Day 103 | Nurture by Maxine Kumin

Day 102 | Nurture by Maxine Kumin

Day 91 | Bird-Understander by Craig Arnold

Day 92 | Bird-Understander by Craig Arnold

Day 119 | Nurture by Maxine Kumin

Day 102 | Nurture by Maxine Kumin.

Day 92 | Bird-Understander by Craig Arnold

Bird-Understander
Craig Arnold

Of many reasons I love you here is one

 

the way you write me from the gate at the airport

so I can tell you everything will be alright

 

so you can tell me there is a bird

trapped in the terminal      all the people

ignoring it       because they do not know

what to do with it       except to leave it alone

until it scares itself to death

 

it makes you terribly terribly sad

 

You wish you could take the bird outside

and set it free or       (failing that)

call a bird-understander

to come help the bird

 

All you can do is notice the bird

and feel for the bird       and write

to tell me how language feels

impossibly useless

 

but you are wrong

 

You are a bird-understander

better than I could ever be

who make so many noises

and call them song

 

These are your own words

your way of noticing

and saying plainly

of not turning away

from hurt

 

you have offered them

to me       I am only

giving them back

 

if only I could show you

how very useless

they are not

Day 124 | New Stanzas for Amazing Grace by Allen Ginsberg

New Stanzas for Amazing Grace
Allen Ginsberg

I dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place

Where I was lost alone

Folk looked right through me into space

And passed with eyes of stone

O homeless hand on many a street

Accept this change from me

A friendly smile or word is sweet

As fearless charity

Woe workingman who hears the cry

And cannot spare a dime

Nor look into a homeless eye

Afraid to give the time

So rich or poor no gold to talk

A smile on your face

The homeless ones where you may walk

Receive amazing grace

I dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place

Where I was lost alone

Folk looked right through me into space

And passed with eyes of stone

Day 102 | Nurture by Maxine Kumin

Nurture
Maxine Kumin

From a documentary on marsupials I learn

that a pillowcase makes a fine

substitute pouch for an orphaned kangaroo.

I am drawn to such dramas of animal rescue.

They are warm in the throat. I suffer, the critic proclaims,

from an overabundance of maternal genes.

Bring me your fallen fledgling, your bummer lamb,

lead the abused, the starvelings, into my barn.

Advise the hunted deer to leap into my corn.

And had there been a wild child—

filthy and fierce as a ferret, he is called

in one nineteenth-century account—

a wild child to love, it is safe to assume,

given my fireside inked with paw prints,

there would have been room.

Think of the language we two, same and not-same,

might have constructed from sign,

scratch, grimace, grunt, vowel:

Laughter our first noun, and our long verb, howl.

Day 112 | Drycleaners by Dave Smith

Drycleaners
Dave Smith

At the drycleaners I stand in line, my feet
shuffling weight from side to side,
impatience all over me while the woman,
light brown, with her Creole story drones on.
In New Orleans none would notice.
She’s exotic in Baltimore, a dawn bird
everything hears. Even the clerk
leans into her tale, clucking softly. When
people behind me cough, she won’t be
rushed. She’s got her whole story to go.
Soon there’s a man she never married,
her mother opposed, far away still, and he
went into a bar, wrong place, wrong color,
wrong words, maybe, a good man.
He’ll never come away of there, not comin’
home, geraniums on the back porch,
and not replace the bad tire her Honda has,
who could always be telling her what time
does in the kitchen if she stand half
naked letting his dog go on out. So
let me pay you for him, give you money
because you is nice and I remember,
her nearly singing voice sighs. The sleeved
pants, two shirts hang on the brass ring, all
finished, unclaimed, the stiffened
stains gone away. The perfectly starched
cloth a redemption so beautiful
it might be the linen of royalty, but small
for a man two of us will think of as
sleep scuffs house walls like tide under a boat.
How nice they are, these women doing
the little one person can for another
which is, in the end, a wash
of memorable words that leave you standing.