Category: Poems & poem-like things

Original poetry, translations and videopoems by the authors of this blog. (See Poets and poetry for criticism, etc.)

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Vertigo

Tonight, as I read in bed
of The dynamic between falling
and being caught— a kind

of ecstasy— the eye
shutters toward the window,
toward the old church steeple

with its peeling paint
and broken cornices, scudding
clouds still visible against

a rapidly darkening sky—
And then the tremor
in the foot,

along the leg, foretelling
how the body drops into
the well of sleep.

 

In response to small stone (230).

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

And yet

the world has me too:
its dips and rises, that
light I chase from one
end of the day to the other,
the always-beginning-again
a needle that threads floss
through loop after loop
in a chain making daisies
and clouds and rain—
So near sometimes, so close
to gossamer joy I think
almost if I closed my eyes
I might find, by feel,
the coat that I rent,
the love that was lost,
the house that the years
ransacked to ruin.

 

In response to small stone (229).

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Overhead, the thin high whistle of a tree sparrow—

This entry is part 4 of 31 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2013

Does it mean the gods are always watching,
does it mean You there, don’t get too happy, too proud,

too comfortable, too far ahead of yourself? Does it mean
abandon all hope for no good deed goes unpunished,
and only the fat, well-heeled, well-fed, undeservedly

happy are sure to get that reward plus bonus they don’t
even need? Perhaps I have thrown caution out the window
and forgotten how to be circumspect. Perhaps

the bittersweet blooms, the new buds of hydrangea pushing
out from winter’s brown bramble have plucked at a nerve—
and also the speckled blue eggs only big as my thumb

that some snake, trawling the garden, must have found.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.