Poems from Gulf of Maine

Peter Blue Cloud

2012-02-26T08:24:00.001-08:00

Blackberry Books (the publishing arm of Gulf of Maine Bookstore) is republishing Mohawk poet/storyteller Peter Blue Cloud's collection Back Then Tomorrow. We originally published it in 1978, and it won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1981. The new edition will cost $10, and will be available from Blackberry Books and Gulf of Maine Bookstore.
Here is the opening poem from the book:

The Cry

It was all darkness and always had been.
There was nothing there forever.
Creation was a tiny seed
awaiting a dream.
The dream came to be
because of the cry.
A howling cry which was
an echo in the emptiness of nothing.
The cry was very lonely and
caused the dream to
turn over in its sleep.
The dream did not want to awaken,
but the crying would not stop.
Well, thought the dream, opening its mind,
so now I am awake and there is something.
The dream floated above itself
and looked into its mind.
It wanted to see what the cry was.
What it saw was a dream
within its own dreaming.
And that other dream was Creation.
And Creation was the cry
seeking to begin something,
but it didn't know what,
and that is why it cried.
So the original dream lifted
the Creation dream from its mind
and set it free.
Then it went to the other end of nothing
and let itself go back
to dreamless sleep.
Creation floated all over the nothing,
dreaming of all the things it would do.
Its dreaming was interrupted
often by crying.
So, it wasn't me crying after all,
Creation thought.
Then it thought again,
but it is me because I dreamed it.
So, I have begun Creation with a cry.
When I begin to create the universe,
I must remember to give the cry
a very special place.
Perhaps
I'll call the cry
Coyote.

Peter Blue Cloud

Kristen Lindquist

2012-02-10T07:13:00.000-08:00

Kristen Lindquist has a new book of poems, Transportation, and will read from it at Gulf of Maine Books on Saturday, Feb. 25, 3 PM (the bookstore's 33rd birthday party). For more information about the bookstore party, click
here
and to read Kristen's blog, please click here
Here is a poem from her new book:

Brimstone Island: One Day

Deep within the indigo gullet of Penobscot Bay
black rock was belched from earth's belly,
then battered and fractured by waves,
churned smooth over millions of years.
You sail to this island for the sole purpose
of running fingers over these silken stones,
though you have to work for it, have to
first tack for hours across the bay, then row
to shore, choose a path to follow
over the island's rough backbone,
fight off mosquitos, teeter on ledges, to find
the pocket beach tucked between bluffs
on the side where no boat can moor.
An eagle flies overhead, sparrows call
from thorny bushes. On the beach, sun
heats pebbles you stack along your legs,
and lion's mane jellyfish bloom offshore
amid swirling fans of seaweed and foam.
You allow yourself one stone, to ever touch
that perfect day, as geology's slow clock
continues to tick, and, one at a time,
waves sweep and stir the dark shores.

Kristen Lindquist

Simon Pettet

2012-02-05T13:23:00.000-08:00

In 2009 Simon Pettet came up from New York to be the featured reader at Gulf of Maine Books' 30th birthday party. Here he is that day, photographed by Jim McCarthy, reading from his latest book, Hearth (Published by Talisman House).
Here is a poem from that book, as we near our 33rd birthday.

Garra Rufa

remember what the fish say,

don't blow it! don't drown!

don't put piping hot water

in the cold water spin cycle.

separate the paper from the plastic

the dead skin from the old wound(s)

be mindful

don't be a bottom-feeder

or swim away from it all

Simon Pettet

Edna St. Vincent Millay

2012-01-31T12:09:00.000-08:00

February is the birth month of Maine poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Here is her poem "Conscientious Objector"

I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death.

I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; I hear the clatter on the barn floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba, business in the Balkans,
many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle while he cinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself: I will not give him a leg up.

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip, I will not tell him
which way the fox ran.
With his hoof upon my breast, I will not tell him where the black boy
hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death; I am not
on his pay-roll.

I will not tell him the whereabouts of my friends nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much, I will not map him the route
to any man's door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living, that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city are safe with me;
never through me
Shall you be overcome.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

T J Dema, Botswanan poet

2012-01-24T13:04:00.000-08:00

T J Dema is a Botswanan based international poet, and chairperson of the Writers Association of Botswana. To visit her blog you can go
here and to hear her read this and other poems, along with five other poets from Botswana, go
here

Taureg Indigo

I am she who wears colour on skin
Adorning flesh with desert shades of indigo
My stories tell themselves below eyes
Above buttered cheeks
I have no need for a metal sky
A casket carved of bone, mortared in blood
I am a million constellations moulded of mud
The colour of a waking sky
Purple blue memories, sand storm covered secrets
Between my lover the desert
and I

T J Dema

First published in Hair Power - Skin Revolution
edited by Nicole Moore - 2010

Batsirai Chigama, Zimbabwean poet

2012-01-20T06:41:00.000-08:00

Zimbabwean born Batsirai E. Chigama is a performance poet and short story writer. She has traveled extensively in Southern Africa performing at festivals, and her poetry has appeared in 5 poetry anthologies to date. You can visit her website:
here
and to link to a resource list of poets from many African countries go
here

Homelands

Here is a starving child
There is a mad dog;
Feed her, bomb him...
Information about Africa reaches us
through a series of filters -
CNN,
BBC,
reducing the vast continent
To a cluster of emotive slogans
Succeeding in denying Africa,
the rest of the world,
with truth, complexity, context.

