White Egret by Chris Abani—National Poetry Month 2024

Chris Abani.

Here in the marshy Mid-West it is the season of the long leg wading birds pairing, nesting, and stalking shallow water for tadpoles and fingerlings.  Mostly sand hill cranes in profusion but occasionally great blue herons, or most exciting of all, snowy egrets.  On another continent prolific novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright Chris Abani was inspired by a similar avian.   

He grew up in Afikpo, Nigeria and earned a BA in English from Imo State University, Nigeria; an MA in English, Gender, and Culture from Birkbeck College, University of London; and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He is the author of the poetry collections Sanctificum (2010), There Are No Names for Red (2010), Feed Me The Sun: Collected Long Poems (2010), Hands Washing Water (2006), Dog Woman (2004), Daphne’s Lot (2003) and Kalakuta Republic (2001). His many books of fiction include The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), Song For Night (2007), The Virgin of Flames (2007), and Becoming Abigail (2006). Abani is the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the PEN Hemingway Book Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been translated into many languages. He has also published essays in the New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, and elsewhere.

He is currently a professor of English at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Although Abani’s writing is inextricably linked to suffering experienced under Nigeria’s military dictatorship, the author once said of literature, “The art is never about what you write about. The art is about how you write about what you write about. I was a writer before I was in prison.”

An African white egret.

White Egret

 

   The whole earth is filled with the love of God. –Kwame  Dawes

 

A stream in a forest and a boy fishing,

heart aflame, head hush, tasting the world—

lick and pant. The Holy Scripture

is animal not book.

I should know, I have smoked

the soul of God, psalm burning

between fingers on an African afternoon.

And how is it that death can open up

an alleluia from the core of a man?

How easily the profound fritters away in words.

And the simple wisdom of my brother:

What you taste with abandon

even God cannot take from you.

All my life, men with blackened insides

have fought to keep

the flutter of a white egret in my chest

from bursting into flight, into glory.

 

—Chris Abani

White Egret from Smoking the Bible. Copyright © 2022 by Chris Abani.

 

 

 

So This is Nebraska by Ted Kooser—National Poetry Month 2024

This one makes me homesick for those long, hot summer drives across it’s broad, flat expanse,  the pervasive smell of fresh cut alfalfa, grasshoppers splattering on windshields and stinging arms stuck out of the cranked-down windows, watching the wandering line of cottonwoods on the banks of the shallow river.

Born in Iowa in 1939 and a long time Nebraskan, Ted Kooser knows a thing or three about farming and the land.  It has earned him a Pulitzer Prize and two terms as U.S. Poet Laureate.  He is perhaps the greatest bard of the Plains breadbasket since Woody Guthrie.

Ted Kooser in his element.

So This is Nebraska

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop

over the fields, the telephone lines

streaming behind, its billow of dust

full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.

 

On either side, those dear old ladies,

the loosening barns, their little windows

dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs

hide broken tractors under their skirts.

 

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday

afternoon; July. Driving along

with your hand out squeezing the air,

a meadowlark waiting on every post.

 

Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,

top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,

a pickup kicks its fenders off

and settles back to read the clouds.

 

You feel like that; you feel like letting

your tires go flat, like letting the mice

build a nest in your muffler, like being

no more than a truck in the weeds,

 

clucking with chickens or sticky with honey

or holding a skinny old man in your lap

while he watches the road, waiting

for someone to wave to. You feel like

 

waving. You feel like stopping the car

and dancing around on the road. You wave

instead and leave your hand out gliding

larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

 

—Ted Kooser

 

So This Is Nebraska from Sure Signs. Copyright © 1980 by Ted Kooser.

Can’t Get Enough Sandburg—National Poetry Month

Carl Sandburg photo montage by Edward Steichen, 1936.

Whatever current fashion has to say, Carl Sandburg remains one of my three all-time favorite American poets and a personal inspiration.  He always set his own course rejecting the obscurism of fashionable modernism, high-flown rhetoric, or classical allusions in favor of plain, blunt speech.  

Without even dipping into a handful of poems from his first great book, Chicago Poems that have been so widely anthologized that they are familiar to folks who don’t read poetry, here is a sample of his vigorous verse which stand on their merits without further introductions.

