how to pay attention
a poem to begin each day
Tag Archives: art
Day 108 | Raisin by Gregory Pardlo
Raisin
Gregory Pardlo
I dragged my twelve-year-old cousin
to see the Broadway production of A Raisin
in the Sun because the hip-hop mogul
and rapping bachelor, Diddy, played
the starring role. An aspiring rapper gave
my cousin his last name and the occasional child
support so I thought the boy would geek to see a pop
hero in the flesh as Walter Lee. My wife was newly
pregnant, and I was rehearsing, like Diddy
swapping fictions, surrendering his manicured
thug persona for a more domestic performance.
My cousin mostly yawned throughout the play.
Except the moment Walter Lee’s tween son stiffened
on stage, as if rapt by the sound of a roulette ball.
Scene: No one breathes as Walter Lee vacillates,
uncertain of obsequity or indignation after Lindner offers
to buy the family out of the house they’ve purchased
in the all-white suburb, Walter might kneel to accept,
but he senses the tension in his son’s gaze. I was thinking,
for real though, what would Diddy do? “Get rich
or die trying,” 50 Cent would tell us. But my father would
sing like Ricky Scaggs, “Don’t get above your raisin’,”
when as a kid I vowed to be a bigger man than him.
That oppressive fruit dropped heavy as a medicine
ball in my lap meant to check my ego, and I imagined
generations wimpling in succession like the conga
marching raisins that sang Marvin’s hit song. Silly,
I know. Outside the theater, my cousin told me
when Diddy was two, they found his hustler dad
draping a steering wheel in Central Park,
a bullet in his head. I shared what I knew of dreams
deferred and Marvin Gaye. (When asked if he loved
his son, Marvin Sr. answered, “Let’s just say I didn’t
dislike him.”) Beneath the bling of many billion
diodes I walked beside the boy through Times Square
as if anticipating a magic curtain that would rise,
but only one of us would get to take a bow.
Day 143 | Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare
Sonnet 18
William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Day 152 | Ode to the Gain by Matthew Nienow
Ode to the Gain
Matthew Nienow
gain — a bevel cut into plank ends in traditional lapstrake boat construction that allows otherwise lapped planks to lay flush at stem and transom.
There’s the paring chisel’s purpose
in the steamed cedar strake, its long warp
laid strong against the bench,
whose pocked surface is the book
of what has already been made,
or marred in learning’s wake — & clamped
now in the jaws one is
waiting for its match, for the chisel to elaborate
the pencil’s scribed hypothesis, under which
lies another path, & through a tilting eye
the curving bevel’s made, the chisel rolling
back tight scrolls of thinnest grain & what bright
sleeves begin to fleece the floor; there is a lack
given to the wood, some short song cut loose
from the lignin’s name, that a longer &
more buoyant melody be made.
how to pay attention 