Poems by Bobbi Lurie

Bobbi Lurie is a Mexican poet. She writes with a graceful ease. Her poems essentially define the expression of a person coming on terms with his own microcosm as well as the macrocosm. The lines are both a pilgrimage depicted, as well as a traveler sketched. The words are a majestic journey of exploration of the psyche of both the individual and the society. The poems at the same time portraying the polity of the society; also become the symbol of the disillusionment that has become the major characteristic of the modern times. — Anchit 

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BURNING

The arms of the trees open wide
We are here for such a short time
Do not imagine this dream is yours

LOTUS

a lotus grows in my throat
it is blue
i feel it blossom as
an old woman feeds me
sugar cookies
they are poison she says
her hands are etched
with cuts and scabs
her eyes are powder blue
they look through me like a lens
there is no such thing as a friend
in this world she says
people just appear
i see i am
alone
people are just mirrors she says
the lotus in my throat
grows towards my forehead

JANUARY SALES

It's the January sales
and I'm buying.

Trapped in the endless, airless halls,
nullified through the phosphorescent fluorescence

and the lonely beating of my thoughts,
walking behind all the girlfriends,

as I lug my bags, sorry already
for the weight of fashion.

And when I get home
I see other clothes hanging

hanging in my closet...
new, unused, reflecting all the places

I did not go,
the ways I was not seen.

And not until I lay naked in my bed
can I feel

the white longing in my bones
which can not be dressed.

VARIATIONS ON THE THEME OF LONELINESS

1.

He stares into the page, writes his name in red
letters, wipes his nose on the sleeve of his shirt, hopes
no one is looking. But the teacher looks up at him
then down, writes something quickly in her book. The boy
stares out the window, sees crows
                        standing on the lawn in a row.

2.

Outside children ask:
Will you be my friend? Will you promise not to
talk behind my back?
             He does not understand.

3.

He sees them huddled in groups, knows how it is to walk
outside them, how they talk in whispers,
twitter when he passes.
                         And that moment of relief
when they sometimes let him stand
                        in their midst. What they say
bores him. He can’t wait to leave, walk
into the open field,
                        the kindness of horizon,
the clarity of trees.

4.

Wide open door into the closed room.
The way the child sits, the way
he moves his hands, the way he holds his pen,
she records this in her book.                                                 

5.

Trampled grass sprang back when he walked
through the field to see her. But the boy can not
                                                spring back
as she takes notes on each of his gestures,
            as she consults her charts,
writes her report.

6.

The room closes more.
She notes startle reflex in her book, writes
he is too quiet, unable to answer with eye
contact, does not answer my abstract
questions, is not animated like the others.
                        She sees a drowned face,
eyes staring forward from the bottom of a well, tells
his mother, call any time,
                        though it’s taken the mother months to see her.
There are support groups you can join, she says, as she jots
Autistic on the cover of his file,
            places it on her shelf, crammed with books,
looks away, checks her watch.

7.

The boy walks alone through the field of children
and trees and basketball courts and balls and
screaming and jump ropes.
                        The air turns quiet as he leans
against the chain link fence, presses his body
against it as he watches cars pass,
telling stories to the tree,
            laughing at the tree’s response.

KABUL

This afternoon I went to the jar, sank my finger in the honey.
No one saw me so I let the sweetness linger on my tongue.
At night I paint black around my eyes.
I wash it off at morning.
When everyone’s asleep, I draw on scraps of paper
I’ve collected, the backs of labels, edges torn from newspapers.
This is my secret.

***

Coming back from the highway with my brothers,
I dropped my spade, went to lean against the shed,
Heard Father’s voice coming from within.
He was laughing with Abdullah who says he’ll buy me
For three bags of wheat
When Father’s done with me.
When he does I’ll slash my body with petrol,
Strike the match like Laida did.
I watched those two fools empty a giant vat of honey
Into another vat, saw them pull out long tubes
They scraped with their hands, licked with their tongues.
Beneath the amber honey, I saw guns.
Father caught me looking, jumped off his chair,
His hands were claws dripping towards me,
Shoving me hard against the wall, grabbing me there.
Whore!! he screamed then spit on me.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak.
I covered my face.
Back in the tent
Mother was making lentils,
Hunched over the fire.
I pulled the spoon from her hand, stirred the pot
As if I were her daughter.

