The Diameter of the Bomb

By Yehuda Amichai

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.

Trouble With the Stars and Stripes

By Naomi Shihab Nye

I couldn't make my annual flag cake, the one with strawberries for stripes and blueberries for states and white mountain frosting puffing up proudly between. I couldn't even wear a bandanna on the 4th of July. It hurts, this year. Let's talk about the difference between victory and public relations. Let's talk about the size of words. I weighed words during the war, putting them on secret scales, and never once did things balance out. My husband who never shouts shouted in his sleep while the bombs were dropping, "I just don't think humans are doing a very good job!" After the war he traveled to Iraq to make photographs. We have no idea. We can still feel good in this country about what we don't see, if we give it a good enough name. All forms of righteousness begin to terrify. A presidential address, a church. My husband stares when he hears certain words. My enemy - "Who is so beautiful," he whispers.

So Many Books, So Little Time

For independent booksellers & librarians, especially Nichelle Hayes

By Haki Madhubuti 

Frequently during my mornings of pain & reflection

when I can’t write

or articulate my thoughts

or locate the mindmusic needed

to complete the poems & essays

that are weeks plus days overdue

forcing me to stop, I cease

answering my phone, eating right, running my miles,

reading my mail, and making love.

(Also, this is when my children do not seek me out

because I do not seek them out.)

I escape north, to the nearest library or used bookstore.

They are my retreats, my quiet energy-givers, my intellectual refuge.

For me it is not bluewater beaches, theme parks,

or silent chapels hidden among forest greens.

Not multi-stored American malls, corporate book

supermarkets, mountain trails, or Caribbean hideaways.

My sanctuaries are liberated lighthouses of shelved books,

featuring forgotten poets, unread anthropologists of tenure-

seeking assistant professors, self-published geniuses, remaindered

first novelists, highlighting speed-written bestsellers,

wise historians & theologians, nobel, pulitzer prize, and american book

award winners, poets & fiction writers, overcertain political commentators,

small press wunderkinds & learned academics.

All are vitamins for my slow brain & sidetracked spirit in this

winter of creating.

I do not believe in smiling politicians, AMA doctors,

zebra-faced bankers, red-jacketed real estate or automobile

salespeople, or singing preachers.

I believe in books.

It can be conveniently argued that knowledge,

not that which is condensed or computer packaged, but

pages of hard-fought words, dancing language

meticulously & contemplatively written by the likes of me & others,

shelved imperfectly at the level of open hearts & minds,

is preventive medicine strengthening me for the return to my

clear pages of incomplete ideas to be reworked, revised &

written as new worlds and words in all of their subjective

configurations to eventually be processed into books that

will hopefully be placed on the shelves of libraries, bookstores, homes,

& other sanctuaries of learning to be found & browsed over by receptive

booklovers, readers & writers looking for a retreat,

looking for departure & yes spaces,

looking for open heart surgery without the knife.

Burning the Old Year

By Naomi Shihab Nye 

 

Letters swallow themselves in seconds. Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.