Midweek Poetry

Personal Poem Esther Belin

When I walk around downtown Durango
I sometimes find myself searching for the location
Of shops and restaurants no longer there

With quiet intention, I will walk past familiar places:
Carver’s, Brown’s Shoe, Maria’s Bookshop

When in deep thought, I walk into the Animas
Chocolate Company – and like the numerous times
Before, the rows of truffles within the case

Deeply absorb me – the chocolatier’s artistry of
Small batch truffles, neatly arranged

Multi-colored, diversely shaped, shiny speckled &
smooth surfaced, gold dusted, nut-layered
globes rotate into my thoughts, a lasso spiraling

my focus like a funnel, like a warm caress leading me
by the hand, a lover’s scent lingering in the air

I do not buy a tray of truffles, nor an Americano coffee,
or any discounted chocolate tucked in the bin
by the east wall – rather I deeply absorb into

The something missing from this morning – the lingered
Yearning, the inability to coax last night’s thoughts:

Come forth & sing! Strands of hair beneath my pillow
Lost (or loose among) – inventoried in last month’s
Balance sheet – Did I?

O Asphyxiation – how You applaud My lapses
The lapping of consummating downtown walks

This evening there is a ruckus on Main St.
I lift my head, and see Nancy who just came from
The Pride event at the 11th St. Station

She’s covered with rainbow hearts &
We split one down the middle and pose

Click
Click
Click again

The goofiness, the anointing of laughter, the
Hug in broad daylight on Main St. in this

Mountain desert, tourist-tangled, tousled about
Like miners searching for a Mother-lode-of-
Gold town, the place I call home

More about this poem and this poet.

Tuesday Poem

Amber McCrary

Stories

You are a Diné woman
A cosmic energy of earth and sky
Nihimá Nahasdzáán
Azhé’é Diyiní

Winter is over
So, we put our stories in the drawer
Then we take them out for the next winter

It is said stories are only told in the winter
So, the bears and snakes do not hear them

My father is not a traditional man
But he grew up as a traditional ashkii yázhí
He speaks the tongue of the sky and earth

of our people
He knows the ways of our land
But denies it all

One day I tell him
about watching coyote and lizard
stories as a young girl in boarding school
in my Navajo culture class

I tell him excitedly how the videos are now on youtube
but I still don’t understand them
because the videos are only in Navajo

I show him the cute coyote and lizard video
in hopes he will translate for me
He stops me the first ten seconds in
And tells me I shouldn’t watch it

Not because he doesn’t believe in cultural preservation
We are only supposed to watch and tell those stories during the winter, he says
Ohhhhhh, I say as I close the app

All the years my dad talks down on our traditions
I find it interesting, he still abides by the way of the seasons
because he knows snake and bear might hear

Or maybe he said it for other reasons

More about this poem and this poet here.

Monday’s Poem

(Someone must have wished for Summer before it’s even Winter?)

Sufficient

Ina Coolbrith

Citron, pomegranate,
Apricot, and peach,
Flutter of apple-blows
Whiter than the snow,
Filling the silence
With their leafy speech,
Budding and blooming
Down row after row.

Breaths of blown spices,
Which the meadows yield,
Blossoms broad-petaled,
Starry buds and small;
Gold of the hill-sides,
Purple of the field,
Waft to my nostrils
Their fragrance, one and all.

Birds in the tree-tops,
Birds that fill the air,
Trilling, piping, singing,
In their merry moods, —
Gold wing and brown wing,
Flitting here and here,
To the coo and chirrup
Of their downy broods.

What grace has summer
Better that can suit?
What gift can autumn
Bring us more to please?
Red of blown roses,
Mellow tints of fruit,
Never can be fairer,
Sweeter than are these.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 17, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

More about this poem, and this poet on the page.

Sunday Poetry

To Wahilla Enhotulle

Alexander Posey 1873 –1908

^{(To the South Wind)}

O Wind, hast thou a sigh
Robbed from her lips divine
Upon this sunbright day—
A token or a sign?

Oh, take me, Wind, into
Thy confidence, and tell
Me, whispering soft and low,
The secrets of the dell.

Oh, teach me what it is
The meadow flowers say
As to and fro they nod
Thro’ all the golden day.

Oh, hear, Wind of the South,
And whispering softer yet,
Unfold the story of
The lone pine tree’s regret.

Oh, waft me echoes sweet
That haunt the meadow glen—
The scent of new-mown hay,
And songs of harvest men;

The coolness of the sea
And forest dark and deep—
The soft reed notes of Pan,
And bleat of straying sheep.

Oh, make me, Wind, to know
The language of the bee—
The burden of the wild
Bird’s rapturous melody;

The password of the leaves
Upon the cottonwood;
And let me join them in
Their mystic brotherhood.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 16, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

More about this poem, and this poet here.

Poem-a-Day: Miscarriage

Christine Stewart-Nuñez

Gauzy film between
evergreens is a web

of loss. Get closer. Reach
to touch the shimmering

gossamer and your finger
pushes through. Remember

filling that space with desire?
Someone else might grieve

the spider who abandoned
this home; others grow anxious

waiting for a deer’s walk
to wreck it. But you—

you grieve the net of thought
spun inside your own womb:

intricate and glossy and strong.

More about this poet and this poem here.

Legacy

Ted Kooser 1939 –

I have spent seventy years trying to persuade you,
to manipulate you with the poems I’ve written,
to remember my people as if they’d been yours—
to flesh out in evocative detail my parents,
my grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts—
knowing that one day I’ll be gone, and without me
to remember them, the poems I’ve written
will have to go it alone. I owe my people
so much, and I want them to enjoy—if not
immortality—a few more good years in the light,
my grandfather patching a tire for a quarter,
his brother weaving a rag rug on his sun porch,
my mother at her humming sewing machine,
my father un-thumping a bolt of brocade,
measuring for new draperies. Perhaps they were
for you, to draw open and see on your lawn
Cousin Eunice Morarend playing her accordion.

The Warrior’s Plume

Bertrand N. O. Walker 1870 – 1927

On the plains and in the vales of Oklahoma,
Grew a flower of the Tyrian hue,
The color that is loved by the Redman,
That tells him light and life,
And love are true.

Long ago it flamed in beauty on the prairies,
Lighting reaching vistas with its glow;
Ere advent of the whiteman and his fences,
Told the care-free, roving hunter
He must go.

The throng, the herd, and greed have madly trampled
Prairie, woodland, valley, and the height;
Crushed the feath’ry flower and rudely blighted
Its pride and life and beauty,
And its light.

Today ’tis found in silent glades and meadows
Where by twos and threes it greets the May.
Like the scattered braves who loved its color,
It has passed, been trodden out
Along the way.

As the oriflamme it flaunted through past ages
Went to gladden the fairness of the earth;
So the greatness of the Indian will linger
In the land that loves them both
And gave them birth.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 10, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

More from and about this poet on the page.

More Thursday Poetry+Hope

When All Seems Lost….Hope Does Not Go away… (a post from an earlier time)

My friend Mayvella used to say, “If you woke up, put your feet on the floor, the lights turned on, and the toilet flushed, the day will be OK.” I wish more than that for each of us, but seriously, my friend Mayvella was correct. She was a woman of color, very wise when I met her. I’m fortunate to have had her for a friend. She got up, got around, and went and volunteered at the food bank every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and brightened lots of days for many people just by being herself. When she passed, it was suggested we close for a day in observance of love and respect. I’m glad we decided she would have taken that as disrespect, and that she would have gone in and worked if one of the rest of us had passed away. So, rest a bit, and hope. (Then, we organize again.)