Metaphor | Poetry In Voice

Sonnets from the Portuguese 24

Let the world’s sharpness, like a clasping knife,

Shut in upon itself and do no harm

In this close hand of Love, now soft and warm,

And let us hear no sound of human strife

After the click of the shutting. Life to life —

I lean upon thee, Dear, without alarm,

And feel as safe as guarded by a charm

Against the stab of worldlings,...

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1806-1861

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy’d

Greatly, have suffer’d...

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1809-1892

Sons of Orion

for Alton Sterling, Andrew Loku, Philando Castile, et al.

I wanna live, son. But which son are you?

There where the rivers are made

of moonshine and the lights still wait,

move by the music of the dealer’s bootleg CDs.

Have you left the street-side, the Rigel stage

for another watery home?

What still...

Canisia Lubrin
b. 1984

sturgeon

i twist and gasp

open and close my mouth

searching for air

whenever a sturgeon is caught in the rainy river

i know

the feel of strange hands touching my body

the struggle

to be free

the longing

to go where i want to go

i feel

the impact of stick or rock on bone

the splash of colour...

Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm
b. 1965

I Have Something to Tell You

I’ve come to talk to you about shaving cuts

I was waiting across the road

right over there

for the light to turn

and you were on the other side

fumbling with change at the newspaper box

don’t buy this one buy this one

I said

pointing to identical newspapers

look here

I cut myself shaving

and...

Stuart Ross
b. 1959

Under the Answering Sky

I can manage being alone,

can pace out convivial hope

across my managing ground.

Someone might call, later.

What do the dead make of us

that we’d flay ourselves trying

to hear them though they may

sigh at such close loneliness.

I would catch, not my echo,

but their guarantee that this

...

Denise Riley
b. 1948

Two Hours on the Train

During two hours on the train

I rerun the film of my life

Two minutes per year on average

Half an hour for childhood

Another half-hour for prison

Love, books, wandering

take up the rest

the hand of my companion

gradually melts into mine

and her head on my shoulder

is as light as a dove

When we...

Abdellatif Laâbi
b. 1942

From Injun

he played injun in gods country

where boys proved themselves clean

dumb beasts who could cut fire

out of the whitest sand

he played english across the trail

where girls turned plum wild

garlic and strained words

through the window of night

he spoke...

Jordan Abel
b. 1985

A Short Story of Falling

It is the story of the falling rain

to turn into a leaf and fall again

it is the secret of a summer shower

to steal the light and hide it in a flower

and every flower a tiny tributary

that from the ground flows green and momentary

is one of water’s wishes and this tale

hangs in a seed-head smaller...

Alice Oswald
b. 1966

Last Visit

Now I set out across a minefield,

space having taken all I owned, I’m starting over

from a point where every pebble may explode

beneath my shoe and the flowers blaze up

behind my body as I gasp for air,

although in this world I’ve never known

either flames or dragons or the fury of war

in these lands where the sky was always calm...

Pierre Nepveu
b. 1946

Letters

I threw away your letters.

Years ago, just like that.

The tight black swirls,

circles and strokes

filling fine sheets —

I would not see them again.

The last items I had left.

The dates. The phrases.

The things you said. Forfeited.

Snowflake patterns.

Leaf diagrams.

Crushed. Melted. Dissolved....

Russell Thornton
b. 1959

howlin at the moon

take the moon

nd take a star

when you don’t

know who you are

paint the picture in your hand

nd roll on home

take my fear

nd take the hunger

take my body

when i’m younger

paint the picture in your hand

nd roll on home

take my ghost

nd make the...

Wayne Keon
b. 1946

Illegalese: Floodgate Dub

(for the Chinese maroons, British Columbia, 1999–2001)

if you arrive in the belly of a rusting imagination, there are grounds to

outlaw you. but Canada is a remix B-side chorus in the globalization

loop: a sampled track of “back home”-desiring, “old days”-admiring,

democracy-dreaming, racism-reaping homesickness that even

...

Wayde Compton
b. 1972

The limpness of a bird's legs in flight.

The place, the question, the question.

The place, the interest, the question.

There is the place.

There is what you do in the place.

There is your belief.

There is the faith in a knowing.

There is your instruction

by the gods.

There is your instruction as you are told.

There is your relief...

Aisha Sasha John
b. 1980

Deto(nation)

There’s a joke that ends with — huh?

It’s the bomb saying here is your father.

Now here is your father inside

your lungs. Look how lighter

the earth is — afterward.

To even write father

is to carve a portion of the day

out of a bomb-bright page.

