Each month, I collect poems... and try to make reasonable decisions about which ones to discuss.
Herewith, poems that I "didn't have room for" in August.
Invented Landscape by L.A. Johnson
It is the world as I’ve never seen it—
the sky, a kaleidoscope of orange blossoms
and seagulls that drift soft as dandelions
and snow that falls
but then changes to glossy clouds, thin as cotton,
that float in gentle breeze; where the glow
from a high balcony becomes a portal
to an orchard
untouched by human hands, where every tree
blooms with tufts of ivory, the rain descending
with low music, as the earth cools and smells
of soap; a kite
in the sky loops higher and higher in the wind
until the kite is a circle with no beginning,
a day that never ends in night, and a child glimpses
wonder beneath
its salt-air sail, holding all mystery on a string.
This is the world as I’ve never seen it.
I’ve woken in dark rooms, I’ve toiled days facing
an empty wall.
I want to write the world gorgeous
enough for my father to return to it. A world
where oceans meet. A world of lands
never split
with fire. Where you can tell the time
by the stars or the sun or by the dimming
minutes themselves, the way they feel
light in your hands.
"Invented Landscape" by L.A. Johnson. Used by permission of the poet.
from the Slowdown, 7/13/23
Last Days by Kwame Dawes
Rain and ashes seal my lips
--Allen Ginsberg
In the season of drought and hurricane,
this stiff earth cracks and the spawned
eggs of mosquitoes burst into a plague
of coughs and side stitches. Every wild bird
predicts a plague of woes. All around us
the whisper is of “Last Days”, the coming
of the end, and the tyranny of present danger.
December 21, 2005, Marvin Williams,
ex-Drill Sergeant and born-again Arkansas
cotton-picker, remembers the morning he
was bumped from the airliner that flamed
over Lockerbie. Blessed, he says, trying
to calculate the debts he still owes.
Why was he kept; for what?
The dragonflies are dying,
and in the suburbs the pandemic
runs amok. Our bodies betray us
and the summer’s heat warms
the sea, as deep as plummet sounds.
In the desert it rains in deluge,
while the glaciers vanish from mountains.
The stars die a million years ago.
On a beach in Bahia,
a congregation in white descends
to the water’s edge, singing. The surf lips
the disembowelled carcasses of small
animals. A rash of flowers eddies
on the swollen surface like a garland of prayer.
Better go to the house of mourning
than to the house of feasting.
From WHEELS (Peepal Tree Press, 2011)
Tyranny of the Milky Way by Claudia Castro Luna
The way clouds taste as they go from castles to rabbits above your head.
You are twelve, your skin damp from the humid tropical day, the grass
under your arms and legs benign even if itchy. The way a million stars
scatter at night, and you in jersey gown and bare feet seek the same spot
from earlier in the day to count far away incandescent rocks and tucked
behind your ear your secret wish to spot a single UFO. The way a slice
of tres leches cake on your thirteenth birthday surrenders in unison on
your tongue its sweet milks. The way at twelve you tasted marvel and
by fourteen you’d tasted war.
Ewako by Tanya Linklater (with an exercise)
This enigmatic poem is one line in an indigenous tongue. I looked for a pronunciation guide.
Words that are more than the sentence in English which approximates it. (This then is the Earth).
I have reproduced it exactly as poem-a-day presented it. They do not explain the relationship between Duane and Tanya Linklater.
My question to the group. Given what is given on the page, what do you make of it?
I googled Ewako and found this site which explained the name Ewako invokes cheerfulness, trustworthiness and empowerment. It includes a letter by letter analysis! https://nameecho.com/ewako
If you rearrange the letters, the word can become awoke.
If you went outside, blindfolded, what would your senses tell you? How might it be different to describe "this is the earth" without sight? without drawing on memory?
What words can be visited once spoken by those pushed off the land on which they lived?
Ewako
Ewako ôma askiy.
“
It’s hard to translate ewako. It has a feeling in it. It’s almost a feeling word.
”
(This then is the earth.)
-- Tanya Lukin Linklater
Alutiiq/Sugpiaq artist and writer. The author of Slow Scrape, reissued in 2022 by Talonbooks,
Duane Linklater learns Ininīmowin from nohkomnânak mina nimôsomnânak—in close study—felt—over decades. (These ones, they stay with language through ongoing efforts to disrupt our bodies, our thinking, our lands.) We visit, our words, their energy, the incompleteness of translation, our radical love of breath in motion sound on air throat sweep and call. I hear drift and grain in vowels of silty river, spongy muskeg, windswept tamarack, clay that holds us as it held our ancestors. I am not a speaker of Ininīmowin nor am I Omaskeko—(gwi suk)—yet niwâhkomâwak.
Gwisuk: (?) name of people who speak Inininowin
Not sure where I saw this, but wrote it down: Radical love of breath in motion, sound on air; throat sweep and call.