***

Today, walking with my brothers, I saw Bashir.
He was leaning against a wall, one leg missing.
I knew, still a shock went through me
Seeing the dirty rags tied around his stump, the blood dried,
What looked like pus.
And how he stood as if he had a leg.
Strange how we never speak
But I walk through him with my eyes,
Enter his hidden rooms.
He was speaking with Khangal about the enemy
But his soft eyes were blazing holes in me,
Forcing me to see the sky and trees with deeper color.
Khangal saw me looking, threw his spade hard against my leg,
The pain was so intense. I bled and bled,
Putting pressure on the wound with just my hand,
My burkha drenched in blood,
He pulled me up by my hair.
I burned in the part of me which was not hurt.

***

Tonight Father had guests. I heard them say
They liked the bread.
I baked it
While Mother took a nap.
She did not say
I baked it. She turned her back to me.

***

I feel sickness inside me all the time.
I enter the back rooms with my father,
Creep out like a rat trapped in its maze,
Seek escape in the next cage where Mother stands
Brewing the food, keeping us snared in this affliction called life.
And I think of our martyrs dying for freedom.
I would like to die for freedom.                                                                                             
But I am a woman
And I do not believe in the paradise Father speaks about
While he beats me with his stick.

***

But every day I keep collecting my scraps of paper.
And when everyone’s asleep,
I draw Bashir, his stump, my father with his guns,
My mother hunched over the fire, stirring lentils.
I draw them all out of me.
I open myself to the darkness.
I wait for night to speak.

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 “The Book I never Read, poems by Bobbi Lurie, is one of those volumes that stays in your mind - the images, the stories, the observations - all of it piercing, honest and real. I keep waiting to see her poem Kabul in The New Yorker. In her fearless way she describes life for women in that hard land. And then there are these wonderful insights into our everyday lives, full of humor and her own special sarcasm, like Perusing the Fall Catalogue and Dreaming of a Better Life. Nothing escapes her - movies, family life, what it's like to stand by and watch people disappear into Alchemies and madness. I find her world fascinating and compelling and always look forward to the next volume.” — Joan Torres

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“Bobbi Lurie's "the morphine poems" succeeds as language breaks through language metastasizes through the harboring of pain. The words spread across the page with a content all their own; uncanny, they haunt the body. Paragraphs of disorderly text are ordered; a poetics of life against death seeps through. This is an important and powerful book, concerned with illness that almost tends towards pathology of speech itself. The body refuses to disappear and the words simultaneously convey despair, heartbreak, and resistance. Bobbi Lurie writes unsparingly about sickness and wayward health in a brave and detailed cartography of body and biography, creating a work of brilliance and renewal. Everyone should read this book, which is everyone's journey, one way or another, a journey from life into life. It is a journey that is all too often shamefully hidden, a journey we need to contemplate and embrace.” — Alan Sondheim

Poems By Cate Marvin

Cate Marvin is an American poet. Marvin's first book, World's Tallest Disaster (Sarabande Books, 2001), won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. Her second collection, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, was published by Sarabande Books in 2007. She also co-edited Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2006). Marvin's honors include the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Whiting Award, and a NYFA Gregory Millard Fellowship. She teaches at the College of Staten Island in New York. Presenting some poems.

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A Windmill Makes A Statement

You think I like to stand all day, all night,
all any kind of light, to be subject only
to wind? You are right. If seasons undo
me, you are my season. And you are the light
making off with its reflection as my stainless
steel fins spin.

On lawns, on lawns we stand,
we windmills make a statement. We turn air,
churn air, turning always on waiting for your
season. There is no lover more lover than the air.
You care, you care as you twist my arms
round, till my songs become popsicle

and I wing out radiants of light all across
suburban lawns. You are right, the churning
is for you, for you are right, no one but you
I spin for all night, all day, restless for your

sight to pass across the lawn, tease grasses,
because I so like how you lay above me,
how I hovered beneath you, and we learned
some other way to say: There you are.

