Tuesday Poem: "Her Kind" by Anne Sexton

 

I have gone out, a possessed witch,  
haunting the black air, braver at night;  
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch  
over the plain houses, light by light:  
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.  
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.  
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,  
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,  
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:  
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,  
learning the last bright routes, survivor  
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.  
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.  
I have been her kind.

by Anne Sexton

For more information about poet, Anne Sexton, see:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anne-sexton

Tuesday Poem: "Over the Dead Flatness of the Fens' by William Logan

 

Like columns of mist
in some temple to a vanished god,
the late cloud-stacks mass over a June
reduced to the sickly greens of the Norfolk broads;

and, above the steam-soiled mess
where earthworms grovel, where lumpish toads
set up the resistances of grace,
where badgers undermine the tarred road,

I watch the canvas of that underpainted sky
through a jellied glass of vermouth
while the gravestone crops up
and an oily wind steels itself to the south.

There certain winged creatures
from a century misplaced on shelves
take the day down with a moaning chant
known to themselves.

by William Logan

For more information about poet, William Logan, see:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-logan

Tuesday Poem: 'Adjectives of Order" by Alexandra Teague

 

That summer, she had a student who was obsessed
with the order of adjectives. A soldier in the South
Vietnamese army, he had been taken prisoner when

Saigon fell. He wanted to know why the order
could not be altered. The sweltering city streets shook
with rockets and helicopters. The city sweltering

streets. On the dusty brown field of the chalkboard,
she wrote: The mother took warm homemade bread
from the oven. City is essential to streets as homemade

is essential to bread. He copied this down, but
he wanted to know if his brothers were lost before
older, if he worked security at a twenty-story modern

downtown bank or downtown twenty-story modern.
When he first arrived, he did not know enough English
to order a sandwich. He asked her to explain each part

of Lovely big rectangular old red English Catholic
leather Bible. Evaluation before size. Age before color.
Nationality before religion. Time before length. Adding

and, one could determine if two adjectives were equal.
After Saigon fell, he had survived nine long years
of torture. Nine and long. He knew no other way to say this.

by Alexandra Teague

For more information on poet, alexandra Teague, see:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/alexandra-teague