Black Horizons

Black horizons, come up.
Black horizons, kiss me.
That is all; so many lies; killing so cheap;
babies so cheap; blood, people so cheap; and
land high, land dear; a speck of the earth
costs; a suck at the tit of Mother Dirt so
clean and strong, it costs; fences, papers,
sheriffs; fences, laws, guns; and so many
stars and so few hours to dream; such a big
song and so little a footing to stand and
sing; take a look; wars to come; red rivers
to cross.
Black horizons, come up.
Black horizons, kiss me.

—Carl Sandburg

                Sandburg as journalist in Chicago circa 1918.

Cahoots

Play it across the table.
What if we steal this city blind?
If they want any thing let ‘em nail it down.

Harness bulls, dicks, front office men,
And the high goats up on the bench,
Ain’t they all in cahoots?
Ain’t it fifty-fifty all down the line,
Petemen, dips, boosters, stick-ups and guns—
        what’s to hinder?

        Go fifty-fifty.
If they nail you call in a mouthpiece.
Fix it, you gazump, you slant-head, fix it.
        Feed ‘em. . . .

Nothin’ ever sticks to my fingers, nah, nah,
        nothin’ like that,
But there ain’t no law we got to wear mittens—
        huh—is there?
Mittens, that’s a good one—mittens!
There oughta be a law everybody wear mittens.

 —Carl Sandburg

 

Masses

 

Among the mountains I wandered and saw blue haze and
     red crag and was amazed;
On the beach where the long push under the endless tide
     maneuvers, I stood silent;
Under the stars on the prairie watching the Dipper slant
     over the horizon’s grass, I was full of thoughts.
Great men, pageants of war and labor, soldiers and workers,
     mothers lifting their children—these all I
     touched, and felt the solemn thrill of them.
And then one day I got a true look at the Poor, millions
     of the Poor, patient and toiling; more patient than
     crags, tides, and stars; innumerable, patient as the
     darkness of night—and all broken, humble ruins of nations.

—Carl Sandburg

They Will Say

 

     Of my city the worst that men will ever say is this:
You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
And the reckless rain; you put them between walls
To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,
To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted
For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.

—Carl Sandburg

Population Drifts 

 

New-mown hay smell and wind of the plain made her
     a woman whose ribs had the power of the hills in
     them and her hands were tough for work and there
     was passion for life in her womb.
She and her man crossed the ocean and the years that
     marked their faces saw them haggling with landlords
     and grocers while six children played on the stones
     and prowled in the garbage cans.
One child coughed its lungs away, two more have adenoids
     and can neither talk nor run like their mother,
     one is in jail, two have jobs in a box factory
And as they fold the pasteboard, they wonder what the
     wishing is and the wistful glory in them that flutters
     faintly when the glimmer of spring comes on
     the air or the green of summer turns brown:
They do not know it is the new-mown hay smell calling
     and the wind of the plain praying for them to come
     back and take hold of life again with tough hands
     and with passion.

—Carl Sandburg

Anna Imroth

Cross the hands over the breast here—so.
Straighten the legs a little more—so.
And call for the wagon to come and take her home.
Her mother will cry some and so will her sisters and
     brothers.
But all of the others got down and they are safe and
     this is the only one of the factory girls who
     wasn’t lucky in making the jump when the fire broke.
It is the hand of God and the lack of fire escapes.

