Midnight Hour Poetry

Video

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:45:33 -0500

So You Want to Crochet a Fourth Doctor Scarf... (A snarky, tl;dr guide)

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 21:37:11 -0500

One day you get it into your head that you want to recreate Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor scarf. Maybe you want it for yourself, maybe it’s a gift for a Whovian friend of yours, or maybe you just like making products that are easy but incredibly time-consuming.

Only problem is, a vast majority of the patterns for the scarf are knit. The last time you knitted was in the sixth grade, and your scarf ended up turning into a triangle. You are, however, pretty good at crochet—your stitches are uniform, you might have sold or given away a scarf to a friend or stranger who really loved it, people buy you yarn for Christmas, etc.

(An interjection: If you are just starting to learn how to crochet/knit, please do not make the Fourth Doctor’s scarf your first big project. It is an epic project that is fairly simple to make, but you don’t really pick up any skills while working on it other than patience. I’ve seen plenty of beloved but messy Fourth Doctor scarves on the internet, made by people who jumped a little ahead of themselves. You want your scarf to be something that you can look back on fondly and if it’s one of your very first projects, it is likely to haunt you forever. We all have to start somewhere, and the Fourth Doctor’s scarf is better left as an epic project you slowly work up to.)

I’m a firm believer in ingenuity and creativity taking precedence over “authenticity” and in the case of the Fourth Doctor’s scarf, there were so many versions of it that there really is no one, true pattern for the scarf. The story behind the scarf is that they kept sending the knitter balls of yarn and she just kept on knitting, not realizing they weren’t asking for a twelve foot long scarf. It was Tom Baker’s idea to go with it, and it’s lived on in infamy since, in its various ~~incarnations~~ regenerations.

Consider this more of a guide than a pattern, as the most important thing while working on the scarf isn’t to aim for some galactic standard but to have fun with it, and hopefully capture some of the spirit of the show and the man who made it famous.

Read More

from Twenty-One Love Poems (Adrienne Rich) XVIIIRain on the...

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 23:13:16 -0500

from Twenty-One Love Poems (Adrienne Rich)

XVIII

Rain on the West Side Highway,
red light at Riverside:
the more I live the more I think
two people together is a miracle.
You’re telling the story of your life
for once, a tremor breaks the surface of your words.
The story of our lives becomes our lives.
Now you’re in fugue across what some I’m sure
Victorian poet called the salt estranging sea.
Those are the words that come to mind.
I feel estrangement, yes. As I’ve felt dawn
pushing toward daybreak. Something: a cleft of light?
Close between grief and anger, a space opens
where I am Adrienne alone. And growing colder.

XIX

Can it be growing colder when I begin
to touch myself again, adhesions pull away?
When slowly the naked face turns from staring backward
and looks into the present,
the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and death
and the lips part and say: I mean to go on living?
Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream
or in this poem, There are no miracles?
(I told you from the first I wanted daily life,
this island of Manhattan was island enough for me.)
If I could let you know -
two women together is a work
nothing in civilization has made simple,
two people together is a work
heroic in its ordinariness,
the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch
where the fiercest attention becomes routine
- look at the faces of those who have chosen it.

First Taste Of Prosperity (Marc Kaminsky)Instead of the usual...

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 00:06:47 -0500

First Taste Of Prosperity (Marc Kaminsky)

Instead of the usual rations
each of us was given seven cartons of
Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum

we chewed
until the sugar was out of it
then spit it out

unfolding and working through
new sticks
at the rate of fifty an hour

trying
to outpace the growling
of our stomachs.

I watched refugees
walk along, dropping
rubbery pellets and silver

gum wrappers, ceaselessly
chewing.
And though we worked our jaws

till they were numb
who could really silence
his hunger?

When would they give us rice?
No one asked.
But how hopefully we greeted

each convoy of jeeps!
The GIs beeped in their good-natured way
and waved their arms

there was a chorus of
“Hi!
How are you?”

and lines of frightened
beggars
immediately formed—

they were barraged with
Wrigley’s
with a shower of

thousands of packs
of spearmint chewing
gum.

Already
the American century was carpeting Japan
with peculiar abundance

the road to the A-bomb ward
was now paved
with silver.

from Twenty-One Love Poems (Adrienne Rich) XVI Across a city...

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 21:10:00 -0500

from Twenty-One Love Poems (Adrienne Rich)

XVI

Across a city from you, I’m with you,
just as an August night
moony, inlet-warm, seabathed, I watched you sleep,
the scrubbed, sheenless wood of the dressing-table
cluttered with our brushes, books, vials in the moonlight -
or a salt-mist orchard, lying at your side
watching red sunset through the screendoor of the cabin,
G minor Mozart on the tape-recorder,
falling asleep to the music of the sea.
This island of Manhattan is wide enough
for both of us, and narrow:
I can hear your breath tonight, I know how your face
lies upturned, the halflight tracing
your generous, delicate mouth
where grief and laughter sleep together.

