A few poems by Grady Chambers, Dorianne Laux, Mary Oliver, Tina Chang, and Beth Ann Fennelly for Poetry Month

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You could smell the day’s heat even before the day began. 

Constant trickle, endless green trees flanking the highway: 

summer had come back. . . . 

—From "A Known Fact," a poem by Grady Chambers (Quarterly West, Issue 96).

It’s the best part of the day, morning light sliding

down rooftops, treetops, the birds pulling themselves

up out of whatever stupor darkened their wings, . . . 

—From "I Never Wanted to Die," a poem by Dorianne Laux (Poem-a-Day, April 16, 2021, Academy of American Poets).

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees 
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
—From "Wild Geese," a poem by Mary Oliver. 

Up ahead it’s white. Snow animal,

I’m running at your back. I’ve failed to tell you
I’ve been hungry all this time, . . . 

—From "Color," a poem by Tina Chang (Hybrida: Poems, W. W. Norton, 2019).

Today is the day the first bare-chested
          runners appear, coursing down College Hill
                      as I drive to campus to teach, . . . 
—From "First Warm Day in a College Town," a poem by Beth Ann Fennelly (Unmentionables, W. W. Norton, 2008).

Four poems from Like a Beggar and The Human Line

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Bad things are going to happen. 

Your tomatoes will grow a fungus

and your cat will get run over.

Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream

melting in the car . . .
 --From "Relax," a poem by Ellen Bass, first published in The American Poetry Review and reprinted in Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), pp. 3-4. 

  

"I'm fat and I'm old and I'm going to die," Dorianne says

as we're taking our after-dinner walk on the grounds of Esalen . . .

--From "Women Walking," a poem by Ellen Bass, first published in The American Poetry Review, Volume 38, Number 1, and reprinted in Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), pp. 21-22.

 

...She's a dead ringer for my mother,

sipping black coffee, scrambling eggs,

a cigarette burning in a cut-glass ashtray.

She opens the store.  Amber whiskeys

and clear vodkas shine on wooden shelves,

bruise-dark wine rising in the slender necks. . . . 

--From "The Muse of Work," a poem by Ellen Bass, first published in New Ohio Review, Issue 11, and reprinted in Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), pp. 60-61.

 

And yet, wouldn't it be welcome

at the end of an ordinary day?

The audience could be small,

the theater modest.  Folding chairs

in a church basement would do.

Just a short earnest burst of applause

that you got up that morning

and, one way or another,

made it through the day. . . . 

--From "Don't Expect Applause," a poem by Ellen Bass, The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), pp. 87-88.