Poem of the Day
Yellow Striped Pajamas
By Shamsher Bahadur Singh
walking silently on his paws, he emerges from the semidarkness and disappears into it.
walking silently on his paws, he emerges from the semidarkness and disappears into it.
The cars are yellow and green and black.
Cement is gray. My car quit
three years ago. I junked it.
He raised his hand above his head.
His hair was a surface of gray,
his hand a semaphore.
Don’t take me home, at least not yet;
Let’s have another drink, and sit
and talk—I want to be your woman,
I ask you to stay.
Here in my head I ask.
You don’t know I’m asking,
I’m trying to tell you something
important to me
and you walk out the door,
He believes, he believes, the gray-eyed one
who puts your shards together.
(Cleft saucers are mended in Vitebsk.)
Because I want to watch them do what I would like to do
if I were free, and because it is late and I am tired
and out for what I say is my nightly walk, I stop
For peace and peace and peace the prayers ascend
From tongues in darkness sung to tongues in light
In death
If we are truly free and live in a free country,
When shall I be without this heaviness of mind?
When shall I have peace? Peace this way and peace that way?
When I wake, the sheep are eating apple peels just outside the screen, the trees are heavy, soaked, and hushed, the sun just rising. All seems calm, and yet somewhere inside I am not calm. We live in wooden buildings made of two by fours, making the landscape nervous for a hundred miles.