XVII

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan and Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us,
within us and against us, against us and within us.

A Dream of Trees (Mary Oliver) There is a thing in me that...

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 02:44:22 -0500

A Dream of Trees (Mary Oliver)

There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,
A quiet house, some green and modest acres
A little way from every troubling town,
A little way from factories, schools, laments.
I would have time, I thought, and time to spare,
With only streams and birds for company,
To build out of my life a few wild stanzas.
And then it came to me, that so was death,
A little way away from everywhere.

There is a thing in me still dreams of trees.
But let it go. Homesick for moderation,
Half the world’s artists shrink or fall away.
If any find solution, let him tell it.
Meanwhile I bend my heart toward lamentation
Where, as the times implore our true involvement,
The blades of every crisis point the way.

I would it were not so, but so it is.
Who ever made music of a mild day?

Antilamentation (Dorianne Laux) Regret nothing. Not the cruel...

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:07:53 -0500

Antilamentation (Dorianne Laux)

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering
any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

What the Living Do (Marie Howe)Johnny, the kitchen sink has...

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 23:39:00 -0500

What the Living Do (Marie Howe)

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

Walking Home in the Rain (Ally Malinenko) It’s not the best...

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 22:05:00 -0500

Walking Home in the Rain (Ally Malinenko)

It’s not the best walk I’ve had,
not by a long shot,
down 86^th street
from 3^rd Avenue
to 18^th Avenue

but it’s mine
and I’ve gotten used to it,
the spots where there is no shade
in the blazing summer sun
or the way the forest by the park
smells just like the one back home.

But in the rain,
it takes on a certain feeling,
cause no one is else is walking
2 and a half miles in wet flip flops
with Greetings From Asbury Park
in their ears

and if they are,
well they aren’t doing it down 86^th street
cause it’s empty nearly the whole way
and the rain has been coming down for weeks now
washing away the snails and the leaves that cling to the stone wall
by the big houses near 13^th Avenue.

When I pass our window,
you are already inside,
dry, though you must have been caught in it too.
Your feet up on the coffee table,
the orange light glowing,
the cat in the window,
a book in your hand,
killing time,
waiting for me, because I am late,
and because there are drinks to be made
and stories to tell,
inside,
where it’s dry.

Sheltered Garden (H.D.) I have had enough. I gasp for breath....

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 00:13:12 -0500

Sheltered Garden (H.D.)

I have had enough.
I gasp for breath.

Every way ends, every road,
every foot-path leads at last
to the hill-crest—
then you retrace your steps,
or find the same slope on the other side,
precipitate.

I have had enough—
border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies,
herbs, sweet-cress.

O for some sharp swish of a branch—
there is no scent of resin
in this place,
no taste of bark, of coarse weeds,
aromatic, astringent—
only border on border of scented pinks.

Have you seen fruit under cover
that wanted light—
pears wadded in cloth,
protected from the frost,
melons, almost ripe,
smothered in straw?

Why not let the pears cling
to the empty branch?
All your coaxing will only make
a bitter fruit—
let them cling, ripen of themselves,
test their own worth,
nipped, shrivelled by the frost,
to fall at last but fair
With a russet coat.

Or the melon—
let it bleach yellow
in the winter light,
even tart to the taste—
it is better to taste of frost—
the exquisite frost—
than of wadding and of dead grass.

For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life.
I want wind to break,
scatter these pink-stalks,
snap off their spiced heads,
fling them about with dead leaves—
spread the paths with twigs,
limbs broken off,
trail great pine branches,
hurled from some far wood
right across the melon-patch,
break pear and quince—
leave half-trees, torn, twisted
but showing the fight was valiant.

O to blot out this garden
to forget, to find a new beauty
in some terrible
wind-tortured place.

from Twenty-One Love Poems (Adrienne Rich) (THE FLOATING POEM,...

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 23:41:20 -0500

from Twenty-One Love Poems (Adrienne Rich)

(THE FLOATING POEM, UNNUMBERED)

Whatever happens with us, your body
will haunt mine - tender, delicate
your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond
of the fiddlehead fern in forests
just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs
between which my whole face has come and come -
the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there -
the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth -
your touch on me, firm, protective, searching
me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers
reaching where I had been waiting years for you
in my rose-wet cave - whatever happens, this is.

