Love Poems; a few poems I love

homage to my hips

By Lucille Clifton

these hips are big hips

they need space to

move around in.

they don't fit into little

petty places. these hips

are free hips.

they don't like to be held back.

these hips have never been enslaved,   

they go where they want to go

they do what they want to do.

these hips are mighty hips.

these hips are magic hips.

i have known them

to put a spell on a man and

spin him like a top!

 

 

Late Fragment
Raymond Carver
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.
 

EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE AMAZING
Lauren Zuniga

Put on your knickers, girl. We gonna eat these heavy
decisions for breakfast. Smother ‘em in gravy, wash ‘em down
with Grown Ass Woman Soda.

We got this. This is the Big Girl Processing Plant.
Don’t nobody work through their issues like we do. We swallow
abandonment and cough up independence.

You wanna scream? You see that freight train coming at you?
You havin’ that lead-in-yo-legs dream again? Kick that
muthatruckin’ train in its teeth and do a jig.

That’s what you need. Some Mongolian Throat Singing action
and a can o’ Riverdance. Unwad your drawers, Little Mama.
Let’s go to the drag show.

Bust out yo corset, Sweet Ginger and show ‘em all that bouillon.
We were made for the stomp. We were made out of spoon
whittlin’ voodoo stew. Play those spoons, girl.

Don’t let ‘em take your dysfunction and turn it into a brothel.
That’s YOUR dysfunction. You chop that shit up and make it
into a masterpiece. This is the year of Quit the Dumb Shit.
So, you know what that means?

Quit the dumb shit. Stop washing your pearls down
with swine. Get up off your Cadillac britches and show them motor
mouth badgers how it’s done. Everything ain’t gonna be alright.
Everything is going to be amazing.

[From Lauren Zuniga,  The Smell of Good Mud]

Grandmother

by Sherman Alexie

    old crow of a woman in bonnet, sifting through the dump
salvaging those parts of the world
neither useless nor useful

she would be hours in the sweatlodge
come out naked and brilliant in the sun
steam rising off her body in winter
like slow explosion of horses

she braided my sister's hair with hands that smelled of deep
roots buried in the earth
she told me old stories

how time never mattered
when she died
they gave me her clock 

The Video 

 

 Fleur Adcock

When Laura was born, Ceri watched.

They all gathered around Mum's bed -

Dad and the midwife and Mim's sister

and Ceri. 'Move over a bit,' Dad said -

he was trying to focus the camcorder

on Mum's legs and the baby's head.

After she had a little sister,

and Mum had gone back to being thin,

and was twice as busy, Ceri played

the video again and again.

She watched Laura come out, and then,

in reverse, she made her go back in.

 

  
Galileo by Declan O'Rourke is my current favorite love song, it's on You Tube. 

Two anthologies of contemporary poetry that I love are both edited by Neil Astley:
1. Staying Alive and 2. Being Alive. I hope he edits another one soon.

Those lilies speak for themselves.

 Those lilies speak for themselves. Zephyr is a gem of Irish-Alaskan social storytelling. 

Words that make me happy. Unsolicited words in a review. I'm to the age where being invisible happens. It's great when someone far removed from my life notices.

While driving to school in Oranmore yesterday (allegedly the most depressing day of the year) a car turning right bumped into my old banger and left me skidding towards an on-coming silver Mercedes. Had I or the SUV that bumped me (in my apparently invisible fourteen year old Toyota Yaris) been driving fast it would have been a three car pile-up. I woke today feeling very happy and rang the woman who hit me to tell her so. Lucky, lucky, lucky. 

 

A few hours later our postman brought me a pack-chig; a brown envelop with handwriting I did not recognize, addressed to me, Ballinderreen Village, Galway. Did I ever tell you how much I like living in a place that has no numbers in my address? It makes shopping on-line quite tricky, but it is so lovely that the postman requires nothing more than my name and my village. I love my postman. His name is Mick. He calls me darling. All I do for him is give him a bottle of wine at Christmas. 

This surprise and very welcome review of Zephyr by John Liddy fell onto my hall floor. The review of my book is the last article in the last edition of the literary journal called REViVAL. Condolences and fair winds to all associated with REViVAL, 'tis a pity that it has reached the end of its road. I'd revive you if I could. And, thankfully, I required no reviving yesterday. I'm revved up. Perhaps I'll write a feminist manifesto.

REViVAL, A Literary Journal, Issue 28, October/November/December 2013

REVIEW BY JOHN LIDDY

ZEPHYR

Mary Mullen

Salmon Poetry, 2010

On first browsing through these poems with my customary ‘getting to know you’ routine, I thought that this is a book for women—written by a woman, published by women and with cover art work by a woman. The dedication, at first, is to the poet’s mother and then her father. But on closer reading a much wider picture emerges. The feminist viewpoint is present but it is not a feminist manifesto. Poem after poem reveal Mullen’s eye for landscape—Alaska and the West of Ireland, backdrops for the poet’s deeply personal and private concerns. But the real heroine in this book is the poet’s daughter Lily, born in Co Galway with Down syndrome, a special needs child and Mullen, not as mother but as poet, gives us a rare view of Lily’s world, one not found in Sunday Supplements.

      The book opens with poems about Alaska, Mullen’s homeland, which she left behind for a life in Ireland. But she goes back in this opening section and in the first poem we learn that Smelt, a fish that once flourished along the Pacific Northwest from Alaska to British Columbia and as far south as Northern California, is also known as oolichan or hooligan, that the Irish-speaking immigrants working out of Anchorage stayed with a lovely lady Nellie Cronin and built a church in Our Lady of Perpetual Help. It is a gem of Irish-Alaskan social storytelling.

     The poem First Response marks the Irish section and is followed with poems about the birth of her daughter Lily a few hours after the signing/of the Good Friday Peace Agreement and each poem hence deals with an aspect of Lily’s life. Lilyisms 2006 portrays the funny side of caring for her daughter who says

                            The postman brings me a pack-chig.

                            Sometimes boys are ick gusting.

                            And sometimes I wish I had a dumb bed

                            so I could sleep up high.

                I can read Snow White and the Seven Dovers,

                my favourite one is Grumpy. Like my Mum!       

And in the very moving Irish Athletes Walk Tall in Shanghai, Mullen pours out her heart in the lines

            You are half Alaskan gold, half Connemara marble.

            You are soft and full of wily talk,

proud to spell tricky words, puzzled by nuance.

You know when the phone rings it is not for you—

my polar bear ready to spring off melting ice.

I can’t stop crying in my own Shanghai.

But you, you, you are Nureyev, leaping.

In Pint of Milk we are treated to the poet’s wrath through words of closure directed at somebody who walked away and is no longer part of their lives, in which she plainly says

                        You are dead: sanded into extinction.

                        I put a candle on my desk,

and lilies; and made a vow to never

again give you the dignity of a poem.

Those lilies speak for themselves. And as the book comes to a close other references to lemon peels, blackberries and forget-me-nots play vital roles in the completion of poems about male crudity, a longing for company and for Alaska. We are left to ponder the whole of this work in the cark park of the Writer’s Retreat in Annaghmakerrig, Co Monaghan, with a legendary note from Bernard Loughlin and the poet thinking

                                And somewhere in Lourdes, a brave girl

                                lights a candle for her lake-staring mother.

                                                                                                                      John Liddy, Madrid 2013