God got a dog

God got a dog
 by Cynthia Rylant

She never meant to
She liked dogs. She'd
liked them ever since She was a kid,
but She didn't think
She had time for a dog now.
She was always working
and dogs needed so
much attention.
God didn't know if She
could take being needed
by one more thing.
But She saw this dog
out by the tracks
and it was hungry
and cold
and lonely
and God realized
She'd made that dog
somehow,
somehow She was responsible
though She knew logically
that She had only set the
world on its course.
She couldn't be blamed
for everything.
But She saw this dog
and She felt bad
so She took it home
and named it Ernie
and now God....
has somebody
keeping Her feet warm at night.


buy the book here:
http://www.powells.com/book/god-got-a-dog-9781442465183

Why This Night

Why This Night
Or Maybe This Year, We’ll Read a Poem
by Esther Cohen

Why oh why
Is this evening
So long so similar
So often uninspired, disappointing
So hard to conceive?
Why does the word liberation
Sound too much like Liver Nation
Not enough like freedom?
Why can’t we
In the spirit of what
It might mean
To truly celebrate
Overcoming our tribal
Predispositions, telling stories
That make us bigger
Not smaller, reliving
Not the usual what he did
To me, or she, but
Imagining instead
What we might do
Could do, if we were able
Even for one night
To forgive whatever
Happened before
However big, however small,
If we could repeat
The word forgive five times
Or ten, maybe then
We could tell a good story.

What I never liked
About Passover (the holiday
Most of us celebrate) the whole we they part
Good guys and bad. Self righteous holy victim
Story they did this to us and now look.
I took the other side. It wasn’t the usual
I’m an underdog too. More
Personal than that. When I went
To Egypt the first time
In the 70’s I fell in love
With the place Oh My God
Is Egypt beautiful funny warm
Fragrant deeply aesthetic which
Is not to say
The impossible problems
Poverty prejudice religion
Frequent triumvirate did not
Play a part. Egypt was a place
I wanted to live, like Israel
Morocco all those Greek islands
Lemon countries, where deep smiles
Are part of the landscape and people love
With their arms wide open.

I thought about Passover
When I landed in the Cairo airport
So beautiful you could actually feel the colors
Pink yellow gold white and I wanted to write
A different Passover story, not
Of the we are all in this together
Variety more we aren’t ever sure
What truly happened, unless we are
Scientists and even science
Is a guess.

For Passover this year
I’d like to invite
people I love
some I like well enough
some who are in the ok category
To imagine a word
And a world that is open and true,
Where we all imagine, in the course of the meal
That it is possible to forgive
Whatever happened to us:
Betrayal, lies, even annihilation. Some
Of life so terrible it’s hard to believe
What people can do to one another
All in the name of one god or another
Difference makes us all crazy
How could he Why did she
Different values religions races identities.
Close family friend for 30 years
Didn’t invite us to his wedding My husband’s
Relatives killed by Turks. Hurt is not
An abstraction an idea. There is always a why,
A reason. The unsatisfactory explanation. Weakness
Insanity priorities even personality
This Passover maybe not next year
Maybe I’ll feel differently than I do now
This Passover maybe we can liberate ourselves
From holding onto what happened
We don’t have to subscribe
To Be Here Now but we can try
Letting go of all that happened
That shouldn’t have that gets in the way
Of how pink Egypt is how much
We loved one another before
Life intervened. This Passover
We will pass over injustice
Not because it’s ok
But because we want to try a holiday experiment
Maybe just this year, we want
To see if we can liberate ourselves
By saying these words:
Forgive
Forgive
Forgive

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/136986/national-poetry-month-the-unhagaddah/?#ixzz3WPYNYYH0

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

by Anne Sexton

 

No matter what life you lead
the virgin is a lovely number:
cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper,
arms and legs made of Limoges,
lips like Vin Du Rhône,
rolling her china-blue doll eyes
open and shut.
Open to say, 
Good Day Mama,
and shut for the thrust
of the unicorn.
She is unsoiled.
She is as white as a bonefish.

