Early Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson Book

A modern day Walt Whitman, but she is even better, how is it that I have never heard of this poet? Oh right, she is an Carribean-American woman of color who had nonconforming political views and used language in a different way, and was bisexual, so they buried her and her voice.

These poems were startling and abrasive and calm and uniting. I can't even talk about them, they are that phenomenal.

What I can say is that she covers every single subject possible in the world, and veers from a colloquial, informal voice to writing poems for the UN and every single other subject in history: civil rights, slavery, the protracted war in Ireland, troubles in the middle east, troubles in Africa, rape in the US, Clarence Thomas, South Africa, suicide, gender, sexuality, the Newport Jazz Festival. Oh and camping and the redwoods. And more and more and more. I have never read a poet that combined a lifetime of life and aliveness like this. I cried at her voice and her power, and her witness to the most shameful times in our country's history. They weren't all easy to read but need to be read and shared and felt. I will return to this again and again, this was just the first reading.
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from the preface: "Her poetic sensibility was kindred to Blake's scrutiny of innocence and experience; to Whitman's vision of sexual and social breadth; to Gwendolyn Brooks's and Romare Bearden's portrayals of ordinary black people's lives; to James Baldwin's expression of the bitter contradictions within the republic. Keeping vibrations of hope on the pulse through dispiriting times was part of the task she set herself. She wanted her readers, listeners, students to feel their own latent power' of the word, the deed, of their own beauty and intrinsic value; she wanted each of us to understand how isolation can leave us defenseless and paralyzed. She knew, and wrote about, the power of violence, of hate, but her real theme, which infused her style, was the need, the impulse, for relation. Her writing was above all dialogic:

"reaching for you whoever you are and are you ready?
I am a stranger learning to worship the strangers around me whoever you are whoever I may become."

These are poems full of specificity- people and places, facts, grocery lists, imaginary scenarios of social change, anecdotes, talk' that June Jordan voice, compelling, blandishing, outraged and outrageous, tender and relentless with the trust that her words matter, that someone is listening and ready for them."

SUNFLOWER SONNET NUMBER TWO
"Supposing we could just go on and on as two
voracious in the days apart as well as when
we side by side (the many ways we do
that) well! I would consider then
perfection possible, or else worthwhile
to think about. Which is to say
I guess the costs of long term tend to pile up,
block and complicate, erase away
the accidental, temporary, near
thing/ pulsebeat promises one makes
because the chance, the easy new, is there
in front of you. But still, perfection takes
some sacrifice of falling stars for rare.
And there are stars, but none of you, to spare."

POEM NUMBER TWO ON BELL'S THEOREM, OR THE NEW PHYSICALITY OF LONG DISTANCE LOVE
"There is no chance that we will fall apart
There is no chance
There are no parts. "

Because cowards attack by committee and
others kill with bullets while some numb by
numbers bleeding the body and the language of a child

Who would behold the colorings of a cloud and
legislate its shadows legislate its shine?
Or confront a cataract of rain and seek
to interdict its speed and suffocate its sound?
Or disappear the trees behind a nomenclature
no one knows by heart? Or count the syllables
that invoke the mother of my tongue?
Or say the game goes the way of the wind
And the wind blows the way of the ones who make and break the rules?

............... because because because
as far as I can tell
less than a thousand children
playing in the garden of a thousand
flowers means the broken neck of birds

I commit my body and my language…"

"These poems they are things that I do
in the dark reaching for you whoever
you are and are you ready?
These words they are stones in the water running away
These skeletal lines they are desperate arms for my longing and love.
I am a stranger learning to worship the strangers around me whoever you are

whoever I may become."

