Best+Poem+Work

Found poem exercise, 8/26, post poems here! Page 2 for poem work (Friday, 8/26) Page 3 for poem work (Friday, 8/26)

Page 1 for Sept 2nd poems Page 2 for Sept 2nd poems media type="custom" key="10692814" Friday Haiku - Oct. 28

Three Days of Forest, a River, Free

The dogs have nothing better to do than bark; duty's whistle slings a bright cord around their throats. I'll stand here all night if need be, no more real than a tree when no moon shines.

The terror of waking is a trust drawn out unbearably until nothing, not even love, makes it easier, and yet I love this life:

three days of forest, the mute riot of leaves.

Who can point out a smell but a dog? The way is free to the river. Tell me, Lord, how it feels to burst out like a rose.

Blood rises in my head-- I'm there. Faint tongue, dry fear, I think I lost you to the dogs, so far off now they're no more than a chain of bells ringing darkly, underground.

Rita Dove, Selected Poems

The Day I Saw Barack Obama Reading Derek Walcott's Collected Poems by Yusef Komunyakaa

Was he looking for St. Lucia's light

to touch his face those first days

in the official November snow & sleet

falling on the granite pose of Lincoln?

If he were searching for property lines

drawn in the blood, or for a hint

of resolve crisscrossing a border,

maybe he'd find clues in the taste of breadfruit.

I could see him stopped there squinting

in crooked light, the haze of Wall Street

touching clouds of double consciousness,

an eye etched into a sign borrowed from Egypt.

If he's looking for tips on basketball,

how to rise up & guard the hoop,

he may glean a few theories about war

but they aren't in The Star-Apple Kingdom.

If he wants to finally master himself,

searching for clues to govern seagulls

in salty air, he'll find henchmen busy with locks

& chains in a ghost schooner's nocturnal calm.

He's reading someone who won't speak

of milk & honey, but of looking ahead

beyond pillars of salt raised in a dream

where fat bulbs split open the earth.

The spine of the manifest was broken,

leaking deeds, songs & testaments.

Justice stood in the shoes of mercy,

& doubt was bandaged up & put to bed.

Now, he looks as if he wants to eat words,

their sweet, intoxicating flavor. Banana leaf

& animal, being & nonbeing. In fact,

craving wisdom, he bites into memory.

The President of the United States of America

thumbs the pages slowly, moving from reverie

to reverie, learning why one envies the octopus

for its ink, how a man's skin becomes the final page.