Responsibility

Responsibility

It is the responsibility of society to let the poet be a poet
It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman
It is the responsibility of the poet to stand on street corners
giving out poems and beautifully written leaflets
also leaflets you can hardly bear to look at
because of the screaming rhetoric
It is the responsibility of the poet to be lazy
to hang out and prophesy
It is the responsibility of the poet not to pay war taxes
It is the responsibility of the poet to go in and out of ivory
towers and two-room apartments on Avenue C
and buckwheat fields and army camps
It is the responsibility of the male poet to be a woman
It is the responsibility of the female poet to be a woman
It is the poet's responsibility to speak truth to power as the
Quakers say
It is the poet's responsibility to learn the truth from the
powerless
It is the responsibility of the poet to say many times: there is no
freedom without justice and this means economic
justice and love justice
It is the responsibility of the poet to sing this in all the original
and traditional tunes of singing and telling poems
It is the responsibility of the poet to listen to gossip and pass it
on in the way storytellers decant the story of life
There is no freedom without fear and bravery there is no
freedom unless
earth and air and water continue and children
also continue
It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman to keep an eye on
this world and cry out like Cassandra, but be
listened to this time.


-Grace Paley

A bouquet
by Bei Dao (tr.?)

Between me and the world
You are a day, a sail
The faithful ends of a rope
You are a fountain, a wind
A shrill childhood cry

Between me and the world
You are a picture frame, a window
A field covered with wild flowers
You are a breath, a bed
A night that keeps the stars company

Between me and the world
You are a calendar, a compass
A ray of light that slips through the gloom
You are a biographical sketch, a bookmark
A preface that comes at the end

Between me and the world
You are a gauze curtain, a mist
A lamp shining into my dreams
You are a bamboo flute, a song without words
A closed eyelid carved in stone

Between me and the world
You are a chasm, a pool
An abyss plunging down
You are a balustrade, a wall
A shield’s eternal pattern.

BOB HICOK'S NEW BOOK
http://www.amazon.com/Words-Empty-Full-Pitt-Poetry/dp/082296077X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267647164&sr=8-2

Mehr Licht by Tim Dlugos

Mehr Licht

BY TIM DLUGOS

were the last words

of Goethe on his

deathbed as the darkness

closed around him.

But Mayor Licht

was also the chief

executive of Providence,

Rhode Island in the early

Eighties. I’m dreaming

of the best political

commercial of all time—

Weimar in the 1830s,

Goethe gasping “Mehr licht,

mehr licht”—and suddenly

Mayor Harry Licht of Providence

appears to pump the paw

of the poet, and save the day.

Mehr Licht by Tim Dlugos : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Seventh Avenue - Mark Halliday

SEVENTH AVENUE

by, Mark Halliday

Late Tuesday afternoon the romantic self weaves

up Seventh Avenue amid too many lookers, too many

feelers: romance hates democracy;

how can you be so great and golden inside

if your trunk is shouldered among other trunks

block after block, block after block--

you can't help glimpsing an otherness in others

that is not just surface: they ache,

their aches ache away north and south all Tuesday

in murmurous torsos like yours . . .

What apprehension blossoms even now in Manuel

shifting steaks at the ten-foot grill of Charley O's

beneath the towering chef's hat they make him wear?

When I was twenty I'd have written

that he was only thinking of Cadillacs and sex;

now I'm afraid he's just as worried as I am

about love vs. lesser things and the point of it all.

Manuel, stay there at the sizzling grill till midnight

and then just drink or sleep, man,

don't write poems--

do me that favor. It's loud enough already

out here on Seventh Avenue with that cat's boom box

and these three giggle girls being Madonna together

and that guy hawking wind-up titans wielding laser lances.

Who's Wordsworth for any extended period on Seventh Ave?

In this pre-dusk traffic you catch the hint

that Manuel and thou if seers at all are seers only

for seconds--now the steak, taxi, buttocks, headline

and wallet resume their charismatic claim to be what counts.

Soul on Seventh is a sometime on-off quick-flip thing . . .

What I want is a poem long as Seventh Avenue

to sprinkle gold on every oppressed minority,

every young woman's subtly female hips,
every sad and suspicious American face

and the quiddity of every mud-tracked pizza shop;

proving, block after block, stanza by stanza
that I'm not just one skinny nervous pedestrian

but the one who matters because he sees and says.

I want that. The Avenue grins and says
"You want, that? How does it feel to want?"

A Brief for the Defense - Jack Gilbert

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

-Jack Gilbert

Envoy by, Maurice Manning

Envoy
by, Maurice Manning

Man who believes television
is the mouthpiece of the devil,
seeks female with similar views.

Attention all ladies who like
biscuits: man has gristmill
and two or three acres of wheat.

Are you a woman cast out from society?
Man with thirty-seven acres
and big muscles can provide refuge.

Would like to find sober woman (beer okay),
interested in pick-up trucks, old-time
Gospel music, buffalo trails.

Grown man who likes red dogs
and skipping rocks, hoping against
hope some woman likes same.

Man who lives several hundred
years in the past would like to find
woman zealous for spinning wheels.

Eccentric (?) gentleman (negotiable)—
tinker/farmer searching the heavens
for the true spark of love (breast-size unimportant). Please.