There’s enough...

Ocean Vuong
b. 1988

Say the Names

— say the names say the names

and listen to yourself

an echo in the mountains

Tulameen Tulameen

say them like your soul

was listening and overhearing

and you dreamed you dreamed

you were a river

and you were a river

Tulameen Tulameen

— not the flat borrowed imitations

of foreign names...

Al Purdy
1918-2000

Little Song

Both guitars run trebly. One noodles

Over a groove. The other slushes chords.

Then they switch. It’s quite an earnest affair.

They close my eyes. I close their eyes. A horn

Blares its inner air to brass. A girl shakes

Her ass. Some dude does the same. The music’s

Gone moot. Who doesn’t love it when the bass

Doesn’t hide? When...

Rowan Ricardo Phillips
b. 1974

Francesca Woodman

At the heart there is a hollow sun

by which we are constructed and undone

Behind the mirror. Favourite place to hide.

I didn't breathe. They looked so long I died.

...

Don Paterson
b. 1963

The Novel As Manuscript

An ars poetica

I remember the death, in Russia,

of postage stamps

like immense museum masterpieces

patchwork

wrapped in linen, tea stained,

with hemp for strapping...

these colored stamps designed for foreign places

were even printed during famine—

so when they vanished...

Norman Dubie
b. 1945

I’ll Teach You Cree

with the tip of my spring tongue, ayîki frog

your mouth will be the web

catching apihkêsis words, spider

a crawling-out ceremony

that cannot be translated.

hâw, pîkiskwê! Now, speak!

I’ll teach you Cree, nêhiyawêwin...

Gregory Scofield
b. 1966

Hip-Hop Ghazal

Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips,

decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.

As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,

inhaling bassline, cracking backbone and singing thru hips.

Like something boneless, we glide silent, seeping ‘tween floorboards,

...

Patricia Smith
b. 1955

St John’s Burns Down for the Umpteenth Time

Let’s say the fix was in. Let’s say history,

Being human and thus short on ideas,

Made change from an old bag of tricks. Say this

Was something reported as news

On a day when your life came to no good.

The new homeless drifting from row houses

Along streets tamped down by the heedless

And paved in afterthought. Out of hollows...

James Langer
b. 1973

What Is Poetry

(a twelve-tone poem)

trite yap show

rosy twit heap

posterity haw

a wept history

it’s yawp rot, eh

a wisher potty

a power shitty

a whitey sport

poetry is what

whips yo tater

pets it awry, oh

oh, twisty pear

two hearts yip

it’s paw theory...

Susan Holbrook
b. 1967

Poem For Duncan Campbell Scott

(Canadian poet who “had a long and distinguished career

in the Department of lndian Affairs, retiring in 1932.”

The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse)

Who is this black coat and tie?

Christian severity etched in the lines

he draws from his mouth. Clearly a noble man

who believes in work and mission. See

how he rises from...

Armand Garnet Ruffo

Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border

It is never easy

Walking with an invisible border

Separating my left and right foot

I feel like an illegitimate child

Forsaken by my parents

At least I can claim innocence

Since I did not ask to come

Into this world

...

Alootook Ipellie
1951–2007

I Feel the Sun

Down a long, long corridor

I keep walking…

—A window straight ahead so bright it hurts the eyes,

reflective walls on both sides.

Sunlight, me,

I stand with the sunlight.

—The sunlight is so intense!

So warm people stop in their tracks,

so bright people hold their breath.

All the light in...

Wang Xiaoni
b. 1955

Cowboy Story

The books sit on the shelf, a row of coma patients

in a ward, a series of selves no longer able to learn

and trapped at the point of injury: the last page.

At the donor clinic I offer my arm to the spigot

of the needle and think, as I see the bag fill

with blood, there goes some of me. But that’s a lie:

as...

George Murray
b. 1971

Common Magic

Your best friend falls in love

and her brain turns to water.

You can watch her lips move,

making the customary sounds

but you can see they’re merely

words, flimsy as bubbles rising

from some golden sea where she

swims sleek and exotic as a mermaid.

It’s always like that.

You stop for lunch in a crowded

...

Bronwen Wallace
1945-1989

Chemo Side Effects: Memory

Where is the word I want?

Groping

in the thicket,

about to pinch the

dangling

berry, my fingerpads

close on

air.

I can hear it

scrabbling like a squirrel

on the oak’s far side.

Word, please send over this black stretch of ocean

your singular flare,...

