Free Poems for Life by The Nightingale-Bamford School Page A

moment, like he was swaying
    with a woman. Our gun barrels
    glowed white-hot.
    When I got to him,
    a blue halo
    of flies had already claimed him.
    For some of those children who once were lulled to sleep by the rhythms of Seuss and Sendak, poetry comes now set to music: Nirvana and Arrested Development, Tori Amos and the Indigo Girls. Many readers are scared off young, put off by the belief that poetry is difficult and demanding. We complain that it doesn’t sound like the way we talk, but if it sounds like the way we talk, we complain that it doesn’t rhyme.
    A poet who teaches in the schools tells of how one boy told him he couldn’t, wouldn’t write poetry. Then one day in class he heard Hayden Carruth’s “Cows at Night” and cried, “I didn’t know we were allowed to write poems about cows.”
    Or write a poem about two women talking in the kitchen.
    Crazy as a bessy bug.
    Jack wasn’t cold
    In his grave before
    She done up & gave all
    The insurance money
    To some young pigeon
    Who never hit a lick
    At work in his life.
    He cleaned her out & left
    With Donna Faye’s girl.
    Honey, hush. You don’t
    Say …
    That’s Mr. Komunyakaa from the collection, Neon Vernacular , that won the Pulitzer. His publisher originally printed 2,500 copies, which is fairly large for poetry but a joke to the folks who stock those racks at the airport. Few are the parents who leap up with soundless joy when a son or daughter announces, “Mom, Dad, I’ve decided to become a poet.“
    People who are knowledgeable about poetry sometimes discuss it in that knowing, rather hateful way in which enophiles talk about wine: robust, delicate, muscular. This has nothing to do with how most of us experience it, the heart coming around the corner and unexpectedly running into the mind. Of all the words that have stuck to the ribs of my soul, poetry has been the most filling. Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, the divine W. B. Yeats. April is the cruelest month. O World, I cannot hold thee close enough! After the first death, there is no other. A terrible beauty is born.
    Poems are now appearing on posters in subway trains; one commuter said of a Langston Hughes poem, “I can’t express it, but I get it.” Now rolling through the soot-black dark of the tunnels and the surprising sunshine where the subways suddenly shoot aboveground: Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Audre Lord, May Swenson, Rita Dove, and Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote that exquisite evocation of carpe diem, and perhaps of poetry, too:
    Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.
    And be it gash or gold it will not come
    Again in this identical disguise.
    Says Mr. Komunyakaa, who teaches, “I never really approached it from the perspective of making a living. It was simply a need.” Maybe it’s a need for us all we just forget.

Poems
    for Life

J ANE A LEXANDER

    Dear Ms. Rabbino,
    Thank you for your letter, and I applaud your project as a means to raise funds for the International Rescue Committee to benefit refugee children.
    You have asked me to give you a copy of my favorite poem. I have many favorite poems, but I read one the other day that is my current favorite and I thought you might wish to include it in your book. The poem, “In Black Earth, Wisconsin,” was written by Andrea Musher. I read it in a recently published anthology of poems by Dane County writers of Wisconsin. The anthology is called The Glacier Stopped Here , published by the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission and Isthmus Publishing Company in 1994.
    The poem is my favorite presently because it paints for me a picture of this very specific Wisconsin country. I get a clear picture of the farm, the mother and family and the graveyard at the top of the hill. It evokes for me a particular time and an almost unbearable emotional path that this mother and family have taken.
    Poems are