There are no handles upon a language
Whereby men take hold of it
And mark it with signs for its remembrance.
It is a river, this language,
Once in a thousand years
Breaking a new course
Changing its way to the ocean.
It is mountain effluvia
Moving to valleys
And from nation to nation
Crossing borders and mixing.
Languages die like rivers.
Words wrapped round your tongue today
And broken to shape of thought
Between your teeth and lips speaking
Now and today
Shall be faded hieroglyphics
Ten thousand years from now.
Sing—and singing—remember
Your song dies and changes
And is not here to-morrow
Any more than the wind
Blowing ten thousand years ago. This poem is in the public domain.
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's
Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
This poem is in the public domain.
Box cars run by a mile long.
And I wonder what they say to each other
When they stop a mile long on a sidetrack.
Maybe their chatter goes:
I came from Fargo with a load of wheat up to the danger line.
I came from Omaha with a load of shorthorns and they
splintered my boards.
I came from Detroit heavy with a load of flivvers.
I carried apples from the Hood river last year and this year
bunches of bananas from Florida; they look for me with
watermelons from Mississippi next year.
Hammers and shovels of work gangs sleep in shop corners
when the dark stars come on the sky and the night watchmen
walk and look.
Then the hammer heads talk to the handles,
then the scoops of the shovels talk,
how the day’s work nicked and trimmed them,
how they swung and lifted all day,
how the hands of the work gangs smelled of hope.
In the night of the dark stars
when the curve of the sky is a work gang handle,
in the night on the mile long sidetracks,
in the night where the hammers and shovels sleep in corners,
the night watchmen stuff their pipes with dreams—
and sometimes they doze and don’t care for nothin’,
and sometimes they search their heads for meanings, stories,
stars.
The stuff of it runs like this:
A long way we come; a long way to go; long rests and long deep
sniffs for our lungs on the way.
Sleep is a belonging of all; even if all songs are old songs and
the singing heart is snuffed out like a switchman’s lantern
with the oil gone, even if we forget our names and houses in
the finish, the secret of sleep is left us, sleep belongs to all,
sleep is the first and last and best of all.
People singing; people with song mouths connecting with song
hearts; people who must sing or die; people whose song
hearts break if there is no song mouth; these are my people.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 7, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
Aurora Americana
The most interesting thing about emptiness is that it is preceded by fullness. —Joseph Brodsky
1.
She leaves me outside among yellowing
aspens. Hemlock branches
discarded dying on this iced clod.
Corms in the ground whiten waiting for another snow.
Fissured face the skin of me fissured.
The leather of a carriage no longer
fit to front a manor with sequoia moldings
or doors carved in California shipped
to Louisiana to shut in that house.
Made for another girl now dead. Her mother
made me out of that tatty carriage-seat leather.
Made me as she evoked her mother’s
country dissolved in seawater.
I’m the leavings of seawater left cold.
Forgotten in cold.
Forgotten in this northern place.
They have forgotten what I have not.
The dark is without forgetting.
That woman filled me with pink
cotton that annual spell when
cotton explodes that gaudy hue.
I’m holding time in the dark waiting
for the dappling of sky.
I hear them.
I know them.
They’ll do the thing that wrecks.
They’re unworthy of themselves.
This knowledge wrecks.
But a jester?
That jester?
His brashness a theory of this land.
A quality encouraged for navigation.
I’m not protected.
Cold unprotected at night.
Solitary at night inducing
more creasing more
staining as they stain themselves as
they beg for regression. As
they beg for the nineteenth
century the century I was made.
Hold the clock’s clicking.
Turn it back make-make America.
She leaves me to see this night.
To see blue televisions through windows.
To hear raucous commentary.
She leaves me to see this night to
freeze among the frozen.
There’s yellow in the trees tonight.
The girl who leaves me wears
a yellow dress.
Her boots are white.
2.
I voted for snow frost crystals.
I see them falling.
I’ve been falling into myself.
I see myself with myself.
I hold my own hand as I walk through snow.
I walk with my twin.
I wish for a country of twins.
Our slacks are patterned with stars.
We are partisans.
We believe in the belief.
There is only one belief.
There is only one nation.
We are the founders of the nation.
Our blood for this nation.
Our blood in this nation is the nation.
We see it in sunset.
All that we’ve given is sunset.
We aspire to what the billionaire has built.
The lavishness of pink marble
wild in our sleep.
We want what he has.
We believe what he has is his.
We believe his dream is American.
We believe his reality can be ours.
We believe in oligarchy ours.
We’re waiting for the chalice that goddess’s
slow pouring of shine.
But that frozen doll frightens me.
I’m walking away but I keep
craning toward it.
Its face of creature its darkness
on that which is frozen.
I leave it there.
They’re left. They’re not me.
We voted for snow its perpetual system.
Radically radical we voted.
3.
He wanted me away.
I want him away from
that public house.
In his dream I’m the boy
locked in steel.
There’s water in his dream.
I sank.
He saw my hands reaching
from the steel until they didn’t.
I was a boy.
We were boys.
He wanted to kill the boy.
He wanted the boy dead
in steel quickly
a man in steel.
We became men in steel.
In the paper he bought our
capture shouted execution.
Years in steel.
The sky’s steel here.
It’s cold here.
My daughter is here.
I want her to play.
Be a good girl play.
I want him away from
that public house.
How’s he a choice?
Up in Michigan near Lake
Superior waiting for spirals funnels
of jade ginger light.
This dawn is near but which dawn?
Which will be created?
So cold here in this north.
The north couldn’t protect.
When has it ever protected?
When has this place protected me?
