The Sunday Poem

Every Sunday I post an original poem.

The Sunday Poem: Apples

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May 262008
 

In Latin, the words for “apple” and for “evil” are similar in the singular (malus—apple, malum—evil) and identical in the plural (mala).

– Wikipedia

This apple from Tajikistan gave birth to all the fruit:
The red ones, gold ones, tart ones, green and russet hues.

Each branch was mated to a branch carried over miles
And honeybees deployed in ranks to stoke the woody fires.

The names themselves are everywheres: from Fuji to Orléans,
Grannies, Coxes, McIntoshes and countless other brands,

Which carry in each half-cut star and in their very style
The memory of Kazakh slopes where first they grew in wild.

The blossoms spread, pink and pale verging on the blue,
Until we had the legends: the gold ones Hera grew;

The one that Eris tossed to Paris, causing wars in Troy;
Immortal orchards grown in eddas, Idun’s deathless joy;

A snow white princess poisoned; Atalanta’s race;
Johnny and all those orchards over which he traipsed;

The tree of knowledge, good and evil, our original sin.
This is quite a burden for fruit to bear within.

We have made the apple ours, and on it grafted history,
And yet the breed runs on, profusions to a tree,

This fruit humanity resents, but loves and needs.
Every apple carries still inside those bitter seeds.

The Sunday Poem: Building the Globe

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Apr 272008
 

We heft the oak beams, one two three, each count
A sturdy truss; smooth hewn and splintered, blunt
And heavy, painted gaily marbled, dun
And costumeless. By numbers shall we know
Their place, when Southwark greets our lumber load;
The Theatre is no more, and soon we’ll have a Globe.
In Shoreditch now there stands a hole, on lease-
Land Burbage didn’t own. And past the trees,
By open fields, his Men will have a Streete-
Built O, wherein proud Oberon will prance
And Lear cry out his woe; where faery dance
For groundlings’ sake, and Puck plays out his pranks.
We’ll sift the straw and lay it straight on top,
And paint anew the spangled sky aloft
Above proscenium’s boards. We’ll stop
The crowd with good stout rails, so high-pitch boys
Can stain their lips and flounce their tails, and raise
A ruckus to the skies, the center of our noise.
But first, we must dismantle, first we take
Apart. If all the world’s a stage and planks
Are how it’s made, then for our Good Lord’s sake
I hope he spent his seven days as well,
Assembling worlds in beams of thirty ells,
A Shakespere for his script, Queen Bess, and all
A-toiling midst the sound of London’s bells.

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The Sunday Poem: Peace

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Apr 202008
 

Peace shouldn’t be quiet, clouds soft and pliant,
A mellow sky scene in blue.
Peace should be blaring, a jazz band past caring,
A squabble of children and you.
The clangor of pots, your eyes full of spots,
Buttercups growing in dew.
Peace is invention, it’s sustained attention,
It’s chemistry going kaboom.
It’s racing of go karts and artichoke hearts
And farming in Kalamazoo.

It’s silence as well, but the silence of bells
The moment they still for a few;
An aftershock sound that echoes around
And gives way to rush and to hue.
It’s not smug inertia, safe from what hurts ya;
Pain is what gives us the glue.
It’s temperate intemperance, all quantum events,
Mosquitoes buzzing canoes.
A whole raucous party, that’s peace’s priority:
Space to be scattered and true.

The Sunday Song: Polliwog

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Apr 132008
 

OK, I lied. It’s not a song. It’s more of a jam session. Since it wasn’t fully grown and looked likely to have warts even upon attaining adulthood, I named it “Polliwog.” Drum tracks, bass, acoustic, two electrics, and the piano all piled onto a standard blues progression played really fast.

Basically, I slammed together three different blues riffs I like to jam with, two for guitar and one for piano. They were originally all in different keys, but I piled ’em all into one. If you want to add to the cacophony, it’s in E.

The Sunday Poem: The Land of Red Barns

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Apr 062008
 

Well, I just wasted like three or four hours trying to record a song, but something is off in my recording setup and everything sounds incredibly noisy. I can’t pinpoint what the problem is, so I am giving up.

That means that I am cheating today, which is bad, given that I missed two weeks of posting something for the Sunday Poem/Song — one to the blog being down and one to illness. But oh well, that’s what backlogs are for.

This song is on After the Flood, and was also the title track to a separate album that I put together but never finished recording. I wrote it after driving cross-country to attend a friend’s wedding. And all you get is the lyrics — you’ll have to pick up the CD to get the actual song. 🙂

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