What If...

What if you were a giant who could look over the heads of all the people in a crowd?

Excursion by Linda Pastan

Excursion
Linda Pastan

I am a tourist
in my own life,
gazing at the exotic shapes
of flowers
as if someone else
had planted them;
barred
from the half-lit rooms
of children
by an invisible
velvet rope.
The dresses in my closet
are costumes
for a different woman,
though I hide myself
in their silky textures.
The man asleep
in my bed
knows me best
in the dark.

Lecture Poem - The Ox

I am using this poem in my lecture. To me, this is one of the most hilarious poems. I remember the first time I read it, I could not stop laughing. I laughed and giggled and guffawed.
I'm using this as the closing poem in my graduation lecture:
The Ox
Russell Edson

There was once a woman whose father over
the years had become an ox.

She would hear him alone at night lowing
in his room.

It was one day when she looked up into his
face that she suddenly noticed the ox.

She cried, you're an ox!

And he began to moo with his great pink
tongue hanging out of his mouth.

He would stand over his newspaper, turning
the pages with his tongue, while he evacuated
on the rug.

When this was brought to his attention he
would low with sorrow, and slowly climb the
stairs to his room, and there spend the night
in mournful lowing.

A Wendy Cope Poem/ Video

2 for 1 Day

Readers,
I have decided because of my hectic schedule that I am going to pare the blog down to a once a week poem, and when I have more free time after I graduate, I will amp it back up. Today, there are going to be 2 poems, one from the awesome Shel Silverstein and one from me (I would appreciate feedback on it). Please enjoy the poems, smile, and have a good week!

Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

~

Supernatural (I've tried something a little different)
Lauren Young

He had a voice like clapping
thunder that shoves its fist against a cliff,
whirring and whirring about like
a thick cloud of sparking
flints together. That's when the blackberry
bushes shook, yearning
to be in out of the power of his
voice. You see, he wasn't even
that tall or scary. He was
unassuming and slender as the stem of a cherry.

Restarting my Poetic Tendencies

Hippos on Holiday from Ballistics
Billy Collins

is not really the title of a movie
but if it was I would be sure to see it.
I love their short legs and big heads,
the whole hippo look.
Hundreds of them would frolic
in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river,
and I would eat my popcorn
in the dark of a neighborhood theater.
When they opened their enormous mouths
lined with big stubby teeth
I would drink my enormous Coke.

I would be both in my seat
and in the water playing with the hippos,
which is the way it is
with a truly great movie.
Only a mean-spirited reviewer
would as on holiday from what?

From to Today's Writers' Almanac

People Who Eat in Coffee Shops

by Edward Field

People who eat in coffee shops
are not worried about nutrition.
They order the toasted cheese sandwiches blithely,
followed by chocolate egg creams and plaster of paris
wedges of lemon meringue pie.
They don't have parental, dental, or medical figures hovering
full of warnings, or whip out dental floss immediately.
They can live in furnished rooms and whenever they want
go out and eat glazed donuts along with innumerable coffees,
dousing their cigarettes in sloppy saucers.

"People Who Eat in Coffee Shops" by Edward Field, from Counting Myself Lucky: Selected Poems 1963-1992. © Black Sparrow Press, 1992.

The Early Bird

The Early Bird

Ted Kooser

Still dark, and raining hard

on a cold May morning

and yet the early bird

is out there chirping,

chirping its sweet-sour

wooden-pulley notes,

pleased, it would seem,

to be given work,

hauling the heavy

bucket of dawn

up from the darkness,

note over note,

and letting us drink.

Dishwater by Ted Kooser for G'ma Patty

Dishwater
Ted Kooser
from Delights and Shadows. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon, 2004.

Slap of the screen door, flat knock
of my grandmother's boxy black shoes
on the wooden stoop, the hush and sweep
of her knob-kneed, cotton-aproned stride
out to the edge and then, toed in
furious twist and heave,
a bridge that leaps from her hot red hands
and hangs there shining for fifty years
over the mystified chickens,
over the swaying nettles, the ragweed,
the clay slope down to the creek,
over the redwing blackbirds in the tops
of the willows, a glorious rainbow
with an empty dispan swinging at one end.

For My Little Brother, Minus the Hangover

Student
Ted Kooser (from his book Delights and Shadows)

The green shell of his backpack makes him lean
into wave after wave of responsibility,
and he swings his stiff arms and cupped hands,

paddling ahead. He has extended his neck
to its full length, and his chin, hard as a beak,
breaks the cold surf. He's got his baseball cap on

backward as he crawls, out of the froth
of a hangover and onto the sand of the future,
and lumbers, heavy with hope, into the library.