via theSteward

If you threw her in the water
she would float upstream.
What if baby Moses had floated upstream,
bobbing toward Lake Victoria in his bullrush boat,
passing the transfixed laundry women,
leaving them behind in a wake of amazement?
What would have become of the children of Israel?
The middle daughter forgets,
there is always history.

Show her white, she sees black.
The problem is her vision.
From infancy she has thrown off
every color we wrapped her in:
first the pink, contemptuous,
and later even the blue, for reasons
we hadn’t the nerve to be thankful for.
She wants to wear red, or nothing.
And you should see her with her red shirt
flapping on her spindle body
like some solo flag,
marching up the river,
leading the salmon to slaughter.
She says they aren’t really dying.
She says something is born of swimming upstream
that finds its way back to the sea
and spreads like a grassfire through the seaweed
across the floor of underwater continents
and finally comes back to the very same river,
not one, but a thousand fish,
a generation of fish.
This middle daughter believes
she will make history.

–Barbara Kingsolver

P.S. Read up on other Friday poems here.
P.P.S. I am a middle daughter :)

{via flickr}

So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky
of this black August. My sister, the sun,
broods in her yellow room and won’t come out.

Everything goes to hell; the mountains fume
like a kettle, rivers overrun; still,
she will not rise and turn off the rain.

She is in her room, fondling old things,
my poems, turning her album. Even if thunder falls
like a crash of plates from the sky,

she does not come out.
Don’t you know I love you but am hopeless
at fixing the rain? But I am learning slowly

to love the dark days, the steaming hills,
the air with gossiping mosquitoes,
and to sip the medicine of bitterness,

so that when you emerge, my sister,
parting the beads of the rain,
with your forehead of flowers and eyes of forgiveness,

all will not be as it was, but it will be true
(you see they will not let me love
as I want), because, my sister, then

I would have learnt to love black days like bright ones,
the black rain, the white hills, when once
I loved only my happiness and you.

–Derek Walcott

{Jose Villa}

Addison tells of spending his summer
clearing the farm his family has owned
since the revolutionary war
acres and acres of overgrown fields —
pastures and hayfields, hedgerows, forest growth —
a big enterprise for an ex-farm boy
turned minister in a flowing cassock
not handy for plowing. I’ve seen him lift
the bread and wine in pale hands above
the bowing heads of his parishioners.

And as he tells about his summer work
I see the chalice turn into a saw,
the handles darkened with his father’s sweat,
and before that, his grandfather’s, on down
the generations until the sad phrase
delivered in the garden comes to mind:
“sweat of your brow,” which now is Addison’s,
clearing the land so that we see the light
as it first shone on Adam, pruning turned
into a kind of hands-on ministry.

What did he see once the hedgerows were cleared?
The skies opening, divine light beaming down
on distant vistas of a promised land?
Salvation for God’s sweating minister?
But he saw only what was there to see —
rolling green hills such as a child might draw,
cars moving on a distant road like beads
on an abacus, a neighbor hanging wash:
the earth released and grown so luminous
that he was saved simply by seeing it.

–Julia Alvarez

P.S. Even though next week is Wedding Week, I’ll be popping in with a few pre-scheduled post… and maybe a few behind-the-scenes details from our preparations! Wish us luck!

{c/o Elizabeth Messina}

A garden between low walls, bright,
made of dry grass and a light that slowly bakes
the ground below. The light smells of sea.
You breathe that grass. You touch your hair
and shake out the memory of grass.

I have seen ripe
fruit dropping thickly on remembered grass with a soft
thudding. So too the pulsing of the blood
surprises even you. You move your head
as though a miracle of air had happened around you,
and the miracle is you. Your eyes have a savor
like the heat of memory.

You listen.
You listen to the words, but they barely graze you.
Your face has a radiance of thought that shines
around your shoulders, like light from the sea. The silence
in your face touches the heart with a soft
thud, exuding drop by drop,
like fruit that fell here years ago,
an old pain, still.

–Cesare Pavese

(Thanks, Meghan, for reminding me about Poem Fridays! I hope you like this one.)