POEM OF THE DAY BY PABLO NERUDA

Ode to the Watermelon

The tree of intense

summer,

hard,

is all blue sky,

yellow sun,

fatigue in drops,

a sword

above the highways,

a scorched shoe

in the cities:

the brightness and the world

weigh us down,

hit us

in the eyes

with clouds of dust,

with sudden golden blows,

they torture

our feet

with tiny thorns,

with hot stones,

and the mouth

suffers

more than all the toes:

the throat

becomes thirsty,

the teeth,

the lips, the tounge:

we want to drink

waterfalls,

the dark blue night,

the South Pole,

and then

the coolest of all

the planets crosses

the sky,

the round, magnificent,

star-filled watermelon.

It's a fruit from the thirst-tree.

It's the green whale of the summer.

The dry universe

all at once

given dark stars

by this firmament of coolness

lets the swelling

fruit

come down:

its hemispheres open

showing a flag

green, white, red,

that dissolves into

wild rivers, sugar,

delight!

Jewel box of water, phlegmatic

queen

of the fruitshops,

warehouse

of profundity, moon

on earth!

You are pure,

rubies fall apart

in your abundance,

and we

want

to bite into you,

to bury our

face

in you, and

our hair, and

the soul!

When we're thirsty

we glimpse you

like

a mine or a mountain

of fantastic food,

but

among our longings and our teeth

you change

simply

into cool light

that slips in turn into

spring water

that touched us once

singing.

And that is why

you don't weigh us down

in the siesta hour

that's like an oven,

you don't weigh us down,

you just

go by

and your heart, some cold ember,

turned itself into a single

drop of water.


-Pablo Neruda

POEM OF THE DAY BY PAUL CORMAN ROBERTS

THE LAST POEM I WILL EVER WRITE ABOUT POETRY
OR POETZ FOR REALZ I SWEAR THIS TIME

Contrary to popular belief
The poets are the last
To be killed or driven out
When the various gurgling pockets of
White/educated/liberal/entitlement
Begin to fracture, shrink, divide and multiply
Into a foamy disaffectation
Beneath the economic pressure
That makes a liar out of everyone
Who claimed they had faith
In civilization.

Poets used to be the elite of course;
In the days when only the elite
Were allowed to read and write.

Since then, no practice or profession
Has so sycophantically embedded itself
Into the columns of society
Than that of “poet.”

And this is because genuine poets
Are genuine slaves to words.
And words have always been used
To divide and fracture and
Separate and segregate.
And there is none of this
That is new.

But what the liberal white intellectuals
Tend to forget
Is that while Western Civilization
Faces many humiliating and degrading mileposts
On its slide down history’s timeline
There is still actually quite a long way to go.

But make no mistake about it
And let’s be perfectly clear on this

When the authorities
Begin rounding up the poets
And incarcerating them
En masse,
You can be sure that
It is not the beginning of the end

But a sure sign
That the whole shithouse
Has already gone up in flames.

-Paul Corman Roberts

POEM OF THE DAY BY LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

"Johnny Nolan has a patch on his ass"

Kids chase him
thru screendoor summers

Thru the back streets
of all my memories

Somewhere a man laments
upon a violin

A doorstep baby cries
and cries again
like
a
ball
bounced
down steps

Which helps the afternoon arise again
to a moment of remembered hysteria

"Johnny Nolan has a patch on his ass"

Kids chase him.

-Lawrence Ferlinghetti

POEM OF THE DAY BY KEVIN RABAS

Fall Up

Gunkle and I had this big mirror between us, hefting it
into the back of his blue pick up truck. Gunkle’s part retarded,

a giant in blue jeans and green Crocs, wearing a white t-shirt
with battery acid on it. His glasses are thicker than my thumb.

So, we grab hold of this monster mirror, and it glints,
and we both look into that mirror, noticing the clarity
of that blue sky and those green sycamore leaves reflected
so perfectly that is appears you could just dive on into that mirror
and sink into the sky, and we think the same thing.

“You could fall up,” Gunkle says, “and just keep on falling.
Nothing would stop you.” And that was the way of it.

Gunkle’s mind was now my mind, and I was in that mirror
falling on up through those white smoke clouds

headed towards an orange sun.

Gunkle and I stacked box bed springs on top the mirror,
and some branches from out front, and I could hear that large mirror crack,
but I think Gunkle and I could still see it—
that vision of sinking into sky, drowning

with only the sun to hold us up.

-Kevin Rabas

POEM OF THE DAY BY CHARLES BERNSTEIN

Pompeii

The rich men, they know about suffering

That comes from natural things, the fate that

Rich men say they can’t control, the swell of

The tides, the erosion of polar caps

And the eruption of a terrible

Greed among those who cease to be content

With what they lack when faced with wealth they are

Too ignorant to understand. Such wealth

Is the price of progress. The fishmonger

Sees the dread on the faces of the trout

And mackerel laid out at the market

Stall on quickly melting ice. In Pompeii

The lava flowed and buried the people

So poems such as this could be born.

 -Charles Bernstein

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POEM OF THE DAY BY IRIS APPELQUIST

just my 19th nervous breakdown

it was daytime and i realized i feared
being in the sun. then, when it was
nighttime, i noticed that the moon was
menacing me. i could not determine
whether this was the way it had always
been, and i’d always just cockroached my
way through the daytimes and the
nighttimes…or if my being so thoroughly
terrorized had materialized with suddenness.

with help and, in large parts, luck, the daytimes
and nighttimes were made into different
beasts altogether, and i was able to coerce myself
into believing that these altogether different
beasts were nothing to be afraid of.

-Iris Appelquist