Our war was never
between the Hutus & Tutsis
We fight against
a hegemony of cartographers
Cutting borders
drawing MAPS
charting the chasms of African souls;
Against mythic figure of the foreign correspondents
Who comes here sends bad news
Too much reality for them overseas
For us too landlocked within our nations
Shocked at things he purports we do.

It is time to switch channels
Switch off accounts of horrific,
Metamorphosed realities of unknown facts,
Switch off the over-zealous journo-fantasist
Rummaging in the dustbins of Rwanda
Dead bodies litter in the minds of the young
Strewn across blooded pavements
With no one to claim them
Is this what the African life has become;
A daily escape from death, until the day we don't?
Escape?

Africa is not safe they say
Her soul is brutalized by "landmines"
Dongas gaping shamelessly
where diamonds lay; where did the diamonds go?
You may ask
Her children kneel in falling crevices
Groping for a little chuff June to May
Her vast plains are watered by sweat
Yet within all her dissected fertile being
Her children reduced to "eating rats"
Find within their hungry stomachs
Energy to dance, to laugh
Listen to the morning bird songs
And wake up to a new melody each day.

At the bira the children
Lose themselves in the throb of the jembe
Wantonly seducing life
to wrap her arms around them
Exorcising the night of her ills
This is what Africa is
Rhythm

Batsirai Easther Chigama
(adapted from Salman Rushdie's essay "Homelands")

Amal Al-Jubouri

2012-01-17T12:48:00.000-08:00

Alice James Books, of Farmington, Maine, has just published a book of poems by Iraqi poet Amal Al-Jubouri, called Hagar Before the Occupation/ Hagar After the Occupation. (translated by Rebecca Gayle Howell with Husam Qaisi, with a foreword by Alicia Ostriker)
Here is one poem from her collection:

To the Master of the White House

O-

Give me back my city
without caskets
without clothes of grief

Give me back the country
That once was called my country

My homeland
My homeland

Freedom was deep in sleep
and when it awoke
Fundamentalism came
Violence begat violence
Death ballooned
Fear ballooned
Tyrants bred

We refuse
We refuse

A homeland turned to ashes
A homeless child born

We refuse
We refuse

O - Master of the White House
I am not Jesus Christ
Here in my country
There, in yours,
All the slain cry out

I swear to my homeland
I will not forgive you

O - Master of the White House

Slaves we will never be
Never slaves to our enemies

Draw Back Draw Back
All the slain cry out:

We will not forgive you
We will not forgive you
Draw back

O - Master of the White House

My homeland
My homeland

Amal Al Jubouri

Nanao Sakaki

2012-01-10T06:47:00.000-08:00

photo of Nanao Sakaki by John Suiter

To accompany the Cardenal poem, below, we offer this poem by Nanao Sakaki. Previously unpublished, it will appear in Seventh Son - The Collected Poems of Nanao Sakaki (Fall, 2012, from Blackberry Books)
Here is a nice collection of Nanao links, on the Allen Ginsberg blog, with a spooky picture of Nanao and Allen in a Japanese nuclear plant:
here
and on another Ginsberg blog, a picture of Nanao having tea with Vaclav Havel and Anne Waldman
here

In The Next Life I Will Be

Wiping the windowpanes of my humble shack,
a dirty dust cloth in my hand,
endless blue sky over my head.

At the forest edge
where narcissus are already in all their glory,
where wild boars bite off various trees' roots every so often,
where I stand, piss, and murmur.

In the next life I will be a dust cloth
lapis lazuli colored.

As a dust cloth, making myself dirty
I clean up windowpanes, kitchens and toilets,
and I also wipe out discrimination and wars.

If ever the world really exists
I start polishing it from my tiny corner.
If ever eternity really exists
I make it brilliant at every moment.

The more I work, the more I become
pure lapis lazuli color
just like today's sky.

Ten days after winter solstice
the mother sun is shining bright.

All of a sudden, a gust of north wind
blows the dead leaves from the trees.

Look, something coming down!
With our luminous star behind
red wings flutter.

What is that? Hawk? Flying goblin? UFO?
Wow! On the palm of my hand
I catch the monster -
a withered red leaf of oak.

Living in the flower garden of the sun's red corona
biting off the rainbow's roots forever
someone murmurs

In the next life I will be....

