Twenty-One Love Poems, VI, by Adrienne Rich

Prelude in B minor, arranged for piano by Alexander Siloti
from Prelude in E minor BWV 855a by J. S. Bach
with Emil Gilels

Your small hands, precisely equal to my own -
only the thumb is larger, longer - in these hands
I could trust the world, or in many hands like these,
handling power-tools or steering-wheel
or touching a human face...such hands could turn
the unborn child rightways in the birth canal
or pilot the exploratory rescue-ship
through icebergs, or piece together
the fine, needle-like shreds of a great krater-cup
bearing on its sides
fingers of ecstatic women striding
to the sibyl's den or the Eleusinian cave -
such hands might carry out an unavoidable violence
with such restraint, with such a grasp
of the range and limits of violence
that violence ever after would be obsolete.


in The Fact of a Door Frame: Poems Selected and New, 1950-84, WW Norton & Co (1985)

Shoulders, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Robert Schumann - Romance, Op. 28, No. 2, with Arthur Rubinstein

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is sleeping on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world's most sensitive cargo
but he's not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy's dream
deep inside him.

We're not going to be able
to live in this world
if we're not willing to do what he's doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.


from Reflections, Spring 2009, Yale Divinity School

Hum, by Ann Lauterbach

Giacomo Puccini - "Senza Mamma" from Suor Angelica, with Maria Callas

The days are beautiful
The days are beautiful.

I know what days are.
The other is weather.

I know what weather is.
The days are beautiful.

Things are incidental.
Someone is weeping.

I weep for the incidental.
The days are beautiful.

Where is tomorrow?
Everyone will weep.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
The days are beautiful.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
Today is weather.

The sound of the weather
Is everyone weeping.

Everyone is incidental.
Everyone weeps.

The tears of today
Will put out tomorrow.

The rain is ashes.
The days are beautiful.

The rain falls down.
The sound is falling.

The sky is a cloud.
The days are beautiful.

The sky is dust.
The weather is yesterday.

The weather is yesterday.
The sound is weeping.

What is this dust?
The weather is nothing.

The days are beautiful.
The towers are yesterday.

The towers are incidental.
What are these ashes?

Here is the hate
That does not travel.

Here is the robe
That smells of the night

Here are the words
Retired to their books

Here are the stones
Loosed from their settings

Here is the bridge
Over the water

Here is the place
Where the sun came up

Here is a season
Dry in the fireplace.

Here are the ashes.
The days are beautiful.


from poets.org

Dark Prophecy: I Sing Of Shine, by Etheridge Knight

Johann Sebastian Bach - Concerto for Two Violins,
with Taro Hakase & Iwao Furusawa

And, yeah brothers
while white America sings about the unsinkable molly brown
(who was hustling the titanic
when it went down)
I sing to thee of Shine
the stoker who was hip enough to flee the fucking ship
and let the white folks drown
with screams on their lips
(jumped his black ass into the dark sea, Shine did,
broke free from the straining steel).
Yeah, I sing to thee of Shine
and how the millionaire banker stood on the deck
and pulled from his pockets a million dollar check
saying Shine Shine save poor me
and I'll give you all the money a black boy needs—
how Shine looked at the money and then at the sea
and said jump in muthafucka and swim like me—
and Shine swam on—Shine swam on—
and how the banker's daughter ran naked on the deck
with her pink tits trembling and her pants roun her neck
screaming Shine Shine save poor me
and I'll give you all the pussy a black boy needs—
how Shine said now pussy is good and that's no jive
but you got to swim not fuck to stay alive—
And Shine swam on Shine Swam on—

How Shine swam past a preacher afloating on a board
crying save me nigger Shine in the name of the Lord—
and how the preacher grabbed Shine's arm and broke his stroke—
how Shine pulled his shank and cut the preacher's throat—
And Shine swam on—Shine swam on—
And when news hit shore that the titanic had sunk
Shine was up in Harlem damn near drunk—


from afropoets.net

People at Night, by Denise Levertov

Ludwig van Beethoven - Piano Trio in D major Op. 70 No. 1 (Ghost), I
Melbourne Piano Trio (June 2011 at The Independent, Sydney)
Ji Won Kim, violin 
Chris Howlett, cello 
Hoang Pham, piano

A night that cuts between you and you
and you and you and you
and me : jostles us apart, a man elbowing
through a crowd. .........We won't
..................look for each other, either-
wander off, each alone, not looking
in the slow crowd. Among sideshows
..................under movie signs,
..................pictures made of a million lights,
..................giants that move and again move
..................again, above a cloud of thick smells,
..................franks, roasted nutmeats-

Or going up to some apartment, yours
..................or yours, finding
someone sitting in the dark:
who is it really? So you switch the
light on to see: you know the name but
who is it ?
.........But you won't see.

The fluorescent light flickers sullenly, a
pause. But you command. It grabs
each face and holds it up
by the hair for you, mask after mask.
..................You and you and I repeat
..................gestures that make do when speech
..................has failed .........and talk
..................and talk, laughing, saying
..................'I', and 'I',
meaning 'Anybody'.
...........................No one.


from poemhunter.com

wishes for sons, by Lucille Clifton

Giuseppe Verdi - "Questa donna conoscete?", La Traviata
with Raina Kabaivanska & Piero Visconti

i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
i wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.

later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn't believe. let the
flashes come when they
meet someone special.
let the clots come
when they want to.

let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.


from poets.org

The Conjugation of the Paramecium, by Muriel Rukeyser

Johannes Brahms - Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op. 115 for viola,
with Selka-Vengerov-Rachlin-Spitzer-Maisky

This has nothing
to do with
propagating

The species
is continued
as so many are
(among the smaller creatures)
by fission

(and this species
is very small
next in order to
the amoeba, the beginning one)

The paramecium
achieves, then,
immortality
by dividing

But when
the paramecium
desires renewal
strength another joy
this is what
the paramecium does:

The paramecium
lies down beside
another paramecium

Slowly inexplicably
the exchange
takes place
in which
some bits
of the nucleus of each
are exchanged

for some bits
of the nucleus
of the other

This is called
the conjugation of the paramecium.


from A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, W.W. Norton & Co. (1995)