You strip the cut, splice it to strips, you mill
the wind, you scissor the air into ecstasy until
all lawns shimmer with your bluest energy.

Oracle

Dead girls don't go the dying route to get known.
You’ll find us anonymous still, splayed in Buicks, 
carried swaying like calves, our dead hefts swung 
from ankles, wrists, hooked by hands and handed
over to strangers slippery as blackout. Slammed
down, the mud on our dress is black as her dress,
worn out as a throw-rug beneath feet that stomp 
out the most intricate weave. It ought not sadden 
us, but sober us. Sylvia Plath killed herself. She ate 
her sin. Her eye got stuck on a diamond stickpin. 
You take Blake over breakfast, only to be bucked 
out your skull by a cat-call crossing a parking lot. 
Consuming her while reviling her, conditioned to 
hate her for her appetite alone: her problem was 
she thought too much? Needling an emblem’s ink 
onto your wrist, the surest defense a rose to reason 
against that bluest vein's insistent wish. Let’s all 
us today finger-sweep our cheek-bones with two
blood-marks and ride that terrible train homeward 
while looking back at our blackened eyes inside 
tiny mirrors fixed inside our plastic compacts. We 
could not have known where she began given how 
we were, from the start, made to begin where she 
ends. In this way, she's no way to make her amends.

Why I Am Afraid of Turning the Page

Spokes, spooks: your tinsel hair weaves the wheel
that streams through my dreams of battle. Another
apocalypse, and your weird blondeness cycling in
and out of the march: down in a bunker, we hunker,
can hear the boots from miles off clop. We tend to
our flowers in the meantime. And in the meantime, 
a daughter is born. She begins as a mere inch, lost
in the folds of a sheet; it's horror to lose her before
she's yet born. Night nurses embody the darkness.
Only your brain remains, floating in a jar that sits 
in a lab far off, some place away, and terribly far.
Your skull no longer exists, its ash has been lifted
to wind from a mountain's top by brothers, friends. 
I am no friend. According to them. Accordion, the
child pulls its witching wind between its opposite
handles: the lungs of the thing grieve, and that is
its noise. She writhes the floor in tantrum. When
you climbed the sides of the house spider-wise to
let yourself in, unlocked the front door, let me in
to climb up into your attic the last time I saw you
that infected cat rubbed its face against my hand.
Wanting to keep it. No, you said. We are friends.
I wear my green jacket with the furred hood. You 
pushed me against chain-length. Today is the day 
that the planet circles the night we began. A child 
is born. Night nurses coagulate her glassed-in crib.
Your organs, distant, still float the darkness of jars.

Lying My Head Off

Here's my head, in a dank corner of the yard.
I lied it off and so off it rolled.
It wasn't unbelieving that caused it
To drop off my neck and lull down a slope.
Perhaps it had a mind of its own, wanted
to leave me for a little while.

Or it was scared and detached itself
from the stalk of my neck as a lizard's tail
will desert its body in fright of being caught.
The fact is, I never lied. The fact is,
I always lied. Before us, we have two mirrors.
At times, they say, one must lie in order

to survive. I drove by the house, passed
it several times, pretending it was not
my own. Its windows were red with curtains
and the honeyed light cast on the porch
did not succeed in luring me back inside.
I never lied. I drove by the house,

suckling the thought of other lovers
like a lozenge. I was pale as a papery birch.
I was pure as a brand new pair of underwear.
It will be a long while before I touch another.
Yet, I always lied, an oil slick on my tongue.
I used to think that I was wrong, could

not tell the truth for what it was. Yet, one
cannot take a lawsuit out on oneself.
I would have sworn in court that I believed
myself and then felt guilty a long time after.
I hated the house and I hated myself.
The house fattened with books, made me

grow to hate books, when all the while
it was only books that never claimed
to tell the truth. I hated him and I hated
his room, within which his cloud of smoke
heaved. I disappeared up narrow stairs,
slipped quick beneath the covers.

