ravenstalebooks.com home | site map | reviews | bookstore travelers | book awards | April is National Poetry Month and we always celebrated in our stores and online with our POEM A DAY program. Each and every customer in the store got a printed copy of the day's poem and every one on our email list had the poem emailed their way. We shared some of our favorite poems this way from 2000 to when we closed our doors for the last time. All Poetry Books were 10% OFF for the entire month as well. Enjoy the poems. |
below are the poems from April 1 - 15 | click HERE for poems from April 16 to 30 |
day one
Moon
Open the book of evening to the page where the moon, always the moon, appears between two clouds, moving so slowly that hours will seem to have passed before you reach the next page where the moon, now brighter, lowers a path to lead you away from what you have known into those places where what you had wished for happens, its lone syllable like a sentence poised at the edge of sense, waiting for you to say its name once more as you lift your eyes from the page
and close the book, still feeling what it was like to dwell in that light, that sudden paradise of sound.
Mark Strand
day two
Water
Before I was born I was water. I thought of this sitting on a blue chair surrounded by pink, red, white hollyhocks in the yard in front of my green studio. There are conclusions to be drawn but I can't do it anymore. Born man, child man, singing man, dancing man, loving man, old man, dying man. This is a round river and we are her fish who become water.
Jim Harrison
day three
The Poet's Occasional Alternative
I was going to write a poem I made a pie instead it took about the same amount of time of course the pie was a final draft a poem would have had some distance to go days and weeks and much crumpled paper
the pie already had a talking tumbling audience among small trucks and a fire engine on the kitchen floor
everybody will like this pie it will have apples and cranberries dried apricots in it many friends will say why in the world did you make only one
this does not happen with poems
because of unreportable sadness I decided to settle this morning for a re- sponsible eatership I do not want to wait a week a year generation for the right consumer to come along
Grace Paley
day four
Seriousness
Driving the Garden State Parkway to New York, I pointed out two crows to a woman who believed crows always travel in threes. And later just one crow eating the carcass of a squirrel. "The others are nearby," she said, "hidden in trees." She was sure. Now and then she'd say "See!" and a clear dark trinity of crows would be standing on the grass. I told her she was wrong to under- or overestimate crows, and wondered out loud if three crows together made any evolutionary sense. I was almost getting serious now. Near Forked River, we saw five. "There's three," she said, "and two others with a friend in a tree." I looked to see if she was smiling. She wasn't. Or she was. "Men like you," she said, "need it written down, notarized, and signed."
Stephen Dunn
day five
Late Hours
On summer nights the world
moves within earshot
on the interstate with its swish
and growl, an occasional siren
that sends chills through us.
Sometimes, on clear, still nights,
voices float into our bedroom,
lunar and fragmented,
as if the sky had let them go
long before birth. In winter we close the windows
and read Chekhov,
nearly weeping for this world. What luxury, to be so happy
that we can grieve
over imaginary lives.
Lisel Mueller
day six
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver
day seven
The Love Cook
Let me cook you some dinner.
Sit down and take off your shoes
and socks and in fact the rest
of your clothes, have a daiquiri,
turn on some music and dance
around the house, inside and out,
it’s night and the neighbors
are sleeping, those dolts, and
the stars are shining bright,
and I’ve got the burners lit
for you, you hungry thing.
Ron Padgett
day eight
A Substitute for You
I’m a fan of Christopher Columbus I want to find a spice route too They’ve got a substitute for sugar I want a substitute for you
I’m gonna ride those trade winds Find gold in El Dorado too They’ve got MasterCard for money I need a substitute for you
My feet at night Are so cold I tell you they’re turning blue They have a substitute for coal oil I’ll buy a substitute for you
Some things are real though most things Really don’t be true They got a substitute for the truth But a lie right now won’t do
You let me think you loved me Luckily I can’t sue With work and play we drifted I’m requesting something new
I’m not saying This is nice There’s a crack That love fell through
I’m just saying What we had is gone
I need a substitute For you
Nikki Giovanni
day nine
Perfection Wasted
And another regrettable thing about death is the ceasing of your own brand of magic, which took a whole life to develop and market— the quips, the witticisms, the slant adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears, their tears confused with their diamond earrings, their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat, their response and your performance twinned. The jokes over the phone. The memories packed in the rapid-access file. The whole act. Who will do it again? That’s it: no one imitators and descendants aren’t the same.