But I’m trying to protect my
north my daughter
in winter-white boots.
The breeze isn’t silent.
I want him away from
that public house.
I stare skyward yet I see
the glare of televisions.
My daughter’s fingers are cold.
4.
My father is afraid
but he doesn’t say it.
I came in from playing to see
him to be around him.
His hands are colder than snow.
His hands are chapped.
Why are your hands so cold?
The past was cold. I don’t want
the past to permit what may come.
What?
He embraces me. The world
is around me.
Snow strange I’m waiting
for something I don’t understand.
Will you wait for me?
I’m here forever here around.
He’s angry at the television.
The blue of the television
is what’s inside him.
If I could open him an abrupt
door I could open step into
the blue step into to brightness
burning my eyes.
I’m quickly blind
within the blue of my father.
He mentions jester.
He mentions clown.
He mentions criminal.
He mentions killer.
Where’s your doll?
I’ve left her without knowing.
Left her freezing left her among snow
without protection.
I have to find her.
Go find her.
Bring her inside.
My coat like skin fake fur on skin.
I’m running back to save
the one I forgot.
How could I forget her?
She has been forgotten before
but I didn’t want to forget.
Everything tall green
heavy with whiteness.
My father’s upset even
when there are auroras
above him above me above
this country.
5.
It isn’t dawn when she returns.
But I thought if there would
be a return it would happen at dawn
when America shows what she
hides what she whispers what
she denies in conversation what
she calls crazy in public.
I know this place.
I know its makers.
Those with soft
hands rough always
rough who smile
yet hide tundras.
Within them tundras with paths
lined with wet spikes.
Something dead on the spikes.
Something dying on the spikes.
She’s kissing me.
I’m being carried kissed
among firs snow blowing.
They will do it.
They have done it before.
Regression angry at the lie
they can’t keep from questioning.
I’m loved by a little girl
who knows nothing of me.
I want her father to scream.
If he doesn’t he may die early.
He may leave his daughter early.
So many men leave their daughters early.
Don’t be shocked.
Perhaps you’ve left your daughter?
Fissured face the skin of me fissured.
Does she know what these fissures hold?
Does she know what she holds?
Does she know what
her father’s holding?
What he doesn’t say
when he sees her when
he sees the jester?
His hands are over his ears?
She sees him on the porch
as if holding his head together.
It could erupt.
It could combust St. Helens.
Dust fire smoke like
that mountain.
We’re all combustible.
But first implosion.
The birches within us falling.
Not the leaves in autumn
but the trees themselves falling.
Paper bark mangled.
The hidden thump that
crash beneath ivory cages skin.
This isn’t greatness.
This isn’t noble.
A terrible enactment in
the dark the light the cold.
She drops me on the porch
to hold her father’s face.
Hold me.
Hold.
Hold.
Hold.
Hold.
6.
I’m cold here.
Waiting as blue hits my face.
I’ve made a fire.
Crackle.
Crackle.
My son burns marshmallows.
They’re gooey on graham
crackers. Chocolate melts
on sweet sandwiches.
The auroras are rare.
I want my son to see the auroras that
which is possible in sky.
This was my place as a boy.
This was where my parents took
me to say this is ours.
This piece of it is ours.
We feed ducks bread.
But what bread feeds us now?
There’s poison in the bread.
We’re losing.
So much poison poison
to survive but we
are surviving without ourselves.
Save us.
Save us with your wealth.
Save us with the way you make wealth.
Fire what’s killing us. Burn the ground.
Wall us in. We are being killed.
They are killing us.
Aurora.
Aurora my love I’m
waiting for Aurora.
When you come will we be saved?
Auroras in that sky swirl in the cold.
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of….
7.
This is reality?
This is a reality star?
His reality isn’t our
reality but they believe it can be.
Their reality is fake.
Their false reality exists in their minds.
They are convinced of their reality.
Some realities are based in trickery.
They want to change a false reality.
But how can they change a reality that doesn’t exist
other than to change the falseness of that reality
into what’s actual? Oh he changed my reality that
reality of innocence to criminal.
My reality became prison.
His fake reality made my reality my
reality of childhood to manhood fugacious.
My reality of custody trial conviction
was his the country’s made reality.
The reality is it is almost dawn.
The reality is my daughter is sleeping.
The reality is this place is now more dangerous for her.
The reality is auroras are stunning.
I’m staring at the reality of stunning auroras.
I’m in a reality stunned.
8.
Dawn gleams.
In my dream my father is content.
He’s unworried.
He’s lifting me into cloying light.
I’m wearing a dress of light he has made.
So many are waving at us.
We’re waving back.
A chalice of light was poured
into the sky.
Snow’s falling.
Snow the color of light is falling
but we aren’t cold.
From Aurora Americana (Princeton University Press, 2023) by Myronn Hardy. Copyright © 2023 by Myronn Hardy. Used with the permission of the publisher.
Democracy Americana
Forgive us for bells of which we listened those we didn’t.
Forgive us for ourselves as ourselves.
Forgive us for causes effects.
Forgive us for loving the thing we say we don’t.
Forgive us for unloving the thing we say we do.
Forgive us for seeing not seeing.
Forgive us for hoping for the thing we couldn’t say.
Forgive us for whispers.
Forgive us for disbelief.
Forgive us for shock.
Forgive us for hiding everything.
Forgive us for imprudence.
Forgive us for ferocity.
Forgive us for obliteration.
Forgive us for slyness.
Forgive us for getting what we want.
We are what we want.
From Aurora Americana (Princeton University Press, 2023) by Myronn Hardy. Copyright © 2023 by Myronn Hardy. Used with the permission of the publisher.
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