Once there was a lovely virgin
called Snow White.
Say she was thirteen.
Her stepmother,
a beauty in her own right,
though eaten, of course, by age,
would hear of no beauty surpassing her own.
Beauty is a simple passion,
but, oh my friends, in the end
you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.
The stepmother had a mirror to which she referred--
something like the weather forecast--
a mirror that proclaimed 
the one beauty of the land.
She would ask,
Looking glass upon the wall,
who is fairest of us all?
And the mirror would reply,
You are the fairest of us all.
Pride pumped in her like poison.

Suddenly one day the mirror replied,
Queen, you are full fair, ‘tis true,
but Snow White is fairer than you.
Until that moment Snow White
had been no more important
than a dust mouse under the bed.
But now the queen saw brown spots on her hand
and four whiskers over her lip
so she condemned Snow White
to be hacked to death.
Bring me her heart, she said to the hunter,
and I will salt it and eat it.
The hunter, however, let his prisoner go
and brought a boar’s heart back to the castle.
The queen chewed it up like a cube steak.
Now I am fairest, she said,
lapping her slim white fingers.

Snow White walked in the wildwood
for weeks and weeks.
At each turn there were twenty doorways
and at each stood a hungry wolf,
his tongue lolling out like a worm.
The birds called out lewdly,
talking like pink parrots,
and the snakes hung down in loops,
each a noose for her sweet white neck.
On the seventh week
she came to the seventh mountain
and there she found the dwarf house.
It was as droll as a honeymoon cottage
and completely equipped with
seven beds, seven chairs, seven forks
and seven chamber pots.
Snow White ate seven chicken livers
and lay down, at last, to sleep.

The dwarfs, those little hot dogs,
walked three times around Snow White,
the sleeping virgin.  They were wise
and wattled like small czars.
Yes.  It’s a good omen,
they said, and will bring us luck.
They stood on tiptoes to watch
Snow White wake up.  She told them
about the mirror and the killer-queen
and they asked her to stay and keep house.
Beware of your stepmother,
they said.
Soon she will know you are here.
While we are away in the mines
during the day, you must not
open the door.

Looking glass upon the wall . . .
The mirror told
and so the queen dressed herself in rags
and went out like a peddler to trap Snow White.
She went across seven mountains.
She came to the dwarf house
and Snow White opened the door
and bought a bit of lacing.
The queen fastened it tightly
around her bodice,
as tight as an Ace bandage,
so tight that Snow White swooned.
She lay on the floor, a plucked daisy.
When the dwarfs came home they undid the lace
and she revived miraculously.
She was as full of life as soda pop.
Beware of your stepmother,
they said.
She will try once more.

Looking glass upon the wall. . .
Once more the mirror told
and once more the queen dressed in rags
and once more Snow White opened the door.
This time she bought a poison comb, 
a curved eight-inch scorpion,
and put it in her hair and swooned again.
The dwarfs returned and took out the comb
and she revived miraculously.
She opened her eyes as wide as Orphan Annie.
Beware, beware, they said,
but the mirror told,
the queen came,
Snow White, the dumb bunny,
opened the door
and she bit into a poison apple
and fell down for the final time.
When the dwarfs returned
they undid her bodice,
they looked for a comb,
but it did no good.
Though they washed her with wine
and rubbed her with butter
it was to no avail.
She lay as still as a gold piece.

The seven dwarfs could not bring themselves
to bury her in the black ground
so they made a glass coffin
and set it upon the seventh mountain
so that all who passed by
could peek in upon her beauty.
A prince came one June day
and would not budge.
He stayed so long his hair turned green
and still he would not leave.
The dwarfs took pity upon him
and gave him the glass Snow White--
its doll’s eyes shut forever--
to keep in his far-off castle.
As the prince’s men carried the coffin
they stumbled and dropped it
and the chunk of apple flew out
of her throat and she woke up miraculously.