John Updike
day ten
The Sailor
In my movie the boat goes under An he alone survives the night in the cold ocean, Swimming he hopes in a shoreward direction. Daylight and he’s still afloat, pawing the water And doesn’t yet know he’s only fifty feet from shore. He goes under for what will be the last time But only a few feet down scrapes bottom. He’s suddenly a changed man and half hops, half swims The remaining distance, hauls himself waterlogged Partway up the beach before collapsing into sleep. As he dreams the tide comes in And rolls him back to sea.
Geof Hewitt
day eleven
Topography
After we flew across the country we got in bed, laid our bodies delicately together, like maps laid face to face, East to West, my San Francisco against your New York, your Fire Island against my Sonoma, my New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas burning against your Kansas your Kansas burning against my Kansas, your Eastern Standard Time pressing into my Pacific Time, my Mountain Time beating against your Central Time, your sun rising swiftly from the right my sun rising swiftly from the left your moon rising slowly from the left my moon rising slowly from the right until all four bodies of the sky burn above us, sealing us together, all our cities twin cities, all our states united, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Sharon Olds
day twelve
Easter Morning
On Easter morning all over America the peasants are frying potatoes in bacon grease.
We’re not supposed to have "peasants" but there are tens of millions of them frying potatoes on Easter morning, cheap and delicious with catsup.
If Jesus were here this morning he might be eating fried potatoes with my friend who has a ‘51 Dodge and a ‘72 Pontiac.
When his kids ask why they don’t have a new car he says, "these cars were new once and now they are experienced."
He can fix anything and when rich folks call to get a toilet repaired he pauses extra hours so that they can further learn what we’re made of.
I told him that in Mexico the poor say that when there’s lightning the rich think that God is taking their picture. He laughed
Like peasants everywhere in the history of the world ours can’t figure out why they’re getting poorer. Their sons join the army to get work being shot at.
Your ideals are invisible clouds so try not to suffocate the poor, the peasants, with your sympathies. They know that you’re staring at them.
Jim Harrison
day thirteen
Poetry
And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don’t know how or when, no they were not voices, they were not words, nor silence, but from a street I was summoned, from the branches of night, abruptly from the others, among violent fires or returning alone, there I was without a face and it touched me. I did not know what to say, my mouth had no way with names, my eyes were blind, and something started in my soul, fever or forgotten wings, and I made my own way, deciphering that fire, and I wrote the first faint line, faint, without substance, pure nonsense, pure wisdom of someone who knows nothing, and suddenly I saw the heavens unfastened and open, planets, palpitating plantations, shadow perforated, riddled with arrows, fire and flowers, the winding night, the universe. And I, infinitesimal being, drunk with the great starry void, likeness, image of mystery, felt myself a pure part of the abyss, I wheeled with the stars, my heart broke loose on the wind.
Pablo Neruda
day fourteen
The Shoe
Each time I relived it, after the worst was over, I’d say to myself, as if my fate would solace me, ”at least I’ll never have to do this again.” It is true that I’ll never have to kiss his dying hands, now dead. I’ll never have to find where he left his coffee mug, now mine.
I’ll never have to wash his hair or repair his typewriter or stock the medicine stand. I’ll never even have to find places that can use his clothes because some friend-I don’t remember who- did that for me when I could not. I distributed his portrait, I picked up his poems.
I thanked friends and children for helping me hold on. I made braids out of dead funeral flowers to border the rooms where once he breathed and took on the heavy chores, gladly, of loving me. I sprinkled one teaspoon of his ashes on our bereft bed and slept with them. They scourged my body.
But when that single shoe, the mate I thought had got sent off with its partner, showed up today, alone, crouching behind the couch, alive with Effie’s opulent Turkish angora fur, I knew solace was something I could neither seek nor find. Oh beloved! I know I am an old woman. But I cannot live in your shoe.
Kathryn Starbuck
day fifteen
Late Fragment
And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.
_____________ & _________________
Bonnard’s Nudes
His wife. Forty years he painted her. Again and again. The nude in the last painting the same young nude as the first. His wife.
As he remembered her young. As she was young. His wife in her bath. At her dressing table in front of the mirror. Undressed.
His wife with her hands under her breasts looking out on the garden. The sun bestowing warmth and color.
Every living things in bloom there. She young and tremulous and more desirable. When she died, he painted a while longer.
A few landscapes. Then died. And was put down next to her. His young wife.
Raymond Carver
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