Elise Partridge
1958–2015

I've Tasted My Blood

If this brain’s over-tempered

consider that the fire was want

and the hammers were fists.

I’ve tasted my blood too much

to love what I was born to.

But my mother’s look

was a field of brown oats, soft-bearded;

her voice rain and air rich with lilacs:

and I loved her too much to like

how she dragged...

Milton Acorn
1923–1986

Modestine

We have each tried to read to him, with no success, except for James, who read him all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

I was there, in the first of the long-term care centres, when he finished the story,

And we all shared the narrator’s sadness about giving up his donkey,

Not having realized that he loved her; unable to...

Lynn Crosbie
b. 1963

Money

Coin Exhibit, British Museum.

Their misshapenness strikes the table in tiny splashes,

like still-cooling splatters of silver. Stater and shekel,

mina and obol. Persia’s bullion had a lion and bull.

Athens an owl, Messana a hare, a jar for Terone, Melos

a pomegranate. Call it museum money, written...

Carmine Starnino
b. 1970

From Correspondences

Sometimes we are led through the doorway

by a child, sometimes

by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing

the past, for if there is anything we must change

it is the past. To look back

and see another map.

Love enough to fill

a shoe, a suitcase, a bit of ink,

a painting, a child’s eyes at a chalkboard,...

Anne Michaels
b. 1958

My Meadow, My Twilight

Sure, there’s a spell the leaves can make, shuddering,

and in their lying suddenly still again — flat, and still,

like time itself when it seems unexpectedly more

available, more to lose therefore, more to love, or

try to...

But to look up from the leaves, remember,

is a choice also, as if up from the shame of it...

Carl Phillips
b. 1959

11. Headwinds

When I began to write, I didn’t know

each of my words would bit by bit remove

things from the world and in return leave blank

spaces. That poems would begin to take

the place of my own homeland, mother, father,

first love, and second youth, and what I write

would fade from this world, trade its solid being

for unstable...

Tomasz Rózycki
b. 1970

Eight

The trick to building houses was making sure

they didn’t taste good. The ocean’s culinary taste

was growing more sophisticated and occasionally

its appetite was unwieldy. It ate boats and children,

the occasional shoe. Pants. A diamond ring.

Hammers. It ate promises and rants. It snatched up

names like...

Sue Goyette
b. 1964

Cocteau Twins

I’ve heard the phrase between you

and me too many times to believe

it to be true, but between me and you

there was Cocteau, wagging his testimonial

finger, as usual, while flat out on the floor

with my arms in receipt of the flower

of thought, palms upwards, I envisaged

the...

Rachel Boast
b. 1975

The Cold Green Element

At the end of the garden walk

the wind and its satellite wait for me;

their meaning I will not know

until I go there,

but the black-hatted undertaker

...

Irving Layton
1912–2006

Let the Ponies Out

oh papa, to have you drift up, some part of you drift up through

water through

fresh water into the teal plate of sky soaking foothills, papa,

to have your breath leave, escape you, escape the

weight of bone, muscle and organ, escape you, to rise up, to loft,

till you are all breath filling the room, rising, escaping the white...

Marilyn Dumont
b. 1955

the knowing

the re-invention of oneself

through the tongues of whispering mountains

the re-arrangement of the universe

because a spider wrapped her legs around a star

the knowing

the remembering of stone’s story

while walking down a dried riverbed

being serenaded by crickets singing the blues

because everyone except them has...

Connie Fife
b. 1961

Salmon Courage

Here at Woodlands, Moriah,

these thirty-five years later,

still I could smell her fear.

Then, the huddled hills would not have

calmed her, now as they do me.

Then, the view did not snatch

the panting breath, now, as it does

these thirty-five years later, to the day,

I relive the journey of my salmon mother.

...

M. NourbeSe Philip
b. 1947

Chinese Chimes: Nine Detours of the Yellow River

you are unaware of your obscure sources

but you are explicitly sure of the vast sea

as your final destination

you always frown with your brownish wrinkles

but you prefer a nonprofessional smile on your face

your only luggage of life

...

Changming Yuan

Dear Updike

I dreaded those future aeons when I would not be present —

an endless succession of days I would miss, with their own

news and songs and styles of machine.

— John Updike, “On Being a Self Forever”

No, nothing much has changed.

A year later, the world is still one you’d recognize...

Evelyn Lau
b. 1971

I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries

I have not lingered in European monasteries

and discovered among the tall grasses tombs of knights

who fell as beautifully as their ballads tell;

I have not parted the grasses

or purposefully left them thatched....

