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.
It is possible that he is not a boy at all?
By this I mean, or meant last night with the noise
keeping me up as it does these days, I'm foggy
The bread and the candle: pale leftovers
from the last milling, the last box of singular suns.
There will be no more questions, no more serving you at sundown.
But this is not the field the soldiers took with so few losses.
Prophets never stop
beside the well sprung from the garden hose. A snake has
Adam and Eve preferred the Tree of Good
and Evil to the fruits of infinity,
says Edward Dahlberg. Gustav Janouch observes
Everything springs from nothing, then is thrust,
face forward, to infinity, declared
Pascal. To get to know the infinite,
What will be the last book
I read? Woolf s finest work,
the only one I shunned?
—Yes, my friend, making my grave rounds. Our mother’s there,
my brother too, and the wife’s niece, buried last year,
only seventeen, leukemia, it seems. And you, sir?
You spoiled something back there at the beginning,
a vowel, a syllable, a word,
and the poem’s inedible now,
You think me evil? I think so of you.
Before you captured me I was the queen
of Goths, and there I was no lady, but
This quill is a wand;
I wave it about