their same old constellations, like memories of ourselves. Or like the remnants of some decimated tribe, come down out of the hills to tell their stories in the lightly falling rain— to be, for a moment, simply there and nowhere else, faces glowing each time they lift to their lips the little flame. —Patrick Phillips


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47. Swatting Flies You think of yourself now as having been A sweet boy, the kind of kid Who wouldn’t hurt a fly, But let us not forget that In summer you kept a swatter nearby.

You liked the feel of the wire Handle in your hand, How easy it was To wield, light and nimble As a riding crop.

The business end was a square Of blue plastic mesh, stippled To let the air pass through So that in the act of wrath You didn’t fan the fly to safety.

Granted, most days the killing You did was passive. Sometimes You even swatted your own bare calf, Leaving a red welt You felt vanish

Like the ring of condensation Evaporating off the armrest Of the chair in which you sat reading Lord of the Flies But don’t you remember

Those afternoons something That had nothing to do with the flies Incited you to slaughter them? Then you had no sympathy for the ones Who wrung their hands among

The breadcrumbs in the kitchen, Begging you for mercy, Or the ones you found Making love on the windowsills In the upstairs bedrooms

Where they had believed Themselves safe. The only thing that stopped you Killing them was when The blue square grew

So clogged with the dead The living felt a breath of air That made them take flight Like people who flee a house Moments before the drone strike. —Austin Smith

48. Today If ever there were a spring day so perfect, so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage, indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants from their snow-covered cottage so they could walk out, holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white, well, today is just that kind of day. —Billy Collins


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49. Ethics In ethics class so many years ago our teacher asked this question every fall: if there were a fire in a museum which would you save, a Rembrandt painting or an old woman who hadn't many years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs caring little for pictures or old age we'd opt one year for life, the next for art and always half-heartedly. Sometimes the woman borrowed my grandmother's face leaving her usual kitchen to wander some drafty, half imagined museum. One year, feeling clever, I replied why not let the woman decide herself? Linda, the teacher would report, eschews the burdens of responsibility. This fall in a real museum I stand

before a real Rembrandt, old woman, or nearly so, myself. The colors within this frame are darker than autumn, darker even than winter — the browns of earth, though earth's most radiant elements burn through the canvas. I know now that woman and painting and season are almost one and all beyond saving by children. —Linda Pastan

50. Quiet Places Some people on bus seats shake at the shoulders, Stoned Elvises trying to dance after the gig.

Some walk into the rain and look like they’re smiling, Running mascara writes sad bitter letters on their faces.

Some drive their cars into lay-bys or park edges And cradle the steering-wheel looking like headless drivers.

Some sink their open mouths into feather pillows And tremble on the bed like beached dolphins.

Some people are bent as question marks when they weep And some are straight as exclamation marks.

Some are soaking in emotional dew when they wake, Salt street maps etched into their faces.

Some find rooms and fall to the floor as if praying to Allah. Noiseless Faces contorted in that silent scream that seems like laughter.

Why is there not a tissue-giver? A man who looks for tears, Who makes the finest silk tissues and offers them for free?

It seems to me that around each corner, beneath each stone, Are humans quietly looking for a place to cry on their own. —Lemm Sissay

51. The Dead The dead are always looking down on us, they say. while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich, they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heaven as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth, and when we lie down in a field or on a couch, drugged perhaps by the hum of a long afternoon, they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes —Billy Collins


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52. The Golden Years All I do these drawn-out days is sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge where there are no pheasants to be seen and last time I looked, no ridge. I could drive over to Quail Falls and spend the day there playing bridge, but the lack of a falls and the absence of quail would only remind me of Pheasant Ridge. I know a widow at Fox Run and another with a condo at Smokey Ledge. One of them smokes, and neither can run, so I’ll stick to the pledge I made to Midge. Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge? I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge. —Billy Collins

53. Salutation O generation of the thoroughly smug and thoroughly uncomfortable, I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun, I have seen them with untidy families, I have seen their smiles full of teeth and heard ungainly laughter. And I am happier than you are, And they were happier than I am; And the fish swim in the lake and do not even own clothing. —Ezra Pound

54. Not Waving But Drowning Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. Poor chap, he always loved larking And now he’s dead It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, They said. Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning. —Stevie Smith

55. My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. —William Wordsworth


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56. Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year’s horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life. —James Wright

