Friday Love Poem: Tony Brown!

OLD LOVE


Their hands
fold into one anotheras do paper dolls:



not two separate but
one continuous; this
is not the love
of silk and
fire


but that of
welded breaks made
strong, stronger
than before,


steel
that may yet be defeated
but refuses to lose,
becomes plastic
under pressure,
reforms into sculpture
garden hands that
could be called
great art if it were not
natural for these two.


And their eyes!
Set into mapped
faces, clear
as seafront mornings
after fog’s burned away,


but they are so still,
so still…


Alive? Yes.
Whatever comes next
they are alive now
and no telling,
they may remain so
after what we call death.


Whatever you say
of this, however you
call out or disregard
the forged hands
and the still eyes,


old love is alive here.
And to prove it,


with his free hand
he
(trembling)
brushes a crumb
from her chin.


A veteran of both page and stage in the poetry world, Tony Brown has been publishing and reading in journals and on stages around the US for over thirty years. His work has appeared in anthologies including A Generation Defining Itself, from MPW Press; Look, Up In the Sky! and Appleseeds, both from Sacred Fools Press; From Page To Stage, The Wordsmith Press  (all US); and 100 Poets Against the War, from Salt Publishing (UK). Tony's work has also appeared in many journals (among them: Riverwalk Journal, The Ballard Street Poetry Journal, nthposition, The Worcester Review, The Furnace Review, New Verse News, The November Third Club,  Spindle, Breath And Shadow, Home Planet News, and World Literature Today). He was named a “Legend of Slam” at the 2006 National Poetry Slam in Austin, TX, and was elected “The Poet Laureate Of The Blogosphere” by voters at thebloggingpoet.com for 2008.A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, I’m the author of twelve chapbooks and two CDs of my work, the latter with his music and poetry project, The Duende Project, which features the stellar bass and nylon string guitar work of Steven Cafaro, Jr. (aka “Faro.”) He is a regular columnist for gotpoetry.com and help to run a weekly reading series in Providence, RI.
A chapbook of recent poems, FLOOD, is available from Pudding House Publications (Columbus, OH). They can be purchased from me at readings and through the publisher’s Website. $10.00 US.

Poetry Saves the Week (Mostly)

I’ve had a real hard time keeping the ol’ chemicals up this week. Sadness and loneliness have just been real hard to fight. Even though I’ve been keeping my resolutions, I’m just not liking myself.

The thing that’s kept me mostly afloat, though, has been poetry, of course. Here’s some ways poetry loved me this week:

1. Sitting in the bookstore reading a wonderful collection called The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing. (Okay that’s kind of a sad activity.)
2. Listening to the overwhelming and diverse talent of my students.
3. My kid student wrote FOUR poems yesterday! Two poems asking questions to animals, (after The Tyger) two practicing rhyme.
4. I wrote my friend in CA a poem for his birthday and he wrote a BEAUTIFUL poem back.
5. Got to spend some time catching up with my co-host.
6. Got to sing the praises of Daniel Ladinsky, badass translator of
Love Letters from God—think I accidentally helped sell the book.
7. This poem by Tony Brown that really hit the spot:

Hummingbird Prayer
If there is
a right of return, I
would like to return
to a holy land
fitted to me. In a place
that allows hummingbirds
to be fierce warriors
in their universe
instead of precious gems
in ours, for example,
I may worship
on the scale I prefer,
where every moment
is its own, where the smallest details
are clear and crucial.
Examining their blurs
and hovers, I can say no
to the glorious and impenetrable wings
I have always been told were behind me,
and come back
to the source of flight
itself: the need to feed,
to thrive and pray, with those of my kind,
and to see those hummingbirds
as my kind, in spirit if not in body;
to stare into the cloud of their wings
at the spark of divine humor
that sits still and smiling
within each.