Poems

April Is a Dog's Dream BY  MARILYN SINGER April is a dog's dream the soft grass is growing the sweet breeze is blowing the air all full of singing feels just right so no excuses now we're going to the park to chase and charge and chew and I will make you see what spring is all about

More Dangerous Air BY MARGARITA ENGLE Newsmen call it the Cuban Missile Crisis. Teachers say it's the end of the world. At school, they instruct us to lookup and watch the Cuban-cursed sky. Search for a streak of light. Listen for a piercing shriek, the whistle that will warn us as poisonous A-bombs zoom close. Hide under a desk. Pretend that furniture is enough to protect us against perilous flames. Radiation. Contamination. Toxic breath. Each air-raid drill is sheer terror, but some of the city kids giggle. They don't believe that death is real. They've never touched a bullet, or seen a vulture, or made music by shaking the jawbone of a mule. When I hide under my frail school desk, my heart grows as rough and brittle as the slab of wood that fails to protect me from reality's gloom.

The Aim Was Song BY  ROBERT FROST Before man came to blow it right      The wind once blew itself untaught, And did its loudest day and night      In any rough place where it caught. Man came to tell it what was wrong:      It hadn’t found the place to blow; It blew too hard—the aim was song.      And listen—how it ought to go! He took a little in his mouth,      And held it long enough for north To be converted into south,      And then by measure blew it forth. By measure. It was word and note,      The wind the wind had meant to be— A little through the lips and throat.      The aim was song—the wind could see.

Ritmo /Rhythm BY  MARGARITA ENGLE Mad has decided to catch a vulture, the biggest bird she can find. She is so determined and so inventive, that by stringing together a rickety trap of ropes and sticks, she creates a puzzling structure that just might be clever enough to trick a buzzard, once the trap’s baited with leftover pork from supper. Mad and I used to do everything together, but now I need a project all my own, so I roam the green fields, finding bones. The skull of a wild boar. The jawbone of a mule. Older cousins show me how to shake the mule’s  Quijada , to make the blunt teeth rattle. Guitars. Drums. Gourds. Sticks. A cowbell. A washboard. Pretty soon, we have a whole orchestra. On Cuban farms, even death can turn into music.

Indigenous Elvis at the Airport BY HEID E. ERDRICH Indigenous Elvis works security: Chief Joseph hair, blue-black and pomped, turquoise and shell dangling from one ear, silver chunks of rings on every bronze knuckle. Indigenous Elvis works security: X-ray glances at your backpacks, laptops, empty still-moist shoes. Indigenous Elvis waves me to his line. A perfect gentlemen at...

My Doggy Ate My Essay BY  DARREN SARDELLI My doggy ate my essay. He picked up all my mail. He cleaned my dirty closet and dusted with his tail. He straightened out my posters and swept my wooden floor. My parents almost fainted when he fixed my bedroom door. I did not try to stop him. He made my windows shine. My room looked like a palace, and my dresser smelled like pine. He fluffed up every pillow. He folded all my clothes. He even cleaned my fish tank with a toothbrush and a hose. I thought it was amazing to see him use a broom. I’m glad he ate my essay on “How to Clean My Room.”

Nature Knows Its Math BY JOAN GRAHAM Divide the year into seasons, four, subtract the snow then add some more green, a bud, a breeze, a whispering behind the trees, and here beneath the rain-scrubbed sky orange poppies multiply .

Drum Dream Girl BY  MARGARITA ENGLE On an island of music in a city of drumbeats the drum dream girl dreamed of pounding tall conga drums tapping small  bongó  drums and boom boom booming with long, loud sticks on big, round, silvery moon-bright  timbales . But everyone on the island of music in the city of drumbeats believed that only boys should play drums so the drum dream girl had to keep dreaming quiet secret drumbeat dreams. At outdoor cafés that looked like gardens she heard drums played by men but when she closed her eyes she could also hear her own imaginary music. When she walked under wind-wavy palm trees in a flower-bright park she heard the whir of parrot wings the clack of woodpecker beaks the dancing tap of her own footsteps and the comforting pat of her own heartbeat. At carnivals, she listened to the rattling beat of towering dancers on stilts ...

And Later . . . BY JEN BRYANT I take my kaleidoscope off the shelf, look through the little hole at the end of the cardboard tube; I turn       and turn       and turn       and turn, letting the crystals shift into strange and beautiful patterns, letting the pieces fall wherever they will.

The Life of a Digger BY  MARGARITA ENGLE Henry from the island of Jamaica Jamaican digging crews have to sleep eighty men to a room, in huge warehouses like the ones where big wooden crates of dynamite are stored. My hands feel like scorpion claws, clamped on to a hard hard shovel all day, then curled into fists at night. At dawn, the steaming labor trains deliver us by the thousands, down into that snake pit where we dig until my muscles feel as weak as water and my backbone is like shattered glass. But only half the day is over. At lunchtime, we see sunburned American engineers and foremen eating at tables, in shady tents with the flaps left open, so that we have to watch how they sit on nice chairs, looking restful. We also watch the medium-dark Spanish men, relaxing as they sit on their train tracks, grinning as if they know secrets. We have no place to sit. Not even a stool. So we stand,...

Old Love BY PAT MORA When my aunt died, my uncle raised his hands like a prophet in the Bible. “I've lost my girl,” he said, “I've lost my girl,” over and over, shaking his head. I didn't know what to say, where to look, my quiet uncle raising his voice to silence. My aunt was eighty-seven. “Listen,” my uncle said, sighing like a tree alone at night, “women know. Every midnight on New Year's Eve, when others sang and laughed and hugged, your aunt looked at me, tears in her eyes. Sixty years. She knew. One day, we'd kiss good-bye.”

Words are Birds BY FRANCISCO X. ALARCÓN words are birds that arrive with books and spring they love clouds the wind and trees some words are messengers that come from far away from distant lands for them there are no borders only stars moon and sun some words are familiar like canaries others are exotic like the quetzal bird some can stand the cold others migrate with the sun to the south some words die caged— they're difficult to translate and others build nests have chicks warm them feed them teach them how to fly and one day they go away in flocks the letters on this page are the prints they leave by the sea