The Departure of Job

by Anna Kamienska

Get up Job
get up earlier than
a water-carrier with his clattering buckets
earlier than the nightwatchman going to bed
get up before merchants raise themselves
and spread the motley bustle of the day
get up when in silence we can hear in a stable
only the clatter of horses

Get up to be alone in the silence of His presence
Look about the earth
All still breathes with sleep
You are already old
but God loves Job
just as he is

It's good you got up so early
because people might say you went mad
Your chin trembles with joy
and you spread your arms wide like a lover
in order to embrace earth and sky

Job
it was worth so much suffering
to know God's love in old age
Job
you silly old codger
you laugh and cry
fall down in the grass
get up wet with dew

Job
you suffered
so your heart could grow
and could contain everything

Lucky Job
I see you chatting with clouds
and with the light of dawn
I see you departing to embrace
the huge rising sun
with the shout Lord Lord

Job and a Woman

by Anna Kamienska

Job
I took you in when you were sick and poor
look I still have your shirt of rough cloth
a peasant's shirt with stains of blood and pus
that won't come out

Job
I came to you young and healthy
you didn't ask then about my dowry
You often screamed in sleep
quarreled with God
At other times you tossed in sleeplessness
as in fire
I cooled you with kisses

Clearly life is not a precious enough gift
You're always the first the lonely the suffering
the not understood
the great in anger and in misfortune
like a wind
I am only a body
that warms up this fierce old age of yours

Job
sometimes I think
That God bound us for good reason
Body and wind are a well-matched couple
like one person
So don't push me away Job
when there's a change of fate
don't be like the others
I do not want anything from you
only to be with you
it's very difficult Job
to be the body of a wind

Don't be so haughty in your restraint
you who used to lie in dirt
get to know how other tears burn
not only your own

But Job left
whispering Lord Lord

The Silence of Job

by Anna Kamienska

Job
you whose mouth was
eloquent as ripples of rain
when you were arguing with God
about your morsel of life
why were you silent
when you got back everything
life health riches
almost a second happiness
Why don't you protest now
You became as meek as the sea-grass
silent as a stone on sand
You seem to scowl when you look
mutter when you talk

You had a mouth full of arguments
like a harlot hurling insults
when you clamored for your due
Your loud No resounded to the heavens
your Yes is like the peep of a night bird
Explain why misery injury and suffering
are fluent as teachers
while an everyday calm
searches for words
stammering like a schoolboy
Perhaps you wrapped yourself in silence
as a cloak against the world
against the storm of events of friendships of loves
from which only troubles come
Perhaps you pretend to be humble out of conceit
perhaps you think
        I have borne the inhuman
        I am chosen in happiness and in pain
Be careful Job
which of these silences
is your silence
Perhaps it troubles God
more than your protests
Do you think you've eluded human fate
because once you wriggled out
You again have a lot
a lot to lose
You're as safe as everyone else
as a fly trapped in a fist

Tell us
you who escaped death
glanced into its abyss
almost turned into earth
who choked on God
tell us
does something exist there
does your calm mean despair or hope
is your eye clouded by awareness of truth
or of uncertainty
half-closed by irony or arrogance
What are you whispering
Are those merely senile words
out of which meaning has drained
You call dull senile sleep silence
you who got to know the silence of ocean depths
during a time of storm

But Job said nothing
he only whispered Lord Lord

In honor of Maya Angelou, who died today--your words will still sing.

Caged Bird
by Maya Angelou

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.

The Return of Job

by Anna Kamienska

Job didn't die
didn't throw himself under a train
didn't croak in a vacant lot
the chimney didn't spew him out
despair didn't finish him off
he arose from everything
from misery dirt
scabs loneliness

How much more authentic a dead Job would be
even after death shaking his fist at the God of pain
But Job survived
washed his body of blood sweat pus
and lay down in his own house again
New friends were already gathering
a new wife was breathing new love into his mouth
new children were growing up with soft hair
for Job to touch with his hands
new sheep donkeys oxen were bellowing
shaking new shackles in the stable
kneeling on straw

But happy Job didn't have the strength to be happy
afraid he'd betray happiness by a second happiness
afraid he'd betray life by a second life
Wouldn't it be better for you Job
to rot in a lost paradise with the dead
than to wait now for their nightly visit
they come in dreams they envy you life
Wouldn't it be better happy Job
to remain dirt since you are dirt
The pustules washed off your hands and face
ate through your heart and liver
You will die Job
Wouldn't it be better for you
to die with the others
in the same pain and mourning
than to depart from this new happiness
You walk in the dark
wrapped in darkness
among new people
useless as a pang of conscience
You suffered through pain
now suffer through happiness

And Job whispered stubbornly Lord Lord

Gratitude

by Anna Kamienska

A tempest threw a rainbow in my face
so that I wanted to fall under the rain
to kiss the hands of an old woman to whom I gave my seat
to thank everyone for the fact that they exist
and at times even feel like smiling
I was grateful to young leaves that they were willing
to open up to the sun
to babies that they still
felt like coming into this world
to the old that they heroically
endure until the end
I was full of thanks
like a Sunday alms-box
I would have embraced death
if she'd stopped nearby

