I don't really have a "lecture," instead, I'm going to let these poems speak for themselves. All that I ask is that you highlight or circle or copy/cut and paste your favorite lines into a separate document. The writing prompt that follows will explain why.
Poems by Tudor Arghezi
JOHN JOHN
In the cellar with the dead, John looked just fine
laid naked on the slab, a wisp of a smile on his lips.
For three nights the rats had gnawed at him.
There is resinous slaver on his mouth.
When the sexton hoisted him on his back
John seemed made of earth.
He could stand on his feet if you wanted,
but his arm was broken, limp.
In his staring eyes there’s a light
of the village where he was born,
of the fields where the kids grazed,
now stiff with distance.
He was captured by the boyars far from home,
far from his mother’s grief;
on his hair and bruises
lice are dead in herds.
GRACE
Dressed in tinder jackets,
potatoes are ready to give birth.
All winter they’ve prepared themselves for the great days.
in the dark beside moles and worms
and mole-crickets.
From all the crumbs
they become pregnant like cats
with swollen dugs.
Do you hear?
The potatoes were but lately confined.
Listen, grace seized them, godlike,
virginal, innocent spinsters.
The power that deigns
to probe its holy instruments
deep as the tubers
and cast spells on potatoes’ warm warts
as though they were diamonds.
One night
the jackets filled with milk
enough to feed a cub
at each bump’s tip.
THE SICK ANGEL
My angel remembers
joys of former times.
Sky reaches to his taste
with sour milk, sharp grapes.
It no longer sends stars
painted like holy flags,
and the wind no longer spurs evening
with aromas of wine and oil.
Orchards, fields have lost their bloom,
crops their color and leaves.
Beneath warm skies black waters
carry bubbling asphalt sludge.
Wherever his head seeks to rest
that place is thorny and grass turns to nails.
Cranes cross heavens without him;
their wings call to him no more.
His heart can no longer stand
the life of eternity, the ogive nest,
and little by little, for the first time,
he feels hideous in time’s crumbling.
Unknown to him an earthly tumor
has begun to sprout
on his white body.
Poems by Aracelis Girmay
Elegy for the Beekeeper
How dazed the body
after stinging, how drunk
with death & venom.
We wear our good shoes
to the funeral. & our black eyes,
fat with hallucination, hold
the image of the swarm,
take it everywhere:
the streetlight, to church, the coffin.
Even now, the air is wild
with the fever-pitch of wings.
Our girl, small graveyard
of marks & stings--
so fast.
We leave her to sleep outside
like the cats.
We climb into our houses & our beds,
& we miss her. For years
we dream our deaths little
as the bee’s.
Kingdom Animalia
When I get the call about my brother,
I’m on a stopped train leaving town
& the news packs into me—freight—
though it’s him on the other end
now, saying finefine—
Forfeit my eyes, I want to turn away
from the hair on the floor of his house
& how it got there Monday,
but my one heart falls
like a sad, fat persimmon
dropped by the hand of the Turczyn’s old tree.
I want to sleep. I do not want to sleep. See,
one day, not today, not now, we will be gone
from this earth where we know the gladiolas.
My brother, this noise,
some love [you] I loved
with all my brain, & breath,
will be gone; I’ve been told, today, to consider this
as I ride the long tracks out & dream so good
I see a plant in the window of the house
my brother shares with his love, their shoes. & there
he is, asleep in bed
with this same woman whose long skin
covers all of her bones, in a city called Oakland,
& their dreams hang above them
a little like a chandelier, & their teeth
flash in the night, oh, body.
Oh, body, be held now by whom you love.
Whole years will be spent, underneath these impossible stars,
when dirt’s the only animal who will sleep with you
& touch you with
its mouth.