XV

If I lay on that beach with you
white, empty, pure green water warmed by the Gulf Stream
and lying on that beach we could not stay
because the wind drove fine sand against us
as if it were against us
if we tried to withstand it and we failed -
if we drove to another place
to sleep in each other’s arms
and the beds were narrow like prisoners’ cots
and we were tired and did not sleep together
and this was what we found, so this is what we did -
was the failure ours?
If I cling to circumstances I could feel
not responsible. Only she who says
she did not choose, is the loser in the end.

It is the living who cannot (Hilda Morley) It is the living...

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 23:01:00 -0500

It is the living who cannot (Hilda Morley)

It is the living who cannot

live without the dead,

who wish them

back,

who need their presences,

their hands,

as Orpheus

held her hand, Eurydice’s, to lead her

back to earth out of

the gulf of Hades,

as I

need yours

It is not so much

the dead

who need us

now

(as we think they do)

& that reconciliation

we long for, that knowledge

of each other to the uttermost,

which could assuage us,

they are

one step beyond it & suffer us

to long for them.

If they could

return, it would be out of

patience with us merely: their need to

console us. For somehow an indifference

possesses them, for all their tenderness

& they see beyond us,

even if

what they see seems to us

nothing

What Do Women Want? (Kim Addonizio) I want a red dress. I want...

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:49:00 -0500

What Do Women Want? (Kim Addonizio)

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

Note: I read this without checking out Addonizio’s recitation of it. It’s eerily similar, which I adore.

Melting Sun (Laila Neihoum) “Things fall apart,” ...

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 20:41:30 -0500

Melting Sun (Laila Neihoum)

“Things fall apart,”
Tide not turning.
Melting away profoundly
In darkness
The sun.

And I,
Like every other day
A global world-sized wreck
Glaring white,
A hollowed art
Flattened pastures,
Facing an abandoned cave
Where a tear is
The only water
Spilled into
Emptiness.

And I
Said to be a big star
Whom night made sunset
Believe in
So what?
A mere light gleam
Where fate
Grins its last laugh?

And I
What if I had not been,
My parents’ sculpture
And was expecting my shadow
To change its direction
Running over my euphony
Eclipsing me
Partially
Wholly
And what if l jump over obstacles
In the eclipsed noon

Into darkened sea waves
To see terror in your
Blindfolded eyes
And what if,
Oh trembling ones,
I,
Coming out
In mid-eclipse,
Purified my soul of you?

Over My Head Only (Layla Al-Sayed) The land is theirsWhere my...

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:27:00 -0500

Over My Head Only (Layla Al-Sayed)

The land is theirs
Where my sky ascends
And descends
Over the size of my head only
Images retreat
Behind my sky
The blood is leeched from them
And leaves me
Like night lilies
Mined
The smell of their soil
Leaves me
And my sky is over my head only

Fifty April Years (Khaled Mattawa) A soldier waved our businto...

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 18:36:09 -0500

Fifty April Years (Khaled Mattawa)

A soldier waved our bus
into a detour. We didn’t pass
by Parliament Square that day.
I’d hoped to go to a pastry shop,
coins I saved for a week.
Southern winds, sun shrouded
in dirty clouds, red tongues
of dust on windowpanes.
There’d been a hanging on the square.

Sixteen years later
I eat lunch at home,
afternoon light, the gloss
of olive oil on lettuce leaves.
On the radio, whistle and boom
of mortar shells, one landing
on a soccer field, forty boys dead.
And I’m trying to remember who wrote
“to die in mid-sentence
was to triumph over the dark.”

When I was seven
I spent days hiding
among the bean stalks. I heard
my name called and felt indifferent
to being wanted, unassured
that the world I lived in
would undo my foolish malcontent.

It’s not as dramatic now.
I look out the window,
people in their rooms, reading
or thinking, or watching TV
as if the world had stopped calling,
as if we had emerged
from the whirlpool of its demands
with a wild mixture cowardice
and courage to say unto others
“I wish you did not exist.”

On the day of the hanging,
my father drove home,
a poster of the President
on the hood of his car.
He tried to explain.
Over and over he said “survive.”

Once I believed forgetfulness
was a gift from the gods,
not an erosion of the soul.
Now I know enough to say
this has happened before,
and even crueler things—
the bombardment of the ghetto
as the republic ate its lunch
in the park, held its toddlers,
napped on lawns, smoke-sharp air
fevered with the hiss of a flute.

Don’t ask. I too find myself
listening to gurus
who abhor coherence, who tell us
language is a bucket of slop
and we can only grunt and squeal.
I wonder if they say this to silence
the wretched who have found no words,
who wave their torn limbs at us.

This too has happened before:
My brother and I snuck to the car
the night of the hangings.
We intended to tear the President’s poster.
But something held us,
not a policeman’s shadow
or the neighborhood spy.
Not even my father
who hours before
had gone to sleep.

Apologies to All the People in Lebanon (June Jordan) Dedicated...