—Carl Sandburg

                           Sandburg walks Chicago streets again, 1967

Fellow Citizens

I drank musty ale at the Illinois Athletic Club with
     the millionaire manufacturer of Green River butter
     one night
And his face had the shining light of an old-time Quaker,
     he spoke of a beautiful daughter, and I knew he had
     a peace and a happiness up his sleeve somewhere.
Then I heard Jim Kirch make a speech to the Advertising
     Association on the trade resources of South America.
And the way he lighted a three-for-a-nickel stogie and
     cocked it at an angle regardless of the manners of
     our best people,
I knew he had a clutch on a real happiness even though
     some of the reporters on his newspaper say he is
     the living double of Jack London’s Sea Wolf.
In the mayor’s office the mayor himself told me he was
     happy though it is a hard job to satisfy all the office-
     seekers and eat all the dinners he is asked to eat.
Down in Gilpin Place, near Hull House, was a man with
     his jaw wrapped for a bad toothache,
And he had it all over the butter millionaire, Jim Kirch
     and the mayor when it came to happiness.
He is a maker of accordions and guitars and not only
     makes them from start to finish, but plays them
     after he makes them.
And he had a guitar of mahogany with a walnut bottom
     he offered for seven dollars and a half if I wanted it,
And another just like it, only smaller, for six dollars,
     though he never mentioned the price till I asked him,
And he stated the price in a sorry way, as though the
     music and the make of an instrument count for a
     million times more than the price in money.
I thought he had a real soul and knew a lot about God.
There was light in his eyes of one who has conquered
     sorrow in so far as sorrow is conquerable or worth
     conquering.
Anyway he is the only Chicago citizen I was jealous of
     that day.
He played a dance they play in some parts of Italy
     when the harvest of grapes is over and the wine
     presses are ready for work.

—Carl Sandburg

Nigger

I am the nigger.
Singer of songs,
Dancer. . .
Softer than fluff of cotton. . .
Harder than dark earth
Roads beaten in the sun
By the bare feet of slaves. . .
Foam of teeth. . . breaking crash of laughter. . .
Red love of the blood of woman,
White love of the tumbling pickaninnies. . .
Lazy love of the banjo thrum. . .
Sweated and driven for the harvest-wage,
Loud laughter with hands like hams,
Fists toughened on the handles,
Smiling the slumber dreams of old jungles,
Crazy as the sun and dew and dripping, heaving life
     of the jungle,
Brooding and muttering with memories of shackles:
               I am the nigger.
               Look at me.
               I am the nigger.

—Carl Sandburg

              Folk singer and collector on his Swedish bell guitar.

Ready to Kill

Ten minutes now I have been looking at this.
I have gone by here before and wondered about it.
This is a bronze memorial of a famous general
Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver
     on him.
I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be
     hauled away to the scrap yard.
I put it straight to you,
After the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory
     hand, the fireman and the teamster,
Have all been remembered with bronze memorials,
Shaping them on the job of getting all of us
Something to eat and something to wear,
When they stack a few silhouettes
          Against the sky
          Here in the park,
And show the real huskies that are doing the work of
     the world, and feeding people instead of butchering them,
Then maybe I will stand here
And look easy at this general of the army holding a flag
     in the air,
And riding like hell on horseback
Ready to kill anybody that gets in his way,
Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men
     all over the sweet new grass of the prairie.

—Carl Sandburg

                Sandburg charmed Marilyn Monroe and vice versa. 

Prayers After a World War

Wandering oversea dreamer,
Hunting and hoarse, Oh daughter and mother,
Oh daughter of ashes and mother of blood,
Child of the hair let down, and tears,
Child of the cross in the south
And the star in the north,
Keeper of Egypt and Russia and France,
Keeper of England and Poland and Spain,
Make us a song for to-morrow.
Make us one new dream, us who forget,
Out of the storm let us have one star.

Struggle, Oh anvils, and help her.
Weave with your wool. Oh winds and skies.
Let your iron and copper help,
Oh dirt of the old dark earth.

Wandering oversea singer,
Singing of ashes and blood,
Child of the scars of fire,
Make us one new dream, us who forget.
Out of the storm let us have one star. 

—Carl Sandburg

Osawatomie

I don’t know how he came,
shambling, dark, and strong.

He stood in the city and told men:
My people are fools, my people are young and strong, my people must learn, my people are terrible workers and fighters.
Always he kept on asking: Where did that blood come from?

They said: You for the fool killer, you for the booby hatch and a necktie party.

They hauled him into jail.
They sneered at him and spit on him,
And he wrecked their jails,
Singing, ‘God damn your jails,’
And when he was most in jail
Crummy among the crazy in the dark
Then he was most of all out of jail
Shambling, dark, and strong,
Always asking: Where did that blood come from?
They laid hands on him
And the fool killers had a laugh
And the necktie party was a go, by God.
They laid hands on him and he was a goner.
They hammered him to pieces and he stood up.
They buried him and he walked out of the grave, by God,
Asking again: Where did that blood come from?

—Carl Sandburg