Category: Poems
Poetry from Oklahoma
The Cruelest Month: Coming Attractions
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
–T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
What to think of April? Is it the cruelest month? The “idiot, babbling and strewing flowers” as Millay called it? The time when the “shours soote” bathe “every veyne in swich licour” (the sweet showers bathe every plant vein in such liquid), as Chaucer spoke of? Well, it’s all of this and more with cummings’ goat-footed balloon-man whistling far and wee through the “puddle-wonderful” world. Continue reading “The Cruelest Month: Coming Attractions”
Holding Your Hand
We parked the truck and stepped out
Onto the road that used to be a highway
Of my childhood, winding through Mayes County
To the Grand River bluffs, where my mother
Said hobos made cave camps and where a train
Ran a solitary line amidst the blackjack
And sawbriar. I am holding your hand. Continue reading “Holding Your Hand”
Call Eney Time! (Craig’s List Poetry)
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up with a compound bow. Continue reading “Call Eney Time! (Craig’s List Poetry)”
27 Years
Nelson Mandela, leader of the movement to end South African apartheid, is released from prison after 27 years on February 11, 1990.
When I was 27, I was pregnant with my son,
And in the third trimester, I went to England,
Experiencing Stratford on Avon, where he heard
His first Shakespeare play—Much Ado About Nothing—
And toured Roman baths and experienced the result Continue reading “27 Years”
To Embrace Her Slippers
“Will did not know what to say, since it would not be useful for him to embrace her slippers, and tell her that he would die for her . . . it was clear that she required nothing of the sort. . .” –Middlemarch, George Eliot
Yet why not embrace her slippers?
Why not risk the possibility
Of saliva trickling upon satin
Or tapestry or whatever blessed
Shoe covering one might wear
In a 19th century novel weighing
In at 4.2 pounds, 852 pages? Continue reading “To Embrace Her Slippers”
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 