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:03:00 -0500

Apologies to All the People in Lebanon (June Jordan)
Dedicated to the 60,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983.

I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

They said you shot the London Ambassador
and when that wasn’t true
they said so
what
They said you shelled their northern villages
and when U.N. forces reported that was not true
because your side of the cease-fire was holding
since more than a year before
they said so
what
They said they wanted simply to carve
a 25 mile buffer zone and then
they ravaged your
water supplies your electricity your
hospitals your schools your highways and byways all
the way north to Beirut because they said this
was their quest for peace
They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery
stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors
to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys
whose bodies
swelled purple and black into twice the original size
and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby
and then
they said this was brilliant
military accomplishment and this was done
they said in the name of self-defense they said
that is the noblest concept
of mankind isn’t that obvious?
They said something about never again and then
they made close to one million human beings homeless
in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed
40,000 of your men and your women and your children

But I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

They said they were victims. They said you were
Arabs.
They called      your apartments and gardens      guerrilla
strongholds.
They called      the screaming devastation
that they created       the rubble.
Then they told you to leave, didn’t they?

Didn’t you read the leaflets that they dropped
from their hotshot fighter jets?
They told you to go.
One hundred and thirty-five thousand
Palestinians in Beirut and why
didn’t you take the hint?
Go!
There was the Mediterranean: You
could walk into the water and stay
there.
What was the problem?

I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that
paid
for the bombs and the planes and the tanks
that they used to massacre your family

But I am not an evil person
The people of my country aren’t so bad

You can expect but so much
from those of us who have to pay taxes and watch
American TV

You see my point;

I’m sorry.
I really am sorry.

Coming Back from Seeing Your People (Alice Walker) Coming...

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 23:06:59 -0500

Coming Back from Seeing Your People (Alice Walker)

Coming back
From seeing your people
You were
So wonderfully
Full
Of yourself.

But now
You have supped
With vampires
They have fed
Feasted
On you.

They arise
Bright-eyed
Fit.

You alone have lost
Not only
Your sleep
But also
Your glow
The luster of
Affection
Heart welcome
Your people
Sent home
With you.

Beloved
You must learn
To walk alone
To hold
The precious
Silence
To bring home
And keep the precious
Little
That is left
Of yourself.

from Twenty-One Love Poems (Adrienne Rich) XIIIThe rules break...

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 01:52:17 -0500

from Twenty-One Love Poems (Adrienne Rich)

XIII

The rules break like a thermometer,
quicksilver spills across the charted systems,
we’re out in a country that has no language
no laws, we’re chasing the raven and the wren
through gorges unexplored since dawn
whatever we do together is pure invention
the maps they gave us were out of date
by years … we’re driving through the desert
wondering if the water will hold out
the hallucinations turn to simple villages
the music on the radio comes clear -
neither Rosenkavalier nor Gotterdammerung
but a woman’s voice singing old songs
with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute
plucked and fingered by women outside the law.

XIV

It was your vision of the pilot
confirmed my vision of you: you said, He keeps
on steering headlong into the waves, on purpose
while we crouched in the open hatchway
vomiting into plastic bags
for three hours between St. Pierre and Miquelon.
I never felt closer to you.
In the close cabin where the honeymoon couples
huddled in each other’s laps and arms
I put my hand on your thigh
to comfort both of us, your hand came over mine,
we stayed that way, suffering together
in our bodies, as if all suffering
were physical, we touched so in the presence
of strangers who knew nothing and cared less
vomiting their private pain
as if all suffering were physical.

from Twenty-One Love Poems (Adrienne Rich) XI Every peak is a...

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 02:50:00 -0500

from Twenty-One Love Poems (Adrienne Rich)

XI

Every peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes,
making them eternally and visibly female.
No height without depth, without a burning core,
though our straw soles shred on the hardened lava.
I want to travel with you to every sacred mountain
smoking within like the sibyl stooped over his tripod,
I want to reach for your hand as we scale the path,
to feel your arteries glowing in my clasp,
never failing to note the small, jewel-like flower
unfamiliar to us, nameless till we rename her,
that clings to the slowly altering rock -
that detail outside ourselves that brings us to ourselves,
was here before us, knew we would come, and sees beyond us.

XII

Sleeping, turning in turn like planets
rotating in their midnight meadow:
a touch is enough to let us know
we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep:
the dream-ghosts of two worlds
walking their ghost-towns, almost address each other.
I’ve wakened to your muttered words
spoken light- or dark-years away
as if my own voice had spoken.
But we have different voices, even in sleep,
and our bodies, so alike, are yet so different
and the past echoing through our bloodstreams
is freighted with different language, different meanings -
though in any chronicle of the world we share
it could be written with new meaning
we were two lovers of one gender,
we were two women of one generation.