Jan 2, 1998/ Izu Peninsula, Japan
Nanao Sakaki

Ernesto Cardenal

2012-01-03T07:06:00.000-08:00

Father Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaraguan poet, liberation theology priest, and former minister of culture for the Sandanista government, has a new book of poems, Pluriverse - New and Selected Poems, from New Directions Publishers. Here is the closing poem from that collection. You can hear him reading from the book
here
and you can watch him on the Charlie Rose show
here

Stardust

What's in a star? We are.
All the elements of our body and of the planet
were once in the belly of a star.
We are stardust.
15,000,000,000 years ago we were a mass
of hydrogen floating in space, turning slowly, dancing.
And the gas condensed more and more
gaining increasingly more mass
and mass became star and began to shine.
As they condensed they grew hot and bright.
Gravitation produced thermal energy: light and heat.
That is to say love.
Stars were born, grew, and died.
And the galaxy was taking the shape of a flower
the way it looks now on a starry night.
Our flesh and our bones come from other stars
and perhaps even from other galaxies,
we are universal,
and after death we will help to form other stars
and other galaxies.
We come from the stars, and to them we shall return.

Ernesto Cardenal

Theodore Enslin

2011-12-27T11:23:00.001-08:00

Our friend and mentor Theodore Enslin passed away in November. For over 50 years he was a quiet presence in Maine, publishing over 100 collections of poetry, living in Temple and later in Milbridge. He was generous, kind, prolific, a maker of walking sticks and poems, a lover of gardens, and a good friend.The Guardian published an especially sweet obituary
here
Here are two poems from the first book of Ted's that I read, back in 1971 (The Country of Our Consciousness: Poems 1966-1970):

45
The height of land
through
switch bramble.
Old pasture.
Two fence rows.
Trees hugging
steep sides:
Ironwood and rotting maples.
After the scramble,
a clear ridge,
but another,
- higher -
beyond it.
The height of the land?
Depends upon where
you've been.

58 Primal Elements

This
through which
I move
to say:
Time was no arbiter,
space no object.
How I came
broke surface
at the turn
no one may know.
I saw it through
somewhat
and went
another way.

Theodore Enslin

to read a poem for Ted by Henry Braun
click here

meena kandasamy

2011-12-27T07:13:00.001-08:00

Mulligatawny Dreams

anaconda.candy.cash.catamaran.

cheroot.coolie.corundum.curry.
ginger.mango.mulligatawny.

patchouli.poppadom.rice.
tatty.teak.vetiver.

i dream of an english
full of the words of my language.

an english in small letters.
an english that shall tire a white man's tongue.
an english where small children practice with smooth round
pebbles in their mouth to the spell the right zha
an english where a pregnant woman is simply stomach-child-lady
an english where the magic of black eyes and brown bodies
replaces the glamour of eyes in dishwater blue shades and
the airbrush romance of pink white cherry blossom skins
an english where love means only the strange frenzy between a
man and his beloved, not between him and his car
an english without the privacy of its many rooms
an english with suffixes for respect
an english with more than thirty six words to call the sea
an english that doesn't belittle brown or black men and women
an english of tasting with five fingers
an english of talking love with eyes alone

and i dream of an english

where men
of that spiky, crunchy tongue
buy flower-garlands of jasmine
to take home to their coy wives
for the silent demand of a night of wordless whispered love ...

Meena Kandasamy

her blog here
and her website here

Nicolas Guillen

2011-12-22T17:35:00.000-08:00

Nicolas Guillen, the great 20th century Cuban poet, writing in the rhythms of son, and here writing about rivers:

Rivers

With the Rhine, the Rhone, the Ebro
my eyes are filled.
With the Tiber, the Thames,
the Volga, the Danube,
my eyes are filled.

But I know the Plata,
and I know the Amazon bathes.
But I know the Mississippi,
and I know the Magdalena bathes.
I know the Almendares,
and I know the San Lorenzo bathes.
I know the Orinoco,
I know they bathe
lands of bitter slime where my voice blooms,

and languid jungles chained by bloody roots.
America, I drink from your cup,
from your tin cup,
great rivers of tears!

Oh, leave me, leave me,
leave me now
... close to the water.

Nicolas Guillen
translated from the Spanish in
Man-Making Words

Langston Hughes traveled to Cuba to meet Guillen, and you can read his Rivers poem below.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

2011-12-21T15:00:00.001-08:00

I've known rivers.
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Langston Hughes

Hear him read the poem
here
and for a jazz version by saxophonist Gary Bartz go

here

Poems from Gulf of Maine Books

2011-12-20T16:26:00.000-08:00

We are beginning a series of poems from Gulf of Maine Books, weekly, maybe more often - with links to websites, audio, video and events listings to support the poems.We hope that you will visit the bookstore as well - Gulf of Maine Books, 134 Maine Street, Brunswick, Maine 04011.
Come check out the poetry selection!
On Dec. 18 we had a publishing party for Pam Burr Smith's new book of poems Heaven Jumping Woman, from Moon Pie Press here.
Here is a poem from that collection:

Heaven Jumping Woman

Every day
she used to try
to jump to Heaven

Heaven jumping woman

Wore many bruises

But didn't stop jumping

She did not heed the weak voices
telling her the jumping was foolish

Ninny songs

She was not calmed
was not tamed

She jumped each day
Lunging for paradise

Her heart
thrumming young animal beats

She sprang for ache and wild joy

Scraping the outer edges of heaven

That was her secret

Heaven Jumping Woman
got close enough

Pam Burr Smith