THE AMERICAN AESTHETIC
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POEMS of SIX POETS
(Fall 2014, Volume 2)

Picture
Pedro Marrero

In Terrible French
 
It wasn't the persistent tic of the clock
On the nightstand next to me
That made me think of death.
 
It wasn't the spider quietly spinning
Her delicate web in the corner of the ceiling,
 
Nor the dying ember's orange glow
On a cigarette about to meet its end
As it hangs between life and death
Between my fingertips.
 
It was an unfinished poem I found today,
Hidden away among old notes.
 
Lines to a girl living
In some small unknown town in France.
 
A note that read like love, like love
Written in terrible French.

Biographical information, favorite public domain poem.

Picture
Tulip Chowdhury

The Last Songs

Tonight there is silence.

The cicadas that sang
through days and nights
of past warm days
are gone,
leaving me to wonder,
if all had found their mates
with summer songs
or a few had died
lonely deaths,
no love found this season.

Biographical information, favorite public domain poem.

Picture
Sarah Brown Weitzman

THEY WHO ONCE
         
They who once rivaled the clouds in meanings
of many smokes and brought down buffalo

are now reserved on a granted ground
where in the town his wife, Laughing Eyes,

is called Maria and he is just a Johnny.
Here they drag themselves like broken ponies

to force a poor soil that sucks the color
from their lives and yields finally this pale stuff.

Here they’ve become old but not elders.
Here their sons drink in new tradition.

Here their daughters lie with pay-day men
from the factories where the mocking smoke

of the white man’s waste rises up and roams free
mindless and mute to massacre the earth.

Biographical information, favorite public domain poem.

Picture
Jonathan R.K. Stroud

Legacy

“It’s not the earth the meek inherit; it’s the dirt.” - Camelot


Splashing up the dirtroad,
Teakettle-pitched squeals
Not every Friday, but most,
thirty-six years strong.

And then—I never understood--
She held that balled fist in hers
As frost pushed in on windows
Waiting on the ambulance,

howling retreat,
settling duskness
left a wake
she gave too much.

Our dirtfloor cellar--
She swings there, rope singing,
Creak-croak, creak-croak
Chicken feathers stuck to a dangling shoe’s sole.

My chores are done, she’d thought.
My kingdom is gone, she’d written.
Blank lines followed the half-empty book.
She gave too much.

Biographical information, favorite public domain poem.​

Picture
Emily Strauss

Words Are Just Symbols

Words are just symbols:
not pictures of trees
not trees
the ocean’s smell has no sound
lupine speak no language

but you have speech
you can make words
you can tell me anything
if you desire

this old pier is mute
except for lapping waves
and birds speak in unknown
tongues

but you can talk if you choose
paint me the colors of your heart
explain low-flying clouds
the sway of grasses
swallows flocking under the bridge

your words could be strong enough
to call me back
from the full moon hung over
the crystal edge of far hills
you could say our names
to the double-ribboned
star band before dawn

and those words would not be stars
or pictures of night
but night itself
symbols of blind hope
and fullness of expression
lying under the black canopy.

Biographical information, favorite public domain poem.

Picture
Dave Iasevoli

Arrowhead

Before the Iroquois,
the Algonquin, before
them a nameless species,
godless. They worshiped

nothing and followed
only their hunger
with points such as this:
thin isosceles tooth,

exactly one inch tall,
stained green where trod
upon in grass for more
than two millennia.

Sharp still, as a shard
of broken bottle, sharp
enough to tear through hide
and stop at other bones.

A people leave behind
no trace of gods, only
weapons, still intact,
still good as tool.


Biographical information, favorite public domain poem.


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