Black Oak
By Asher Hall
Deep in the city,
She sits planted in the hospital cafe,
A paper sits before her.
It concurs with the thoughts she’s having,
By pleading,
For the past to be changed.
The immediate sensitive nature of the subject ...
1
Some day, a day not on your calendar
And it shouldn’t be long from now
You’ll leave behind your shelter of
Practiced spontaneity and dull knives. ...
A Horizon Line
When I close my eyes,
I see a horizon line.
It’s black at the Coney Island beach in New York,
Gray on the plane back to China,
Blood orange in LA,
And gradient pink at Charles River, Boston.
Time—it’s time that defines the color of the horizon line. ...
“Russian soldiers stayed in our building,” the poet Lesyk Panaisuk wrote to me a few weeks ago. When the war began, Lesyk left Bucha in a hurry, fleeing the Russian invasion.
“War will live in Bucha long after the soldiers are gone,” Lesyk emails me, “because they left a lot of mines throughout Bucha.” Now it is dangerous to walk around the town. Lesyk’s neighbors found some mines in the halls of their building, inside their slippers and washing machines. Some neighbors returned only to install doors and windows. “In our neighbourhood doors to almost every apartment were broken by russian soldiers,” Lesyk writes.
Each year Boston College host the Greater Boston Intercollegiate Undergraduate Poetry Festival, inviting undergraduate student poets from area colleges and universities to read their original poetry. This year, Skyler Bugg, a student in Pat Pattison’s Writing Poetry 2 class, represented Berklee College of Music. Here are the three poems she presented. Firebird is written in Blank Verse, Eve is an Italian Sonnet, and Becoming is Free Verse.
That small curl always dangling in your face—it blocks me from your eyes. You wonder what color, and it’s not the color, but how it feels to me when the sun shines through, burning your eyes. It makes my blood boil, the way at night they are filled with excitement. I know you feel the butterflies in my stomach and the way the moon reflects the mood in your eyes. I just can’t get enough. I think, when will it be enough? ...
Before The Wedding
That man you’re standing next to…For so long
I looked up to him like a god. You’re immured in conversation
And when he smiles back at you now, my heart
Skips, and not for him.
Tonight I need armor to look at you; when I want
To tell you how we should be together, no human
Language comes out. I have known this feeling
That warms, then scalds, me ...
For he was a great man thrown & pulled toward the flames
For the flames were familiar for they would seal his story
For he was taken down face down body down to account
For his soul stood up & noticed the chariot song descending
For he pleaded as the fiery metals coiled upon his ebony skin
For he was our Renaissance our thirst our vessel for Freedom
For they said he was our father our son our symbol our body
For a choir assembled in the streets in every furnace of witness
For he called upon his mother as he called upon the Source
For he was not your Negro he was not your Black cut down
For he was the ancestral ship burning through waves & chains
For he was the future no one had prophesied the Now & the Is...
Blue Hill
The simplest way
to conquer Blue Hill
in the heat of the day
is to drive and stop
at the very foot
of the gentlest slope
and this we did
but were lost at once
in the bristling shade ...