Gratitude is a scattered
homeless love

Old Light of Stars

by Lex Runciman

And I am not the person in the wool vest,
not violets nodding in a cluster by front steps.
I am not that child
in the memory of the black-haired girl
whose mother's stomach bled
as the ambulance took her away.
I am no street or house or row of poplars.
I am not hands stacking firewood,
stealing an apricot, pushing a mower,
sorting laundry, stealing a swallow of Scotch.
I am not asleep outside the Baptistery doors
of Florence. I am not raspberries, nor sea salt,
nor the trail through sunned, prismatic snow.
I am not the finger held by an infant hand
nor a speaker of your language
nor a worshipper of any gold or God.
Not male, not female, not salmon,
bluestem, candle or glass. Not Italian.
Not internal combustion or nuclear power
or the opening of a columbine--
neither barley nor rosemary nor cilantro nor rice.
I do not sing or hum or see color
or touch any flame or fracture or argue
or sufficiently love. I am not enough.
I am not what happened.
I do not end here, was not born here,
nor do I walk home
under the old light of stars.

Cenotaph

by Robert Wrigley

Never especially inclined mathematically, my father,
days past his eightieth birthday, calculated the following:

if the names of all the dead, military and civilian alike,
of every nationality, from his war--the good one--

were blasted into granite, as were those of only
the American soldiers who had perished in the bad one, mine,

the resulting monument would be almost a mile long
and a hundred feet deep. Setting aside the engineering challenges,

he believed the greater problem was the names. Sixty million,
he ciphered, though I don't know how. His imagined monument,

a project no greater than the interstate highway system
or the dams across the nation's rivers, could take decades

to erect. No more than Rushmore or Crazy Horse.
And yet who would have envisioned such a task?

I remember how, the night of the first moon landing,
he stood in his backyard in the heart of the heart of the country,

straining through binoculars to see what could not be seen
but was. Now ten years past his monumental calculations,

the only numeral that matters to him is 2. We are not sure why.
Perhaps because my sister and I are two. As are he

and our mother, her failing eyes and gentle hands. And therefore
"two" is the answer to every problem the young neurologist poses,

a physician not much older than my own children,
none of whom ever lived through something called the draft.

My father does not know what year we are in or the name
of our current president. Even the names of his grandchildren

are lost to him sometimes, and if we were to ask
that name by which he calls himself, we fear that, too,

may be gone. He does not know, and probably never did,
the word cenotaph, though the memorial he once imagined

would have been just that, an empty tomb.
Father, let me estimate the dead for you:

it has been and will be everyone. Let us understand
that mountains are--like plains and swamps,

like rivers and oceans--death and life factories, forges from which
come numberless souls, residents on a spinning blue cenotaph

that without us has no name nor need of one.
These were the dead of a single war, these the dead

of the others. And here are those who died, as we say, in peace,
some whose lives have faded within them until they are

only the names and numbers they had been known by.
And here is where they were, beneath a cyclical moon,

which bears through the universe some footprints and a flag.

Thanks

by W.S. Merwin

 

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

we are standing by the water thanking it

smiling by the windows looking out

in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you

in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators

remembering wars and the police at the door

and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

in the banks we are saying thank you

in the faces of the officials and the rich

and of all who will never change

we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us

our lost feelings we are saying thank you

with the forests falling faster than the minutes

of our lives we are saying thank you

with the words going out like cells of a brain

with the cities growing over us

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

we are saying thank you and waving

dark though it is 

My Grandmother Laughs

by Sasha Banks

Nine years old. A humble offering of thick
braids and flat feet, I tell my grandmother
that I hate my father.

Shove the word off the cliff of my mouth
and watch it drop. The weight of the 'h'
slamming into the 't'. My grandmother's
face razors open a smirked hive of teeth.
"That muthafucka."

A laugh splits
from her belly, circles its way
through twisting cigarette smoke.
She stares at the word floating there,
between us. Doesn't shout for me
to pull it from the air and swallow it.
Or warn me to apologize
until my knuckles are a little softer,
more ladylike.

My grandmother laughs at my hatred
like it is a cruel joke between friends,
told over cocktail music and
spilled drinks.

I am nine.
And maybe hatred is funny.
Maybe how easily it trickles its way
into small things is funny. Maybe
the way it pours itself into the shape
of nine year-old things
is hilarious.

My grandmother laughs.
I throw my head back
and follow her lead.

I Go Down to the Shore

by Mary Oliver

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall--
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

Grief

by Matthew Dickman

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what's left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
her eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.
I am not afraid. She has been here before
and now I can recognize her gait
as she approaches the house.
Some nights, when I know she's coming,
I unlock the door, lie down on my back,
and count her steps
from the street to the porch.
Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,
tells me to write down
everyone I have ever known
and we separate them between the living and the dead
so she can pick each name at random.
I play her favorite Willie Nelson album
because she misses Texas
but I don't ask why.
She hums a little,
the way my brother does when he gardens.
We sit for an hour
while she tells me how unreasonable I've been,
crying in the check-out line,
refusing to eat, refusing to shower,
all the smoking and all the drinking.
Eventually she puts one of her heavy
purple arms around me, leans
her head against mine,
and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.
So I tell her,
things are feeling romantic.
She pulls another name, this time
from the dead
and turns to me in that way that parents do
so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
Romantic? She says,
reading the name out loud, slowly
so I am aware of each syllable
wrapping around the bones like new muscle,
the sound of that person's body
and how reckless it is,
how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.