My stomach hurts, I told him, I was tired.
I grew my dreams thick through hot nights:
dear, flickering flowers. They had eyes
which stared, and I found I could not afford
their nurture, could not return their stare,
Meanwhile, liars began their parade

without my asking, strode sidewalks inches
before my doorstep. I watched their hulking
and strange beauty, their songs pregnant
with freedom, and became an other self.
I taught children how to curse.
I bought children gold pints of liquor.

I sold my mind on the street.
1 learned another language. It translates easily.
Here's how: What I say is not what I mean,
nor is it ever what I meant to say.
You must not believe me when I say
there's nothing left to love in this world.

Pick Me Up Back To Our Old Dungeon !

Paulami Sengupta

Author of ‘Jiwhai Baarbaar Fire Ashe Laban’ (Bangla Poems Collection) Paulami Sengupta (Born: 19 December 1977) is an Indian poet who writes in Bangla and English. she has worked as freelance translator with Sahitya Academi and National Book Trust. Currently working with SAGE Publications (Delhi), Paulami is also part of a poetry group ‘Moonweavers’. Presenting some poems : Being Poet

On her ageing

The head hits the clock
and out come those feathers
‘Best before’.

Before—before breathing heavily under stairs, on cartons and crimps
before laughter, tears, words, wounds and kisses.

Before sleep walking ribbons
get lost in old cupboards
or flutter under wheels of forlorn bicycles.

Hours!
you were never mine
you grew up
moved out.

Cleaning up

Mangled crisp oven words
Trail down the spine
All is fair in lovely wars
Borders meekly whine

Wards pleated neat in clinics
Barbed cotton sleeps
Chairs waiting for our turns
Ether is for keeps

Come out come out
Game is over
Do not hide
I seek
Thy beauty decreases never
Sanity
Span-n-spic

Waiting

‘Revenge, revenge.’

A red wasp stings when I miss the 9 o’clock train.

Teenage strums
on the verge of thirty
still clutching to endless tea cups
in a forest where
logs, twigs and delicious leaves
kiss fire at ease.

Empty railway tracks
cipher the past
I can recall old squabbles
like tables of 6 and 7.
Cousin X taunting at her place
Aunt Y smirking in M's marriage
Bully B roaring in tears...

Me
the whining demon
cribbing along the suburbs of Kolkata
gaping at the foothills of Aravalli
confessing in Darjeeling
and
venting ink on fresh faces in Kalyani

A degenerate queen
shooting twenty arrows
at my ugly brains
while drinking
fifteen yellow minutes of impatience.

Traveling Light

Smart!
I should be
In white sparkling trains
Under urbane grounds
Plush effort
Pressing need
Kleenex/de-text
Untidy seed
Clean your vacuum
Trim your heels
For travelling sane and sound

Old boards and brushes’ ends
Reels of words
In stubborn lanes
Dead tissues
Of sleepless mane
Thrown safely out of chest
Love poems
Naked bare
Memories with extreme care
Stroked/fondled/caressed
Then tipped off the nest

Neat pieces
Rest in peace
In wheeled crates
Of things amiss
I will see you outside platforms
When I miss all trains
Twelve stations, seven routes
When I learn I can’t commute
You will come and pick me up
Back to our old dungeon

The Poetry of Abraham Lincoln !

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln successfully led the United States through one of its greatest constitutional, military, and moral crises—the American Civil War—preserving the Union. Reared in a poor family on the western frontier, Lincoln was mostly self-educated, and became a country lawyer, a Whig Party leader, Illinois state legislator during the 1830s, and a one-term member of the United States House of Representatives during the 1840s. Abraham Lincoln wrote some poems in his life. Presenting a note with his poems : Being Poet

It should surprise few to learn that Abraham Lincoln wrote poetry. But this fact about his life is dwarfed by those events that defined his political legacy, and this is also no surprise. Nevertheless, in the midst of the current Lincoln revival, the man and the statesman, I think it’s fitting to attend to Abraham Lincoln the poet. Certainly scholars have read his poetry in relation to his skillful prose and oratory. But, on its own, this writing gives us insight into the sensitivity of Lincoln’s less public modes of expression.

