Poetry

  • Hiawatha in South Africa

    For Dennis Brutus, who said that during his childhood, his mother recited Longfellow's poems while they did the household chores. A rag rubs on brown soap, swishes yellow lather to nameless plates with chipped rims. She begins by the shining big sea water as I dip dishes in steamy basin. In our tin-roofed township wigwam…

  • Cancion de Segadores

         In the thick adobe harvest room back of the old family house he watches his sister gather into bushel baskets caps and whiskey bottles. From his bed he hears her children playing outside, probably priming the old pump beside the cottonwood later they will climb. Sometimes      they seem far away.           Now on the front porch…

  • Egypt

    She was abrupt and glad, like an ostrich. On the day of her death, the Nile got up and tore at its hair in astonishment and grief. The Nile got up and walked abroad and wept and argued and spread upon the desert first a shroud of water and then a shroud of endless clay….

  • Sante Fe

    The wind blows lilacs out of the east. And it isn't lilac season. And I am walking the street in front of St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe. Oh, and it's a few years earlier and more. That's how you tell real time. It is here, it is there. The lilacs have taken over everything:…

  • Pantoum of Bruises

    These are words without music In a mist that almost made rage mysterious. In silence like the silence after barn burnings, We cannot speak of what happened. A mist almost made rage mysterious: Your fist on my car window, my jaw. We cannot speak of what happened On a dirt shoulder in the dark. Your…

  • The Weed Flower

    to Alma Graham I am a slave girl, twelve years old,      speaking across centuries. They chose me because I was pretty, young,      a virgin, dispensable, and all unknowing, but I know how they will pile      heaps of corn and pumpkins upon my carriage and fast seven days      and offer their own dried blood to me…

  • 1494

    I've set six stones in a row near the eastern shore above where the tide can touch them to mark the time gone since they took her away My feet trace the usual paths past cooksmoke the place where she slept But inside something has changed I dream of her first blood slipping from her…

  • Deer Dancer

    Nearly everyone had left that bar in the middle of winter except the hard core. It was the coldest night of the year, every place shut down, but not us. Of course we noticed when she came in. We were Indian ruins. She was the end of beauty. No one knew her, the stranger whose…