Salmon and Souvlaki

Somehow, I don’t think I’ll be posting a poem next Thursday, because Nik and I will be in Alaska for Rachel’s wedding!  So this is it for a couple weeks!

The
Sunflowers
Mary Oliver

Come with me
into the
field of sunflowers
Their
faces are burnished disks,
their
dry spines,

creak like ship mast,
their
green leaves,
so
heavy and many,
fill
all day with the sticky

sugars of the sun.
Come with
me
to
visit the sunflowers
they
are shy

but want to be friends;
they have
wonderful stories
of when
they were young –
the
important weather,

the wandering crows.
Don’t be
afraid
to ask
them questions!
Their
bright faces,

which follow the sun,
will listen,
and all
those
rows of seeds –
each
one a new life! –

hope for a deeper acquaintance;
each of
them, though it stands
in a
crowd of many,
like
a separate universe,

is lonely, the long work
of turning
their lives
into a
celebration
is not easy.  Come

and let us talk with those modest faces,
the simple
garments of leaves,
the
coarse roots in the earth,
so
uprightly burning. 

Go here to hear this poem read out loud (it is well worth the couple minutes).  The reader is this year’s winner of the Poetry Out Loud competition.  The finals were in DC on Tuesday night.

Frederick Douglass
Robert Hayden

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this
beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.