Tag: homeless

Three Poems by Bonnie Naradzay

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Bede’s Sparrow

Had I not met the souls who gather at Miriam’s Kitchen
each morning for a meal, I could not have shared poems
that sway like sensate trees, that are not just standing there
stripped of leaves, nor could I have heard Carl, who sleeps
near the M Street Bridge, say he likes how the shadows
of birds’ wings pass over his heart. I would not have seen
the robin lying dead on the sidewalk. Did it fall from the sky,
unlike the geese that glide overhead trailing their legs in flight,
or the starlings appearing to wait in the wings only to vanish
from sight? But since then I have lifted my eyes to the rafters
and seen Bede’s sparrow fly through the church basement
where we linger before disappearing into the darkening light.

*

Poetry Salon in the Homeless Day Shelter

Today we read “Gin River,” a poem by Tyree Daye.
In it, Bill Broonzy is singing “When I Been Drinking,”
and people dance in the river, down in rural Carolina.

We end with James Wright’s persona poem, “Saint Judas.”
Now it’s time to write, and Ibrahim, in the voice of Moses,
dares the Pharaoh to make the sun go from west to east.

Chuck wears the chef’s jacket he found in a bag of donations.
On the pocket, stitched in blue cursive: “Ramon.”
It’s his nom de plume. Oh, Ramon – where are you now?

*

Gilgamesh at the Retirement Center

We conclude the annual poetry reading ritual for the residents,
and I delight in the bacon-wrapped scallops impaled on toothpicks.
Ecstatic to find two kinds of wine, I am feeling satisfied.

At some point during dinner, we talk about what we’re reading.
When I say I’m enjoying the epic of Gilgamesh, Celia asks me
what that ancient tale is all about. I launch into the highlights,

including the grand Sumerian city of Uruk, its meaningful bricks,
the faithful friend Enkido, his tragic death, the subsequent quest
for immortality, how Gilgamesh fails his test by falling asleep

instead of staying awake for a week and loses out on eternal life
(sleeping again) when a snake eats the fabled plant and sheds its skin.
Despite all this, Celia thinks I mean the Hindu elephant god, Ganesh.

For a moment I forget who I am, and where. Then I think of Odysseus,
asleep in the boat to Ithaka; Athena disguised the island with mist.
So I change the subject to Odysseus, that time he rises out of the sea

from his long swim, still clutching the rock Calypso gave him,
and he sees in the rock a mist parting to show the years ahead. His bed.
But the wine is wearing off. I’ll go, now, to sleep like Gilgamesh.

*

Bonnie Naradzay leads weekly poetry “salons” at day shelters for homeless people and at a retirement center, all in Washington DC. Twice nominated for a Pushcart prize, her poems have appeared in AGNI, New Letters, RHINO, Kenyon Review, Tampa Review, EPOCH, Split This Rock, Dappled Things, and other sites. In 2010 she won the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize – a month’s stay in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter, Mary. While there, Bonnie enjoyed having tea with Mary, hiking in the Dolomites, and reading early versions of the Pisan Cantos. Her manuscript , “Invited to the Feast,” will be published by Slant Books.

Haiku in the Day Shelter for the Homeless by Bonnie Naradzay

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Haiku in the Day Shelter for the Homeless

This morning we read haikus.
Not just Basho, whose name
means “plantain tree,” and Issa,
whose name means “cup of tea,”
but also Richard Wright,
born in Mississippi, who later moved
to France and wrote thousands
of haikus in his final years.
When I said Wright followed
the strict syllable count,
Leon asked, “What are syllables?”
I began to count the sounds
on my fingers: The crow flew so fast/
that he left his lonely caw
Two people liked this one by Issa –
“Once in the box
every one of them is equal –
the chess pieces.”
Eugenia wrote about three women,
regulars here, who died from drugs
in the past few weeks.
“Now in a box,” she wrote,
naming each of them in her poem.
Alessandro, responding to Basho,
wrote about constellations of stars.
And for the first time this year
Robert, tattooed up and down his arms,
was awake and sublimely alert.
He liked Issa’s The distant mountains/
are reflected in the eye/of the dragonfly.
In his eyes I saw myself reflected too,
and over the lonely fields, the crow.

*

Bonnie Naradzay’s poems have appeared in New Letters, AGNI, EPOCH, RHINO, American Journal of Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, Florida Review Online, Tampa Review, Tar River Review, The Guardian, and others. For years, she has led poetry salons at a homeless day shelter and a retirement center in Washington, DC.

Three Poems by James Harms

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Rail Trail

South of town the asphalt trail
turns to limestone, the woods
thicken on each side, the river
slows. A few miles further
the path passes beneath
the interstate far overhead,
which is itself a river
in the sky rushing two-
ways at once, to Pittsburgh
or Charleston, Marianna or
Jane Lew. The woods are
quiet, the river quiet, the day
thrumming like a low engine
or a rumor you can outwalk
if you walk and walk, then walk
a little more. Until the bend
below the marina breaks
the water enough for it
to sing along the bank,
the loose limestone raking
through wet weeds and reeds,
singing. Apology accepted,
you think turning around,
walking now with the river
on your left, the lies miles
ahead, back in town. Waiting.
Taking off their shoes.

*

As If (The Fading Northern Currents)

“A light-year is a distance, not
an interval of time,” he said.
“And a lie is who you are.”
There was a sweetness, anyway,
to his voice as we walked the shore.
“It’s not as though the kelp gives up,”
he said, “though it looks that way,
the beach for miles heaped with dead
strands, the slick bladders like knots
in a green rope, knots of air that float,
that keep the kelp rising in the rising seas,
a swaying forest with blades of leaves
like narrow palms turned toward the sun
until the sun raises the water’s temperature
just a knot or two above 70 degrees.
And that’s all it takes. The kelp’s roots
give way at the holdfast and gently release
from the deep rocks they’ve woven around
like the hands of a very old couple
simply slipping loose of one another
as the two of them sit together watching
the evening air fill with fireflies, their
hands suddenly grazing the grass instead of
holding.” He said all this through a smile,
as if the fading northern currents that once
kept the waters cool were like a history
worn through at the knees, the fabric
giving way to the force of a man dropping
into prayer, the beach a wreckage of wrack
and weeds and mounds of macrocystis pyrifera.
“You know,” he said, pointing at the pile
of dead kelp, “it can grow two feet a day.”
He smiled again, he was crying. “A lie,”
he said. “Your life. Mine.”

*

Steve

The wizened derelict
(the filthy old wrinkly guy)
sang shirtless on the trestle,

his voice like a feather falling in a canyon,

until he fell in the canyon.

He didn’t fall in the canyon.

He sat down in the dirt
beside the tracks
and began to cry.

The thin morning light
stayed six feet away,
scraped a hole through yellow leaves.

Far below, the sound
of water rubbing softly over pebbles

seemed sordid, insincere.

It sounded like rushing water.

The derelict called himself Steve,
“though my birth name
is a travesty, a shame I won’t repeat.”

He’d stopped crying.
He held a dead squirrel by the tail.

He said he preferred
homeless to derelict,
when I asked.

But I didn’t ask.
I watched and listened from a distance.

I heard everything he said
to that squirrel.
Or to himself.

Or I guess to me.
I mean I wasn’t hiding or anything.

*

James Harms is the author of ten books including, most recently, ROWING WITH WINGS (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2017).