57. Essay on the One Hand and on the Other Consider the palms. They are faces, eyes closed, their five spread fingers soft exclamations, sadness or surprise. They have smile lines, sorrow lines, like faces. Like faces, they are hard to read. Somehow the palms, though they have held my life piece by piece, seem young and pale. So much has touched them, nothing has remained. They are innocent, maybe, though they guess they have a darker side that they cannot grasp. The backs of my hands, indeed, are so different that sometimes I think they are not mine, shadowy from the sun, all bones and strain, but time on my hands, blood on my hands— for such things I have never blamed my hands. One hand writes. Sometimes it writes a reminder on the other hand, which knows it will never write,

though it has learned, in secret, how to type. That is sad, perhaps, but the dominant hand is sadder, with its fear that it will never, not really, be written on. They are like an old couple at home. All day, each knows exactly where the other is. They must speak, though how is a mystery, so rarely do they touch, so briefly come together, now and then to wash, maybe in prayer. I consider my hands, palms up. Empty, I say, though it is exactly then that they are weighing not a particular stone or loaf I have chosen but everything, everything, the whole tall world, finding it light, finding it light as air. —James Richardson

58. Haikus The summer grasses All that remains Of brave soldiers dreams —Matsuo Basho The nightingale is singing, Its small mouth Open. —Buson Don't strike the fly! He wrings his hands! He wrings his feet! —Issa Koi Among heart-shaped leaves the white fish gleams, red tail. Soft lotuses sleep. —Jennifer Wong


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59. little prayer let ruin end here let him find honey where there was once a slaughter let him enter the lion’s cage & find a field of lilacs let this be the healing & if not let it be —Danez Smith

60. Killdeer You know how it pretends to have a broken wing to lure predators away from its nest, how it staggers just out of reach . . . if, at this moment, you’re feeling metaphorical, nest can be the whatever inside us that we think needs protection, the whatever that is small & hasn’t yet found its way. Like us it has lived so long on scraps, on what others have left behind, it thinks it could live on air, on words, forever almost, it thinks it would be better to let the predator kill it than to turn its back on that child again, forgetting that one lives inside the other. —Nick Flynn

61. Communication This color was never stirred in a can. It’s like the underside of God’s tongue. The very thought of reproducing it is like saying, I want this room done in that woman’s laugh after a joke that was only mildly funny but you love the person who told it and the one who laughed equally. No, not remotely salmon; not sienna. Not melon, I don’t care what stage of ripeness. Tincture of fresh clay, of linden tea plus one drop of clover honey? No. It’s more like the glowy heart in the opening credits of I Love Lucy— which was filmed in black and white so you have to guess at its hue. But that’s the color it would have been. It’s like the imagined defying the real in an unusually confrontational way. Once you’ve seen it a kind of zen descends like a cape over your shoulders. You won’t always be trying to impress people. I can’t believe how long you’ve lived here without seeing it, though it lasts only a few seconds every day about this time. I saw it the very first night I moved here. Stand over there, look toward the city but only peripherally. This way, don’t face it full-on; turn slightly left, there, breathe shallowly. Look up without tipping your head back. Now you’re too tense, you’re not trying, no, the light has changed it’s gone —J. Allyn Rosser


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62. Mambo Contra un cielo topacio y ventanales estrellados con delirantes trinitarias y rojas, sensuales cayenas; el fragante céfiro verpertino oloroso de almendros y azahar de la India; sobre las baldozsas de diseños moriscos, con zapatillas de tacón aguja, vestidos descotados y amplias polleras; sus largas, obsidianas cabelleras a la usanza de la época; perfumadas, trigueñas, risueñas, mis tías bailaban el mambo canturreando, “Doctor, mañana no me saca ud. la muela, aunque me muera del dolor.” Aquellas tardes en mi infancia cuando mis tías eran muchanchas y me pertenecían, y yo bailaba cobijado entre sus polleras, nuestras vidas eran un mambo feliz que no se olvida —Jaime Manrique

62. Mambo (Translation) Against a topaz sky and huge windows starry with delirious heartsease and sensual red cayenne; the sweet twilight breeze fragrant with almond and Indian orange; on the Moorish tiles, wearing their spike-heeled shoes, lowcut dresses and wide swirling skirts; their long obsidian hairdos in the style of the time; perfumed, olive-skinned, smiling, my aunts danced the mambo and sang: “Doctor, tomorrow, you can’t pull my tooth even if I die of the pain.” Those evenings of my childhood when my aunts were young and belonged to me, and I danced hiding in their skirts, our lives were a happy mambo— I remember. — translated by Edith Grossman