And thus Snow White became the prince’s bride.
The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast
and when she arrived there were
red-hot iron shoes,
in the manner of red-hot roller skates,
clamped upon her feet.
First your toes will smoke
and then your heels will turn black
and you will fry upward like a frog,
she was told.
And so she danced until she was dead,
a subterranean figure,
her tongue flicking in and out
like a gas jet.
Meanwhile Snow White held court,
rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut
and sometimes referring to her mirror
as women do.

Found here on Poets.org 

Sonnet 130 - My Mistress' Eyes

Sonnet 130 - My Mistress' Eyes

by William Shakespeare

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
   As any she belied with false compare.


Found here on Shakespeare Online

So We'll Go No More A-Roving

So We'll Go No More A-Roving

by George Gordon, Lord Byron

So, we'll go no more a-roving 
     So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
  And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
  And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
  And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
  And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a-roving
  By the light of the moon.


Found here on Writing and Ruminating

A Fairly Sad Tale

A Fairly Sad Tale

by Dorothy Parker

I think that I shall never know
Why I am thus, and I am so.
Around me, other girls inspire
In men the rush and roar of fire,
The sweet transparency of glass,
The tenderness of April grass,
The durability of granite;
But me- I don't know how to plan it.
The lads I've met in Cupid's deadlock
Were- shall we say?- born out of wedlock.
They broke my heart, they stilled my song,
And said they had to run along,
Explaining, so to sop my tears,
First came their parents or careers.
But ever does experience
Deny me wisdom, calm, and sense!
Though she's a fool who seeks to capture
The twenty-first fine, careless rapture,
I must go on, till ends my rope,
Who from my birth was cursed with hope.
A heart in half is chaste, archaic;
But mine resembles a mosaic-
The thing's become ridiculous!
Why am I so? Why am I thus? 


Found here on Poem Hunter dot com

The Words Under the Words

by Naomi Shihab Nye

for Sitti Khadra, north of Jerusalem

My grandmother’s hands recognize grapes,   
the damp shine of a goat’s new skin.   
When I was sick they followed me,
I woke from the long fever to find them   
covering my head like cool prayers.

My grandmother’s days are made of bread,   
a round pat-pat and the slow baking.
She waits by the oven watching a strange car   
circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son,   
lost to America. More often, tourists,   
who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines.   
She knows how often mail arrives,
how rarely there is a letter.
When one comes, she announces it, a miracle,   
listening to it read again and again
in the dim evening light.

My grandmother’s voice says nothing can surprise her.
Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby.   
She knows the spaces we travel through,   
the messages we cannot send—our voices are short   
and would get lost on the journey.
Farewell to the husband’s coat,
the ones she has loved and nourished,
who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky.   
They will plant themselves. We will all die.

My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death.   
When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press,   
when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms,   
He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name.
“Answer, if you hear the words under the words—
otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges,   
difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.”

Found here on Poets dot org 

If I Should Have a Daughter

If I Should Have A Daughter

by Sarah Kay


If I should have a daughter, instead of Mom, she's gonna call me Point B, because that way she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me. And I'm going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands, so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, "Oh, I know that like the back of my hand." And she's going to learn that this life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air.

The Most Efficient Bureaucracy Ever Seen

The Most Efficient Bureaucracy Ever Seen

by Margaret Alice

I’m so delighted by the new form for
obtaining authorisation for carrying
out the job we were assigned to do,
five signatures only required, rather
a disappointingly small number, but
I’m sure it will soon be rectified –
when-ever a problem rears its ugly
head, we’ll appoint another person
to check, it provides such a lot of jobs
to make sure not a cent more is spent
than should be paid out – for that reason
we’ll appoint another five new Directors,
with medical and pension and a goodly
salary – all to ensure that everyone
adheres to all the regulations, that the
rules are never bent – though we spend
a fortune; not a single extra cent will be
paid to a service provider – spending a
thousand a day in the service of
transparency and the saving of a rand
or two, will make us the most efficient
bureaucracy ever seen – and that is the
height of our ambition, without procedures
we are set for perdition!

Found on Poem Hunter here.