Poetry Paper Assignment

“Stamp Collecting”

Cathy Song

The poorest countries

have the prettiest stamps

as if impracticality were a major export

shipped with the bananas, t-shirts and coconuts.

Take Tonga, where the tourists, 5

expecting a dramatic waterfall replete with birdcalls,

are taken to see the island’s peculiar mystery:

hanging bats with collapsible wings

like black umbrellas swing upside down from fruit trees.

The Tongan stamp is a fruit. 10

The banana stamp is scalloped like a butter-varnished seashell.

The pineapple resembles a volcano, a spout of green on top,

and the papaya, a tarnished goat skull.

They look impressive,

these stamps of countries without a thing to sell 15

except for what is scraped, uprooted and hulled

from their mule-scratched hills.

They believe in postcards,

in portraits of progress: the new dam;

a team of young native doctors 20

wearing stethoscopes like exotic ornaments;

the recently constructed “Facultad de Medicina,”

a building as lack-lustre as an American motel.

The stamps of others are predictable.

Lucky is the country that possesses indigenous beauty. 25

Say a tiger or a queen.

The Japanese can display to the world

their blossoms: a spray of pink on green.

Like pollen, they drift, airborne.

But pity the country that is bleak and stark. 30

Beauty and whimsy are discouraged as indiscreet.

Unbreakable as their climate, a monument of ice,

they issue serious statements, commemorating

factories, tramways and aeroplanes;

athletes marbled into statues. 35

They turn their noses upon the world, these countries,

and offer this: an unrelenting procession

of a grim, historic profile.

https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/missouri_review/v011/11.2.song.pdf

“Bilingual Sestina” Julia Alvarez

Some things I have to say aren't getting said

in this snowy, blonde, blue-eyed, gum chewing English,

dawn's early light sifting through the persianas closed

the night before by dark-skinned girls whose words

evoke cama, aposento, suenos in nombres 5

from that first word I can't translate from Spanish.

Gladys, Rosario, Altagracia--the sounds of Spanish

wash over me like warm island waters as I say

your soothing names: a child again learning the nombres

of things you point to in the world before English 10

turned sol, tierra, cielo, luna to vocabulary words--

sun, earth, sky, moon--language closed

like the touch-sensitive morivivir. whose leaves closed

when we kids poked them, astonished. Even Spanish

failed us when we realized how frail a word 15

is when faced with the thing it names. How saying

its name won't always summon up in Spanish or English

the full blown genii from the bottled nombre.

Gladys, I summon you back with your given nombre

to open up again the house of slatted windows closed 20

since childhood, where palabras left behind for English

stand dusty and awkward in neglected Spanish.

Rosario, muse of el patio, sing in me and through me say

that world again, begin first with those first words

you put in my mouth as you pointed to the world-- 25

not Adam, not God, but a country girl numbering

the stars, the blades of grass, warming the sun by saying

el sol as the dawn's light fell through the closed

persianas from the gardens where you sang in Spanish,

Esta son las mananitas, and listening, in bed, no English 30

yet in my head to confuse me with translations, no English

doubling the world with synonyms, no dizzying array of words,

--the world was simple and intact in Spanish

awash with colores, luz, suenos, as if the nombres

were the outer skin of things, as if words were so close 35

to the world one left a mist of breath on things by saying

their names, an intimacy I now yearn for in English--

words so close to what I meant that I almost hear my Spanish

blood beating, beating inside what I say en ingles.

http://intersession2005.tripod.com/Sestina.html

"The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica"

Judith Ortiz Cofer

Presiding over a formica counter, plastic Mother and Child magnetized to the top of an ancient register, the heady mix of smells from the open bins of dried codfish, the green plantains 5 hanging in stalks like votive offerings, she is the Patroness of Exiles, a woman of no-age who was never pretty, who spends her days selling canned memories while listening to the Puerto Ricans complain 10 that it would be cheaper to fly to San Juan than to buy a pound of Bustelo coffee here, and to Cubans perfecting their speech of a "glorious return" to Havana--where no one has been allowed to die and nothing to change until then; 15 to Mexicans who pass through, talking lyrically of  dólares to be made in El Norte--

all wanting the comfort of spoken Spanish, to gaze upon the family portrait of her plain wide face, her ample bosom 20 resting on her plump arms, her look of maternal interest as they speak to her and each other of their dreams and their disillusions-- how she smiles understanding, when they walk down the narrow aisles of her store 25 reading the labels of packages aloud, as if they were the names of lost lovers;  Suspiros, Merengues, the stale candy of everyone's childhood.

She spends her days slicing  jamón y queso and wrapping it in wax paper 30 tied with string: plain ham and cheese that would cost less at the A&P, but it would not satisfy the hunger of the fragile old man lost in the folds of his winter coat, who brings her lists of items that he reads to her like poetry, or the others, 35 whose needs she must divine, conjuring up products from places that now exist only in their hearts-- closed ports she must trade with.

The Voices of Latino Culture: Readings from Spain, Latin America, and the United States, ed. Daniel S. Whitaker (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1996), 265-67.

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/romance/spanish/219/13eeuu/cofer.html

“Planting a Sequoia”

Dana Gioia (author is MALE)

All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard, Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil. Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific, And the sky above us stayed the dull gray Of an old year coming to an end. 5

In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son’s birth– An olive or a fig tree–a sign that the earth has one more life to bear. I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father’s orchard, A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs, A promise of new fruit in other autumns. 10

But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant, Defying the practical custom of our fathers, Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord, All that remains above earth of a first-born son, A few stray atoms brought back to the elements. 15

We will give you what we can–our labor and our soil, Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail, Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees. We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light, A slender shoot against the sunset. 20

And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead, Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down, His mother’s beauty ashes in the air, I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you, Silently keeping the secret of your birth. 25

from  The Gods of Winter © 1991

http://www.danagioia.net/poems/sequoia.htm

“Abandoned Farmhouse”

Ted Kooser

He was a big man, says the size of his shoes

on a pile of broken dishes by the house;

a tall man too, says the length of the bed

in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,

says the Bible with a broken back 5

on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;

but not a man for farming, say the fields

cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.

A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall

papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves 10

covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,

says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.

Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves

and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.

And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames. 15

It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.

Something went wrong, says the empty house

in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields

say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars

in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste. 20

And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard

like branches after a storm--a rubber cow,

a rusty tractor with a broken plow,

a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.

from  Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems  Reprinted by permission of U of Pittsburgh P.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/237648