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63. Seventeen Funerals Seventeen suns rising in seventeen bedroom windows. Thirty-four eyes blooming open with the light of one more morning. Seventeen reflections in the bathroom mirror. Seventeen backpacks or briefcases stuffed with textbooks or lesson plans. Seventeen good mornings at kitchen breakfasts and seventeen goodbyes at front doors. Seventeen drives through palm-lined streets and miles of crammed highways to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School at 5901 Pine Island Road. The first bell ringing-in one last school day on February fourteenth, 2018. Seventeen echoes of footsteps down hallways for five class periods: algebra, poetry, biology, art, history. Seventeen hands writing on whiteboards or taking notes at their desks until the first gunshot at 2:21pm. One AR-15 rifle in the hands of a nineteen year old mind turning hate for himself into hate for others, into one-hundred fifty bullets fired in six minutes through building number twelve. Seventeen dead carried down hallways they walked, past cases of trophies they won, flyers for clubs they belonged to, lockers they won’t open again. Seventeen Valentine’s Day dates broken and cards unopened. Seventeen bodies to identify, dozens of photo albums to page through and remember their lives. Seventeen caskets and burial garments to choose for them. Seventeen funerals to attend in twelve days. Seventeen graves dug and headstones placed—all marked with the same date of death. Seventeen names: Alyssa. Helena. Scott. Martin—seventeen absentees forever—Nicholas. Aaron. Jamie. Luke—seventeen closets to clear out—Christopher. Cara. Gina. Joaquin—seventeen empty beds—Alaina. Meadow. Alex. Carmen. Peter—seventeen reasons to rebel with the hope these will be the last seventeen to be taken by one of three-hundred-ninety-three-million guns in America. —Richard Blanco

64. What It Comes Down To It happened in the spring, A false spring, true, Still, Birth seemed almost possible In that shifting season.

Then blood, and starlight Slipped away from a very small star.

I even had, secretively, names I liked. One was Tess, The others don't matter.

Later My wife cried on her hands and knees On the kitchen floor.

Suddenly the whole world came down To a woman crying. —Matthew Graham

65. The Herdsman I'm herdsman of a flock. The sheep are my thoughts And my thoughts are all sensations. I think with my eyes and my ears And my hands and feet And nostrils and mouth. To think a flower is to see and smell it. To eat a fruit is to sense its savor. And that is why, when I feel sad, In a day of heat, because of so much joy And lay me down in the grass to rest And close my sun-warmed eyes, I feel my whole body relaxed in reality And know the whole truth and am happy. —Fernando Pessoa


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66. For the Anniversary of My Death Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me And the silence will set out Tireless traveler Like the beam of a lightless star Then I will no longer Find myself in life as in a strange garment Surprised at the earth And the love of one woman And the shamelessness of men As today writing after three days of rain Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease And bowing not knowing to what —W. S. Merwin

67. The Chairs That No One Sits In You see them on porches and on lawns down by the lakeside, usually arranged in pairs implying a couple who might sit there and look out at the water or the big shade trees. The trouble is you never see anyone sitting in these forlorn chairs though at one time it must have seemed a good place to stop and do nothing for a while. Sometimes there is a little table between the chairs where no one is resting a glass or placing a book facedown. It might be none of my business, but it might be a good idea one day for everyone who placed those vacant chairs

on a veranda or a dock to sit down in them for the sake of remembering whatever it was they thought deserved to be viewed from two chairs side by side with a table in between. The clouds are high and massive that day. The woman looks up from her book. The man takes a sip of his drink. Then there is nothing but the sound of their looking, the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird then another, cries of joy or warning— it passes the time to wonder which. —Billy Collins


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Index – edit this!

Poems about death: 8,13, 18, 25, 44, 47, 51, 61, 62,

64

Poems about relationships: 12, 18, 21, 23, 28, 29, 41, 44,

50

Poems about family: 2, 9, 13, 14, 16, 25, 26, 33, 38,

47, 49, 56, 62

Poems about fear or pain: 6, 8, 16, 18, 22, 33, 36, 37, 38,

40, 43, 46, 62

Poems about loneliness: 12, 16, 29, 46, 51

Poems that are whimsical: 2, 5, 6, 10, 11, 14, 15, 24, 31,

48

Poems that are odd or intriguing: 19, 20, 22, 28, 41, 49, 52, 53,

54, 58, 60, 63

Poems that are painful: 6, 12, 13, 17, 26, 34, 42, 43, 46,

55

Poems about nature or animals: 1, 3, 4, 7, 17, 20, 32, 34, 35, 36,

37, 40, 42, 45, 53, 56, 57, 60,

63, 65

Poems in or containing Spanish: 27, 59

Poems about race relationships: 26, 30, 38

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POETRY UNIT - FOR ENGLISH 11 2020 Revisions & Additions...POETRY UNIT - FOR ENGLISH 11 – 2020 Revisions & Additions TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Ode to Dirt 3 2. Our Other Sister 3 3. Dandelion