Category Archives: audio

On Moral Leadership as a Political Dilemma – June Jordan

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(audio from pennsound)
(Text from Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan)

—–

Watergate, 1973

I don’t know why but
I cannot tell a lie

I chopped down the cherry tree
I did
I did that
yessirree
I chopped down the cherry tree

and to tell you the truth
see
that was only in the morning

which left a whole day and part
of an evening (until suppertime)
to continue doing what I like to do
about cherry trees

which is
to chop them down

then pick the cherries
and roll them into a cherry-pie circle
and then
stomp the cherries
stomp them
jumping up and down

hard and heavy
jumping up to stomp them
so the flesh leaks and the juice
runs loose
and then I get to pick at the pits
or else I pick up the cherry pits
(depending on my mood)
and then
I fill my mouth completely full
of cherry pits
and run over to the river
the Potomac
where I spit
the cherry pits
47 to 65 cherry pits spit
into the Potomac
at one spit

and to tell you the truth some more
if I ever see a cherry tree
standing around no matter where
and here let me please be perfectly clear
no matter where
I see a cherry tree
standing around
even if it belongs to a middle-American of
moderate means with a two-car family
that is falling apart in a respectable
civilized
falling apart
mind-your-manners manner

even then
or even if you happen to be
corporate rich or
unspeakably poor of famous
or fashionably thin or comfortably fat
or even as peculiar as misguided as
a Democrat

or even a Democrat

even then
see
if you have a cherry tree
and I see it
I will chop that cherry tree down
stomp the cherries
fill my mount complete with the pits to
spit them into the Potomac
and I don’t know why
it is
that I cannot tell a lie
but that’s the truth

(1973)

Changeling – Rhina P. Espaillat

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Read by Shawna Monson
Audio from Poetry Foundation

I want to tell myself she is not you,
this sullen woman wearing Mama’s eyes
all wrong, whose every gesture rings untrue
and yet familiar. In your harsh disguise
I sometimes need to find you, sometimes fear
I will, if I look closely into her.
I want to tell myself you are not here,
trapped in this parody of what you were,
but love was never safe: it lives on danger,
finds what can’t be found by any other
power on Earth or over it. This stranger
is you, is all the you there is, my mother
whose gentler face is gone beyond recall,
and I must love you so, or not at all.

(1991)

Wanting to Die – Anne Sexton

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(source: Open Culture)

Since you asked me most days I cannot remember
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by the voyage.
Then almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well that grass blades you mentioned,
The furniture you have placed under the sun.

But Suicides have specail launguage.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools,
They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself,
Have possession of the enmy, eaten the enmy,
Have taken on his craft, his music.

In this way, hear thoughtful
Warmer than oil or water
I have rested, drooling at the mouthhole.

I do not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born they don’t always die,
But dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet
That even children would look on and smile.

To Trust all that life under your tongue!
That, all by itself, becomes a passion
Death’s a sad bone; bruised, you’d say

And yet after she waits for me. Year after Year.
To so delicately undo an old wound,
To empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
Raging at the fruit, a pumped up moon,
Leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

Leaving the page of the book carelessly open
Something unsaid, the phone off the hook
And the love, whatever it was, an infection.

(1967)

O were my Love yon Lilack fair – Robert Burns

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O were my Love yon Lilack fair,
Wi’ purple blossoms to the Spring;
And I, a bird to shelter there,
When wearied on my little wing.

How I wad mourn, when it was torn
By Autumn wild, and Winter rude!
But I was sing on wanton wing,
When youthfu’ May its bloom renew’d.

[O gin my love were yon red rose,
That grows upon the castle wa’!
And I mysel’ a drap o’ dew,
Into her bonnie breast to fa’!

Oh, there beyond expression blesst
I’d feast on beauty a’ the night;
Seal’d on her silk-saft faulds to rest,
Till fley’d awa by Phebus’ light!]

(1793)

Digging – Seamus Heaney

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(audio from mp3olimp)
(text from poetry foundation)

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

(1966)