Poems Rethabile Likes

"AFTER THE FUNERAL" by Peter Everwine We opened closets and bureau drawers and packed away, in boxes, dresses and shoes, the silk under things still wrapped in tissue. We sorted through cedar chests. We gathered and set aside the keepsakes and the good silver and brought up from the coal cellar jars of tomato sauce, peppers, jellied fruit. We dismantled, we took down from the walls, we bundled and carted off and swept clean. Goodbye, goodbye, we said, closing the door behind us, going our separate ways from the house we had emptied, and which, in the coming days, we would fill again and empty and try to fill again Peter Everwine ...

"The Amen Stone" by Yehuda Amichai Translated By Chana Bloch On my desk there is a stone with the word “Amen” on it, a triangular fragment of stone from a Jewish graveyard destroyed many generations ago. The other fragments, hundreds upon hundreds, were scattered helter-skelter, and a great yearning, a longing without end, fills them all: first name in search of family name, date of death seeks dead man’s birthplace, son’s name wishes to locate name of father, date of birth seeks reunion with soul that wishes to rest in peace. And until they have found one another, they will not find a perfect rest. Only this stone lies calmly on my d...

"Because I could not stop for death" is a poem by Emily Dickinson Because I could not stop for Death— He kindly stopped for me— The Carriage held but just Ourselves— And Immortality. We slowly drove—He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility— We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess—in the Ring— We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain— We passed the Setting Sun— Or rather—He passed Us— The Dews drew quivering and Chill— For only Gossamer, my Gown— My Tippet—only Tulle— We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground— The Roof was scarcely visible— The Cornice—in the Ground— Since then—'tis Centuries—and yet Feels shorter than the Da...

"After the Beginning" by Linda Gregg The woman is preparing her body for sleep. She hangs the hair forward and it almost touches her feet. After brushing, she throws it up and back on to her shoulders. Then splashes water on her face twenty times. There is someone inside her happier than she is, waking as she goes to sleep. A child rolls a ball to where Death stands and waits for him to roll it back. But Death does not touch it. Death covers his face with his hands and turns away. The child runs after wanting to play. The woman would like a husband and child. The desire is curled within her body. She takes flowers into the man’s hous...

"To Katharine: At Fourteen Months" by Joelle Bielle All morning, you’ve studied the laws of spoons, the rules of books, the dynamics of the occasional plate, observed the principles governing objects in motion and objects at rest. To see if it will fall, and if it does, how far, if it will rage like a lost penny or ring like a Chinese gong – because it doesn’t have to – you lean from your chair and hold your cup over the floor. It curves in your hand, it weighs in your palm, it arches like a wave, it is a dipper full of stars, and you’re the wind timing the pull of the moon, you’re the water mea...

"Killing" by Rethabile Masilo from Mbera , Canopic Publishing (2024) Chauvin kills the way my grandfather did, by choking the last, stifled breath in a goat’s throat with his knee, before cutting its neck with a knife, in the evening on a sultry day in May, before dinner, its bleats of I-can’t-breathe! caught in the gullet of its throat. My grandfather’s knee was deaf to pleas—there was food to put on the table. The legs were first... then the whole body fidgeting, its appeals enough to remind one of somebody squirming on the side of a road. On my way home after work I saw a guy die, and the aspha...

"The Word That is a Prayer" by Ellery Akers One thing you know when you say it: all over the earth people are saying it with you; a child blurting it out as the seizures take her, a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital. What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin: at a street light, a man in a wool cap, yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window; he says, Please . By the time you hear what he’s saying, the light changes, the cab pulls away, and you don’t go back, though you know someone just prayed to you the way you pray. Please : a word so short it could get lost in the air as it floats up to God like the feather it ...

"The boy who would die" by Rethabile Masilo for Motlatsi Masilo The bedroom was a shallow grave— perhaps the opinion of the men who came, or of the wardrobe in that room in which a woman hid. In any case, there was a burial in that room; decked in bright pyjamas he slept as bullets hankered for the softness of his body and found the linoleum under the bed. Men he did not know in a house on a hill like a staircase— from the grave you climbed to the sitting room whose Cyclops window looked at the world, the reason perhaps for such an act for which there was no wake, then further up to the tin-stove kitchen that stood above the rest, i...

'AFFIRMATION' by Donald Hall To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage, that began without harm, scatters into debris on the shore, and a friend from school drops cold on a rocky strand. If a new love carries us past middle age, our wife will die at her strongest and most beautiful. New women come and go. All go. The pretty lover who announces that she is temporary is temporary. The bold woman, middle-aged against our old age, sinks under an anxie...

'ADOLESCENCE II' by Rita Dove Although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting. Sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert. Venetian blinds slice up the moon; the tiles quiver in pale strips. Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines. They bring the scent of licorice. One sits in the wash bowl, One on the bathtub edge; one leans against the door. "Can you feel it yet?" they whisper. I don't know what to say, again. They chuckle, Patting their sleek bodies with their hands. "Well, maybe next time." And they rise, Glittering like ...