The first morning song wakes me
before my alarm clock
this winter
tells me, beautifully
and without question
that cardinal knows something
March refuses to admit,
weaving his nest on barely-budded branches
with last year’s field grass,
his wings bleeding through snow squalls
to do it
leading me to question
whether longer days
bring birdsong back, or if
it is his reckless cheer, cheer, cheer
no matter what
that coaxes sun to stay longer
The smallest things seed rebellion,
the way starting tomatoes in March
leads to dreams of oregano
and basil scenting a summer walk
but less obvious, because
it is not food I am talking here
but revolution, like standing up for something
or continuing to sit, a la Rosa Parks,
or loaning a woman
35 dollars for beads and floss,
the price of a bag of groceries,
so she can sell embroidery
in a market stall, instead of her daughter
in an alley.
Not all change is big and violent,
waving signs and shouting slogans,
but quiet, the things that happen under soil
before sprouting, essential and unseen.
That’s what I’m seeding.
shameless
with purest joy
he defiantly loves,
no altar fit to hold or burn
his gift
human nature–in a poem or a pie.
If you wrote me a letter of hate
I would frame it,
simply for its divine soliloquies,
and to see my name
written by your hand,
a brilliant mess of scribbles,
which I would imagine to be
your twisted endearment.
If you wrote me a letter of indifference
I would burn it in oil,
and bake it into a poisoned pie,
to be sent to your address
immediately.
If you wrote me a letter of love,
I would write one back,
and after a while,
if we stopped writing,
and started speaking instead,
and made love every day,
and the ordinary jealousies
and domesticities won out,
we would grow bored
and never write again.
We call this blue jewel
astronauts kiss on returning
home, which means many things
and is where death happens.
Her tectonic rage resonates through space
as she becomes bell, ringing and indifferent;
tsunamis and fallen cities simply notes
in her sounding,
but us, we remember.
We light candles. We pray
and imagine leaving the hard love
of our stone mother
for the clean blues of a heaven
only pure because we are far from it.
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This past week saw up-and-coming political pundit and progressive activist Zerlina Maxwell talking about rape, her own status as a rape survivor, and the fact that women shouldn’t have to carry guns in order to not be raped — because boys and men should be taught not to rape in the first place. This is not a new topic for Zerlina (see her excellent “Stop Telling Women How Not to Get Raped”), and she’s not a stranger to backlash.
However, last week the discussion was on television, which gives it much greater kick, and any conversation about guns adds an entire new layer of intensity to the process, and pretty much immediately after she was off the air, Zerlina began to be inundated with rape threats, death threats, racist slurs, and often a combination of all three, across all the various social media platforms. (You can read more about how it’s…
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This is not news,
women gone
before they are counted:
their newborn flash
snuffed quickly
and quietly.
It is a crisis of numbers,
and numbers don’t lie.
The bodies are buried,
evidence wiped clean,
and all we have to count
is absence, an echo,
a daughter-shaped hole
in our hearts
if we allow the clinical edge
of scalpel truth to cut us there,
bright steel laying it all open.
Susan Daniels Poetry 