Was he a great poet? Well, it appears that he had at least three phases—the first, a youthful one in his teens and early twenties when he produced some silly juvenelia, “a number of crude and satirical verses.” The most popular of these is called “Chronicles of Reuben,” a local satire Lincoln scholar Robert Bray describes as “a series of pseudo-biblical prose and verse pieces that are, out of their local Indiana context, so topical as to be neither funny nor comprehensible.” The piece, written in 1828 to avenge himself upon a rival Indiana family, apparently had great effect on the neighbors, however. One of them, Joseph C. Richardson, claimed that the poem was “remembered here in Indiana in scraps better than the Bible.”

We have to credit frontier oral tradition for our knowledge of some of Lincoln’s more serious poems in his second phase, after he joined “a Kind of Poetical Society” in Illinois sometime between 1837-39. One neighbor, James Matheny, remembered the following worldly lines from a Lincoln poem called “On Seduction”:

Whatever Spiteful fools may Say—
Each jealous, ranting yelper—

No woman ever played the whore
Unless She had a man to help her. 

If this is truly a stanza from Lincoln’s pen, the satirist is still very much in evidence—Swift could have written these lines—but the self-described “prairie lawyer” has grown philosophical and left the adolescent boundaries of local feuds and pranks. 

His third, most serious phase begins when Lincoln returned to Indiana, after leaving Illinois briefly in an attempt to help Henry Clay’s failed presidential bid against James Polk. Lincoln called Indiana “as unpoetical as any spot of the earth,” and yet it serves as a subject for a poem completed in 1846 called “My Childhood Home I See Again.” (The image above is of the first six stanzas of this long poem in Lincoln’s handwriting. Click here to see the remaining pages). Here in the first two stanzas (below), you can see the cutting wit of the younger, more confident man give way to a kind of wistful nostalgia worthy of Wordsworth:

My child-hood home I see again,
And gladden with the view;
And still as mem’ries crowd my brain,
There’s sadness in it too–
O memory! thou mid-way world
‘Twixt Earth and Paradise;
Where things decayed, and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise–

You can read a complete transcript of the poem here, and the Library of Congress has a detailed description of the poem’s stages of composition.

Lincoln-as-poet continued in this thoughtful, mature voice in the remaining years of his life, though never equaling the poetic output of 1846. Somewhat out of character, the final documented piece of poetry from Lincoln comes from July 19, 1863. Written in response to the North’s victory in Gettysburg, “Verse on Lee’s Invasion of the North” is a short piece of doggerel that sees him returning to satire, writing in the voice of “Gen. Lee”:

Gen. Lee’s invasion of the North written by himself—
In eighteen sixty three, with pomp,
and mighty swell,
Me and Jeff’s Confederacy, went
forth to sack Phil-del,
The Yankees they got arter us, and
giv us particular hell,
And we skedaddled back again,
And didn’t sack Phil-del.

Surely the poem was written in a hurry, and with jubilant, triumphal glee, but if this is the last we heard from Lincoln the poet, it might be a shame, though it would not blot out the literary skill of poems like “My Childhood Home I See Again” and others like “The Bear Hunt” and “To Rosa,” which you can read here.

But there’s more to this story; in 2004, a historian discovered an unsigned poem called “The Suicide’s Soliloquy”—published in the August 25, 1838 issue of the Sangamo Journal, a Springfield newspaper—and believed the former president to be the poet. In the video above, listen to a moody, dramatic reading of the poem:

It is not known with certainty if Lincoln wrote this poem, but scholarly consensus inclines heavily in that direction, given its stylistic similarity to his other work from this period. “The Suicide’s Soliloquy” is as passionate and morbid as any of Edgar Allen Poe’s verse, and betrays Lincoln’s characteristic melancholy in its stormiest and most Romantic guise. NPR has the full poem and the story of its discovery.

(source : openculture.com)