This week's poem:
SamisenBy James Kirkup
You look
Like a classic geisha:
Your wooden pegs
Are her hair-ornaments,
Your white soundbox
Her moon-white face,
Your long, slim shank
Her thin
Elegant neck, elongated
As she intones
Some sad romance.
You both have catgut voices.
Last week's poem:
From the San Diego Reader Volume 43/ Number 8
Pigging Out
By Wanda Coleman
at the restaurant we sit down to wine
we are so hungry
the crips appetizers/early loves
and lightly seasoned salad
we've developed appetites for the garlic & onion of life
gorging on a main course of dissatisfaction
over frustrated creativity sautéed in
economic plight
he chews over his Brooklyn childhood
i pick at the tedium of youthful Watts summers
we eat away the lousy jobs stunting our talent
we eat away the hot smog-filled day
we eat away the war in the headlines
we eat away the threat of nuclear holocaust
we eat away love-threatening pressures
we eat away the human pain we see/fee/
are stymied by
(pride is such thin dessert)
we eat until smiles return
until fat and happy
Wanda Coleman won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1999 -- the first African-American woman to do so. Her collection Mercurochrome was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. "Pigging Out" can be found in her 2012 collection The Love Project: A Marriage Made in Poetry, which features poems written to her from her husband, Austin Straus, in the first half; her poems to him comprise the latter half. Wanda died this past November.
at the restaurant we sit down to wine
we are so hungry
the crips appetizers/early loves
and lightly seasoned salad
we've developed appetites for the garlic & onion of life
gorging on a main course of dissatisfaction
over frustrated creativity sautéed in
economic plight
he chews over his Brooklyn childhood
i pick at the tedium of youthful Watts summers
we eat away the lousy jobs stunting our talent
we eat away the hot smog-filled day
we eat away the war in the headlines
we eat away the threat of nuclear holocaust
we eat away love-threatening pressures
we eat away the human pain we see/fee/
are stymied by
(pride is such thin dessert)
we eat until smiles return
until fat and happy
Wanda Coleman won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1999 -- the first African-American woman to do so. Her collection Mercurochrome was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. "Pigging Out" can be found in her 2012 collection The Love Project: A Marriage Made in Poetry, which features poems written to her from her husband, Austin Straus, in the first half; her poems to him comprise the latter half. Wanda died this past November.
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