Who Look at Me
Who would paint a people black or white?
For my own I have held where nothing showed me how
where finally I left alone to trace another destination
A white stare splits the air by blindness on the subway in department stores The Elevator (that unswerving ride where man ignores the brother by his side) A white stare splits obliterates the nerve-wrung wrist from work the breaking ankle or the turning glory of a spine

Is that how we look to you a partial nothing clearly real?
I am impossible to explain remote from old and new interpretations and yet not exactly

look black sailors on the light green sea the sky keeps blue the wind blows high and hard at night for anyhow anywhere new
look close and see me black man mouth for breathing (North and South) A MAN

I am black alive and looking back at you.

sometimes you have to dance like spelling the word joyless

Sometimes America the shamescape
knock-rock territory losing shape
the Southern earth like blood rolls
valleys cold gigantic weeping willow
flood that lunatic that lovely land that
graveyard growing trees remark
where men another black man
died he died again he died
When I or Else when I or else when you and I
or we deliberate I lose I cannot choose
if you if we then near or where unless I stand as loser

of that losing possibility that something
that I have or always want more
than much more at least
to have as less and yes directed by desire

On the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the United Nations: 1970

"1 Of the world so beautiful the men and women
easy like the waters interchange and changing
make for change for children

An ordinary struggle through the day ignores
the natural tide below the waking crust
the one and simple earth before the breaking
of the waters
birth or separation from an early
urgent trust a solid continental
walkland for the one and simple walking life

And yet we do go on…"

Excerpts from a Verse Diary of Somebody Trying to Get into Gear

"for weeks I have been wanting to write this poem
that would muffle my life with the horoscope of flowers
that would join with rivers rushing along
that would bolt and break up
sentences midbolt
and break
impressively
like mid- air somersaults
from high- wire freedom
eyes can scarcely capture

to enrapture
whirling words and
abstract dervishes
asplash
in gutland reappraisal
of the light we barely share
because for weeks I have been wanting
to make my move (as the saying goes).."

"I find my way by following your spine
Your heart indivisible from my real wish
we compelled the moon into the evening when you said,
"No, I will not let go of your hand."
Now I am diving for a tide to take me everywhere
Below the soft Pacific spoils a purple girdling of the globe impregnable."

"The morning on the mountains where the mist
diffuses
down into the depths of the leaves
of the ash and oak trees
trickling toward the complexion of the whole lake
cold
even though the overlooking sky
so solemnly vermilion sub-divides/
the seething stripes as soft
as sweet as the opening
of your mouth."

"A family tremulous but fortified by turnips/okra/handpicked
like the lilies filled to the very living full
one solid gospel (sanctified)
one gospel (peace)
one full Black lily luminescent in a homemade field of love"

Place to Stand
"The forest dwindling narrow and irregular
to darken out the starlight on the ground
where needle shadows signify the moon
a harsh a horizontal blank that lays the land
implicit to the movement of your body is the moon

You'd think I was lying to you if
I described precisely how implicit to
the feeling of your lips are
luminous announcements of more mystery
than Arizona
more than just the imperturbable convictions
of the cow headfirst into a philosophy
and so sexy chewing up the grass."

March Song
"Snow knuckles melted to pearls of black water
Face like a landslide of stars in the dark
Icicles plunging to waken the grave
Tree berries purple and bitten by birds
Curves of horizon squeeze on the sky
Telephone wires glide down the moon
Outlines of space later"

"…pieces of land with names like Beirut
where the game is to tear up the whole
Hemisphere into pieces of children and patches of sand
Asleep on a pillow the two of us whisper
we know about apples and hot bread and honey
Hunting for safety and eager for peace
We follow the leaders who chew up the land with names like
Beirut where the game is to tear up the whole
Hemisphere into pieces of children and patches of sand
I'm standing in place I'm holding your hand and
pieces of children on patches of sand"

Bridget Song #1
"Late in the day and near a growing
edge of redwood trees and following
a solitary trail I saw you/fern ravine
nirvana passing by but then you
changed direction and came back
to walk with me and I will never be the same

Before you knew my name I knew
nobody treads the earth as close
as light as you
And I am turned around
because the ceremony of your movement
slides along the shadow of a shining sound"

"I WANTED NOBODY ROLL BACK THE TREES! I WANTED NOBODY TAKE AWAY DAYBREAK! I WANTED NOBODY FREEZE ALL THE PEOPLE ON THEIR KNEES! I WANTED YOU I WANTED YOUR KISS ON THE SKIN OF MY SOUL AND NOW YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME…"