Poem of the Day
1981
By Asiya Wadud
in a world the orange sun resets
in a world the orange sun resets
After the first death there is a shrinking.
Miracles to fit in a spoon.
The sun rolling crazy and free as the wheel of an old baby buggy.
The fishermen lug in their nets, the take’s
Too small, the natural’s shunted aside
For derricks busy recouping the wastes
This could be Jeffrey Rosen’s car
or a poem about the night.
Only two can be riding in it.
Walking a long time in the fields of the dead
I stopped where the grass
flared thickly, and leaned on a stone
The slippery piglet, clear across the way,
has had my tree cut down.
He rang a man who rang a man who knew
Something isn’t right with me.
We climb in the hot July
car three thousand feet from Laramie
The last words the sea spoke
before it died, the last sigh
of the great wind that blew
Once a woman went into the woods.
The birds were silent. Why? she said.
Thunder, they told her,
Bedecked with scapulars,
heavy with huge crosses
and crying out abroad,
Monna Vanna stares out—disdainfully? no, actually she is very young,
Beautiful, following the style of the time, and that is a certain stylish look; she has on a lot of clothes.
And Benjamin Franklin with a stamp pasted over his features