To the (Heart) Horse
Oh, hooves who never killed me even once,
though there were chances,
I remember you on this road through Pennsylvania —
fog riding the hills like steam off a horse’s neck,
your neck, I flew hard over
into the (dusty) sequined air
like a rag doll ballet of tendons, acrobat
shuffled up by your neck’s jubilee. I am sure
my heart was kicking, but there was not
one afternoon I did not climb back up & shove both feet
into the dark Us of your saddle,
to the hum, I remember now,
to the hum of square boxes stacked
in the beekeeper’s field, my teeth
wore grids of red silt
kicked up by your lilac stomp. Work. Maybe
I did not love you well (enough)
or maybe you were just tired
or both, but noon after afternoon
for at least 200 days, you tried to tell me something.
God knows. Should have just set you loose.
You were not mine or mine to give away.
But still, I should have known
that before September they’d turn you dead
for going crazy. You see,
even the dog is running in its sleep, & the mind
cannot be blamed for its 5 places at once,
or the songs that it hears when it is walking.
& whose fault is it that the brain is a grenade
or a table off of which plates fall,
& what animal was I to tell you not to dance,
to not have heard the tambourines, their banshees,
to have kept you from jackknifing into heaven
by the vexed haul-over of your own wild feet
Poems by Wendy Rose
I Expected My Skin and My Blood to Ripen
“When the blizzard subsided four days later (after the massacre)
a burial party was sent to Wounded Knee. A long trench was dug.
Many of the bodies were stripped by whites who went out in order
to get the ghost shirts and other accoutrements the Indians wore.
The frozen bodies were thrown into the trench stiff and naked...
only a handful of items remain in private hands...exposure to snow
has stiffened the leggings and moccasins, and all the objects show
the effects of age and long use...” There follows: moccasins at $140,
hide scraper at $350, buckskin shirt at $1200, woman’s leggings
at $275, bone breastplate at $1000.”
Plains Indian Art: Sales Catalog by Kenneth Canfield, 1977
I expected my skin and my blood
to ripen
not be ripped from my bones;
like green fruit I am peeled
tasted, discarded; my seeds are stepped on
and crushed,
they have no future. Now
there has been
no past. My own body gave up the beads
my own arms handed the babies away
to be strung on bayonets, to be counted
one by one like rosary stones and then
tossed to each side of life
as if the pain of their birthing
had never been.
My feet were frozen to the leather,
pried apart, left behind—bits of flesh
on the moccasins, bits of paper deerhide
on the bones. My back was stripped
of its cover, its quilling intact, was torn,
was taken away, was restored.
My leggings were taken like in a rape
and shriveled to the size of stick figures
like they had never felt the push
of my strong woman’s body
walking in the hills.
It was my own baby whose cradleboard I held.
Would’ve put her in my mouth
like a snake
if I could, would’ve turned her
into a bush or old rock
if there’d been enough magic
to work such changes. Not enough magic
to stop the bullets.
Not enough magic
to stop the scientists,
not enough magic
to stop the collectors.
Not enough magic
to stop the money.
Excavation at Santa Barbara Mission
When archaeologists excavated Santa Barbara Mission in California, they discovered human bones in the adobe walls.
My pointed trowel
is the artist's brush
that will stroke and pry,
uncover and expose
the old mission wall.
How excited I am
for like a dream
I wanted to count myself
among the ancient dead
as a faithful neophyte
resting there and in love
with the padres
and the Spanish hymns.
A feature juts out. Marrow
like lace, piece of a skull,
upturned cup, fingerbones
scattered like corn
and ribs interlaced
like cholla.
So many bones
mixed with the blood
from my own knuckles
that dig and tug
in the yellow dust.
How fragile
they have become
to float and fall
with my touch,
brittle white tips
shivering into mist.
How helpless I am
for the deeper I go
the more I find
crouching in white dust,
listening to the whistle
of longbones breaking
apart like memories.
My hands empty themselves
of old dreams,
drain the future
into the moisture
of my boot prints.
Beneath the flags
of three invaders,
I am a hungry scientist
sustaining myself
with bones of
men and women asleep in the wall
who survived in their own way
Spanish swords, Franciscans
and their rosary whips,
who died among the reeds
to wait, communion wafers
upon the ground, too holy
for the priests to find.
They built the mission with dead Indians.
They built the mission with dead Indians.
They built the mission with dead Indians.
They built the mission with dead Indians.
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