Leonard Cohen
1934-2016

Wolf Lake

It was down that road he brought me, still

in the trunk of his car. I won’t say it felt right,

but it did feel expected. The way you know

your blood can spring like a hydrant.

That September, the horseflies were...

Elizabeth Bachinsky
b. 1976

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a...

Billy Collins
b. 1941

Lagoons, Hanlan’s Point

Mornings

before the sun’s liquid

spilled gradually, flooding

the island’s cool cellar,

there was the boat

and the still lagoons,

the...

Raymond Souster
1921 - 2012

Wild Nights — Wild Nights!

Were I with thee

Wild Nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile — the Winds —

To a Heart in port —

Done with the Compass —

Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden —

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor — Tonight —

In Thee!

Emily Dickinson
1830-1886

Riprap

Lay down these words

Before your mind like rocks.

placed solid, by hands

In choice of place, set

Before the body of the mind

in space and time:

...

Gary Snyder
b. 1930

Homage to the Mineral of the Onion (I)

In the onion, there’s

something of fire. That fire known as

Fog. The onion is the way

fog has of entering the earth.

Into the soil. Through the green leaves of the onion....

Erin Mouré
b. 1955

Thou Poem

Thou poem of lost attention and half try,

do you fear more the inner world or outer?

I do not love the self less than the others,

my name is legion and my mouth one cry.

...

A. F. Moritz
b. 1947

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading — treading — till it seemed

That Sense was breaking through —

And when they all were seated,

...

Emily Dickinson
1830-1886

The New Experience

I was ready for a new experience.

All the old ones had burned out.

They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside

And blew in drifts across the fairgrounds and fields.

...

Suzanne Buffam
b. 1972

Poetry

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important

beyond all this fiddle.

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it,

one discovers that there is in

...

Marianne Moore
1887-1972

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—

“Hope” is the thing with feathers —

That perches in the soul —

And sings the tune without the words —

And never stops — at all —

And sweetest — in the Gale — is heard — ...

Emily Dickinson
1830-1886

Guanahani, 11

like the beginnings — o odales o adagios — of islands

from under the clouds where I write the first poem

its brown warmth now that we recognize them

...

Kamau Brathwaite
b. 1930

From Chapter I

for Dick Higgins

Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink

this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism,

disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks — impish

hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn’t...

Christian Bök
b. 1966

O Captain! My Captain!

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

But O heart! heart! heart!

O the bleeding drops of red,

...

Walt Whitman
1819-1892

Up-Hill

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

Yes, to the very end.

Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?

From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?

A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.

May not the darkness hide it from my face?...

Christina Rossetti
1830-1894

Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

...

John Donne
1572-1631

Preludes

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

Six o’clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about your feet

And newspapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat

On broken blinds and chimney-pots,

And at the...

T. S. Eliot
1888-1965

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as...

Robert Frost
1874-1963

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles today

Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,

The higher he’s a-getting,

The sooner will his race be run,

And nearer he’...

Robert Herrick
1591-1674

Love (III)

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

If I lack’d any thing.

“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”;

...

George Herbert
1593-1633

The Snow-Storm

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,

Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,

Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air

Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,

And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.

The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet

Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit

...

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882

We Wear the Mask

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, —

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

...

Paul Laurence Dunbar
1872-1906

The Pulley

When God at first made man,

Having a glass of blessings standing by,

“Let us,” said he, “pour on him all we can.

Let the world’s riches, which dispersèd lie,

Contract into a span.”

So strength first made a way;

Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure.

...

George Herbert
1593-1633

The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls

The tide rises, the tide falls,

The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;

Along the sea-sands damp and brown

The traveller hastens toward the town,

And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,

But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;

The little waves, with their soft, white...

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
1807-1882

The Flea

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,

How little that which thou deniest me is;

Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;

Thou know’st that this cannot be said

A sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead,

Yet this enjoys before it woo,

And pampered swells...

John Donne
1572-1631

The Author to Her Book

Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain,

Who after birth didst by my side remain,

Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,

Who thee abroad, expos’d to publick view,

Made thee in raggs, halting to th’ press to trudge,

Where errors were not lessened (all may judg).

At thy return my blushing was not small,

My...

Anne Bradstreet
1612-1672

How One Winter Came in the Lake Region

For weeks and weeks the autumn world stood still,

Clothed in the shadow of a smoky haze;

The fields were dead, the wind had lost its will,

And all the lands were hushed by wood and hill,

In those grey, withered days.

Behind a mist the blear sun rose and set,

At night the...

Wilfred Campbell
1858-1918