Leslie Marmon Silko

Where Mountain Lion Lay Down with Deer -

I climb the black rock mountains stepping from day to day silently.
I smell the wind for my ancestors pale blue leaves crushed wild mountain smell.
Returning
up the gray stone cliff where I descended a thousand years ago.
Returning to faded black stone. where mountain lion lay down with deer.
It is better to stay up here watching wind's reflection in tall yellow flowers.
The old ones who remembered me are gone the old songs are all forgotten and the story of my birth
How I danced in snow- frost moonlight distant stars to the end of the Earth,
How I swam away in freezing mountain water narrow mossy canyon tumbling down out of the mountain out of the deep canyon stone down the memory spilling out into the world

Adrienne Rich

Living in Sin

She had thought the studio would keep itself; no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal, the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears, a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat stalking the picturesque amusing mouse had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe under the milkman's tramp; that morning light so coldly would delineate the scraps of last night's cheese and three sepulchral bottles; that on the kitchen shelf amoong the saucers a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own-- envoy from some village in the moldings...
Meanwhile, he, with a yawn, sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard, declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror, rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes; while she, jeered by the minor demons, pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found a towel to dust the table-top, and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.
By evening she was back in love again, though not so wholly but throughout the night she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming like a relentless milkman up the stairs.
Margaret Atwood

The City Planners

Cruising these residential Sunday streets in dry August sunlight: what offends us is the sanities: the houses in pedantic rows, the planted sanitary trees, assert levelness of surface like a rebuke to the dent in our car door.
No shouting here, or shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt than the rational whine of a power mower cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.

But though the driveways neatly sidestep hysteria by being even, the roofs all display the same slant of avoidance to the hot sky, certain things: the smell of spilled oil a faint sickness lingering in the garages, a splash of paint on brick surprising as a bruise, a plastic hose poised in a vicious coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows

give momentary access to the landscape behind or under the future cracks in the plaster

when the houses, capsized, will slide obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers that right now nobody notices.

That is where the City Planners with the insane faces of political conspirators are scattered over unsurveyed territories, concealed from each other, each in his own private blizzard;

guessing directions, they sketch transitory lines rigid as wooden borders on a wall in the white vanishing air

tracing the panic of suburb order in a bland madness of snows
Denise Levertov

What Were They Like?

Did the people of Viet Nam use lanterns of stone?
Did they hold ceremonies to reverence the opening of buds?
Were they inclined to quiet laughter?
Did they use bone and ivory, jade and silver, for ornament?
Had they an epic poem?
Did they distinguish between speech and singing?

Sir, their light hearts turned to stone.
It is not remembered whether in gardens stone gardens illumined pleasant ways.
Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom, but after their children were killed there were no more buds.
Sir, laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.
A dream ago, perhaps. Ornament is for joy.
All the bones were charred. it is not remembered. Remember, most were peasants; their life was in rice and bamboo.
When peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies and the water buffalo stepped surely along terraces, maybe fathers told their sons old tales.
When bombs smashed those mirrors there was time only to scream.
There is an echo yet of their speech which was like a song.
It was reported their singing resembled the flight of moths in moonlight.
Who can say? It is silent now.

Yusef Komunyakaa

Facing It

My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn't, dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I tum this way - the stone lets me go.
I tum that way - I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash. Names shimmer on a woman's blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall. Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's images floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I'm a window. He's lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

Wislawa Szymborska

The End and the Beginning

After every war someone has to clean up.
Things won't straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble to the side of the road, so the corpse-filled wagons can pass.

Someone has to get mired in scum and ashes, sofa springs, splintered glass, and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder to prop up a wall,
Someone has to glaze a window, rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not, and takes years. All the cameras have left for another war.

We'll need the bridges back, and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand, still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby starting to mill about who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes sometimes someone still unearths rusted-out arguments and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew what was going on here must make way for those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
Causes and effects,
Someone must be stretched out
Blade of grass in his mouth
Gazing at the clouds.