A Shared Poem

Good morning all

I’d like to share a poem written by someone else today, something we haven’t done for a while here (although folks, I did like your recent extra-Symposial sharing of Brian Doyle's poems). This is a contemporary poem out of this month’s Poetry magazine, and I’m sharing it because it demonstrates the best of what poetry can be, because it is another good bird poem and yet a bird poem I had never considered. Poetry should be about sharing beauty that the reader might otherwise have missed or getting the reader to look at something in a different, better way.  No, not all poetry is positive, but even poems like this one that touch on darker truths will, if they are any good, not just wallow in that darkness.  This one ends in a darkness, yes, but one that is immediately contradicted by the first line when you go back and reread it.  It argues against the darkness. 

I love the “no” of this poem.  And it fits with something I am right now working on, some thoughts I will be sharing at a Lenten service next month about how Lent always tugs me in different directions.  There is somberness, darkness, and yet we know there is also Easter, even before it happens.

With apologies and thanks to the poem’s poet, Jamaal May - a new poet, by the way, never widely published until last year, yet also one who is a teacher, a slam poet, someone who calls himself a “working artist.”

      There Are Birds Here
      by Jamaal May

      For Detroit

      There are birds here,
      so many birds here
      is what I was trying to say
      when they said those birds were metaphors
      for what is trapped
      between buildings
      and buildings. No.
      The birds are here
      to root around for bread
      the girl’s hands tear
      and toss like confetti. No,
      I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,
      I said confetti, and no
      not the confetti
      a tank can make of a building.
      I mean the confetti
      a boy can’t stop smiling about
      and no his smile isn’t much
      like a skeleton at all. And no
      his neighborhood is not like a war zone.
      I am trying to say
      his neighborhood
      is as tattered and feathered
      as anything else,
      as shadow pierced by sun
      and light parted
      by shadow-dance as anything else,
      but they won’t stop saying
      how lovely the ruins,
      how ruined the lovely
      children must be in that birdless city.


from Poetry, February 2014