Still I Rise You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise. Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? ‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells Pumping in my living room. Just like…
The Flying Notebook With its spiraling metal body and white pages for wings my notebook flies over my bed while I sleep— a bird full of quotations and tiny images who loves the night’s dark rooms, glad now to be free of my scrutiny and my pen point. Tomorrow, it will go with me into…
Caminante no hay Camino Caminante, son tus huellas el camino y nada más; Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Al andar se hace el camino, y al volver la vista atrás se ve la senda que nunca se ha de volver a pisar. Caminante no hay camino sino estelas en la mar….
Nothing Gold Can Stay Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. “Nothing Gold Can Stay” has been one of my favorite poems…
Ghosts The first time I saw him he was standing in front of the Iranian embassy with his mother, or with whom I assumed was his mother. She wore a black bonnet like a black flower. He wore a black frock coat and a beige collar high under his chins. His linen was unimpeachable. His…
Ararat Wrapped in gold foil, in the search and shouting of Easter Sunday, it was the ball of the princess, it was Pharoah’s body sleeping in its golden case. At the foot of the picket fence, in grass lank with the morning rain, it was a Sunday school prize, silver for second place, gold for…
Invictus Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond…
I. I am a man. I’ve lived alone. I’ve been in love. I’ve played with fire, cursed the telephone, and basked in verse, in verve, and also Humid, terrestrial, mixed, nongenderspecific, have occasionally day’s tumult ushers in an evening with a lone moved a woman’s shut icecream stand, false promises of cone heart, although …
The Saved From cutting the nuts out of a bull calf’s bag with a Barlow, from laying case knives on a dress pattern, from running a trotline and baiting the hooks with gone liver, from mashing a tobacco worm into a green blot, from crimping dough at the piecrust edge, from whisking an egg, from…
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size But when I start to tell them, They think I’m telling lies. I say, It’s in the reach of my arms, The span of my hips, The stride of my step, The curl of my lips. I’m…
