Burial Rites on White Island Volcano (haibun)

The way the sulfur burns our throats on this molten prison
This smoking island “it can’t possibly be worth it” digging
Yellow neon sweating rock – but oh how on some sun-filled days
The deep water around us seems gentle and free and how the birds
May have returned to say goodnight as we settle in, bones aching
From hard labor, our feet covered in volcanic dust, our nostrils
Burnt with the sulfur, oh it is ungodly quiet when we settle in to sleep,
It is quiet when the lahars bury us at sea….

End of days foretold
swiftly the darkness becomes
a light to walk towards.

[written about the the White Island volcano in New Zealand: “Attempts were made in the mid 1880s, 1898–1901 and 1913-1914 to mine sulphur from White Island but the last of these came to a halt in September 1914, when part of the western crater rim collapsed, creating a lahar which killed all 10 workers. They disappeared without trace, and only a camp cat survived.”]

The Promise by Jane Hirshfield

Absolutely beautiful poem featured today on American Life in Poetry. I enjoyed immensely and am excited to share it with you!

American Life in Poetry: Column 382
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Jane Hirshfield, who lives in the San Francisco Bay area, is one of our country’s finest poets, and
I have never seen a poem of hers that I didn’t admire. Here’s a fine one that I see as being about
our inability to control the world beyond us.

The Promise

Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider,
who fled.

Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.
Stay, I said to my body.

It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth
of riverine valley meadows,
of fossiled escarpments,
of limestone and sandstone.
It looked back
with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org),
publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of
Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2011 by Jane Hirshfield, from her most recent book of poems,
Come, Thief, Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. Poem reprinted by permission of Jane Hirshfield and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2012 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

American Life in Poetry ©2006 The Poetry Foundation
Contact: alp@poetryfoundation.org
This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.

The Silver Fish by Shawn Pittard (guest)

Really enjoyed the poem below ~ hope you do as well!
 
American Life in Poetry: Column 380
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Lots of contemporary poems are merely little personal anecdotes set into lines, but I prefer my
anecdotes to have an overlay of magic. Here’s just such a poem by Shawn Pittard, who lives in
California.

The Silver Fish

I killed a great silver fish,
cut him open with a long

thin knife. The river carried
his heart away. I took his

dead eyes home. His red flesh
sang to me on the fire I built

in my backyard. His taste
was the lost memory of my

wildness. Behind amber clouds
of cedar smoke, Orion

drew his bow. A black moon rose
from the night’s dark waters,

a sliver of its bright face
reflecting back into the universe.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org),
publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of
Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2011 by Shawn Pittard, from his most recent book of poems,
Standing in the River, Tebot Bach, 2011. Poem reprinted by permission of Shawn Pittard and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2012 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

American Life in Poetry ©2006 The Poetry Foundation
Contact: alp@poetryfoundation.org
This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.

a return to flight

Over and over,
I’ve been that
(wilted flowers in hand)
silhouette to a setting sun
on a dried-out hill
saying stoic goodbyes.

But when I close my eyes,
(from my earliest
slippery seconds),
I have always seen
a return to flight,
my remains scattered by the aching hands
of my family back to the
soft wet arms 
of a briny sea.

how I’ll fly then —
as gently as cresting waves in
warmly breaking sunlight.