For all those poems about Writing poems! For all those lines running Neck and neck with three- Legged ideas and poems that strain Stars though cheesecloth To have something in hand, to have Something, anything to do With what we’re given here While the sun comes up over Lake Michigan, or wherever you are And for all those lines clouding Their subject with six names Of clouds, for all poems admitting The crime of writing poems About the perfume of summer Melons wherever you are, when Surely something more forceful, more Reparative is called for right now While Police are in the forest and The fires race toward us, or towards Some other us, while the governors Defend their states against Pillage and rights-looting by a Felon president and the trial Of life on earth is Prosecuted by present-day liars By which I mean those who Only see the present By which I mean liars Because newsflash, time Passes and also while the judge Takes the jury to lunch, and Mercy for the time-honored Nostalgia while floodwaters Rise, while oceans cook the coral To its bones, as if south Could be turned against west About almost, about just now, about Late-breaking realization, about When, about how and why, About why why why, About self-recrimination and Impossible apology for poems Attempting moral virtue by mere Mention of immoral tragedy Like this one, this one Begging for amnesty, voting For the future’s oak and the Model of the mothers And about what is the meaning Of this, and this is the meaning Of this, because surely we Can find something, anything To do with these words, this time We have, this broken- Lined yearning for peace.
Jessica Greenbaum’s (she/her) most recent collection, Spilled and Gone, was chosen by the Boston Globe as a Best Book, and her previous one, The Two Yvonnes was named a Best Book by Library Journal. Poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, Poetry London, Best American Poetry, 2024 and Pushcart Prize, 2024. She is the co-editor of Treelines: 21st Century American Poems, and Mishkan HaSeder, the first ever poetry Haggadah. A recipient of awards from the NEA and the Poetry Society of America, she teaches inside and outside academia and, as a social worker, with communities who have experienced trauma.
