Love Song for the Plastic Bag by Karen Finneyfrock
When they peak of you, their sandpaper lips
scraping together, they use the phrase
by-product as if it were a racial slur.
“You are a by product of petroleum,” they say,
like they would hunt down your kind and recycle you.
“But I only ever wanted to carry your groceries,”
you insist, as your spine slits and you spill the eggs
all over the parking lot. “I never asked you to go to war over me.”
You were born slick and new, so thin we could read
books through your handles but still thick enough
to suffocate a baby,
strong like that.
Your were born to the duty of transportation,
a soprano in the Heavenly Choir of Merchandise,
without you, we be a nation of people making
multiple trips to the car.
To re-use means we will use again, to line the trash can
in the bathroom, or the bottom of the rabbit’s cage.
If you are lucky, you will carry one sandwich form home to work.
If you are chosen, you will cradle our muddy boots like a mother.
Brazenly, some of you will escape.
I have seen you floating down the highway like hitch hikers,
dangling your feet from tree branches and telephone wires,
flattening yourself, arms stretched against chain link, letting
the breeze fill you like a sail, like a parachute,
wishing a wind would come along strong enough to blow you up
and out of these cities, back to where you came from,
to the oil fields of your homeland,
which you can only pray
are not burning.
The Facebook Sonnet
Sherman Alexie
Welcome to the endless high-school
Reunion. Welcome to past friends
And lovers, however kind or cruel.
Let’s undervalue and unmend
The present. Why can’t we pretend
Every stage of life is the same?
Let’s exhume, resume, and extend
Childhood. Let’s play all the games
That occupy the young. Let fame
And shame intertwine. Let one’s search
For God become public domain.
Let church.com become our church
Let’s sign up, sign in, and confess
Here at the altar of loneliness.
Magnitudes
By Howard Nermerov
Earth's wrath at our assaults is slow to come
But relentless when it does. It has to do
With catastrophic change, and with the limit
At which one order more of magnitude
Will bring us to a qualitative change
And disasters drastically different
From those we daily have to know about.
As with the speed of light, where speed itself
Becomes a limit and an absolute;
As with the splitting of the atom
And a little later of the nucleus;
As with the millions rising into billions -The piker's kind in terms of money, yes,
But a million square in terms of time and space
As the universe grew vast while the earth
Our habitat diminished to the size
Of a billiard ball, both relative
To the cosmos and to the numbers of ourselves,
The doubling numbers, the earth could accommodate.
We stand now in the place and limit of time
Where hardest knowledge is turning into dream,
And nightmares still confined in sleeping dark
Seem on the point of bringing into day
The sweating panic that starts the sleeper up.
One or another nightmare may come true,
And what to do then? What in the world to do?
The Meteor’s Monologue by Alvin Lau
Dear dinosaurs: this morning, you will live
As you always have: your bellies full
of carnivore dilemmas; your pumping blood
slick as oil you will eventually become,
your graceful necks never designed to look up.
I am sorry I have to crush you. As sorry
as a meteor can be, though giant balls
of ice hurtling through the infinite universe
are not known for their great ability to empathize.
Guilt will fill a single basin along my dimpled face
as I plummet into North America, flattening
your families into mesozoic jelly, a giant reset
button in the video game of existence. At least
humans will treasure your bones, give you names
your tiny brains could never imagine. Gawk
at your old glory, faded under sand.
Dover Beach
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.