Reading Between the Lines
In honor of World Poetry Day, we offer some work by Reed poets.
Broken Ghazal
Fix your gaze on the swinging chandelier—everything
else is broken
A subtle perfume bursts from the debris as my silence
propels—broken
This was war and all I had for armour was an heirloom
quilt of verses
As it hacked my jugular, your huntsman’s axe cried: this
gazelle’s broken
Look for my tapestries unravelling under the bed, the
unspooled story
Sweet, covered with ants: our unlived life yet (in a
nutshell) is broken
—Shadab Zeest Hashmi ’95
(From International English Language Quarterly, 2016. Vol. 4, No. 1.)
Carnot Cycle
Only sometimes does homegrown bedrock glow moneygreen.
Early mornings something doesn’t sit right over the sink. Sits crooked.
Like those days we grab our own pickaxes and head down to the
—Prof. [English]
(From Poetry, April 2014.)
Weather Conditions
As if it were a sampler of weather,
the sky on one side is the blue of oceans
with those scalloped woolly clouds children draw.
The clouds herd together like sheep, closing in
and calling in the black sheep. In the other
sky, it’s darker. Not ominous, just flat
gray, while the wind flicks leaves, clouds of grackles,
branches: the outside world a commotion
of movement. It’s New England; half static,
the radio warns people to take shelter
in the northwestern corners of their homes.
A mother shepherds her family to the cellar,
hands full of matches that wouldn’t hold
a candle to the imagined storm. She
is always full of “safety first,” of fear
of sorrow. All the children can think
of is The Wizard of Oz, in color.
No one in the household has any sense
of direction, so the four of them mill
in various corners, at random, trying
for luck in the face of the big blow that
never comes. The father is curiously
silent. Maybe he wants to be an anchor;
maybe he doesn’t believe in hurricanes,
which to the rest of them spell disaster, spell
hope, spell loss of control, spell freedom.
—Prof. Lisa M. Steinman [English]
(From Absence & Presence, 2013.)
Axe Handles
One afternoon the last week in April
Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head
Without a handle, in the shop
And go gets it, and wants it for his own.
A broken-off axe handle behind the door
Is long enough for a hatchet,
We cut it to length and take it
With the hatchet head
And working hatchet, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
"When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off."
And I say this to Kai
"Look: We'll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with—"
And he sees. And I hear it again:
It's in Lu Ji's Wên Fu, fourth century
A.D. "Essay on Literature"—in the
Preface: "In making the handle
Of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand."
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.
—Gary Snyder ’51
(From Axe Handles, 1983.)
A Dent in a Bucket
Hammering a dent out of a bucket
a woodpecker
answers from the woods
—Gary Snyder ’51
(From Danger on Peaks, 2004.)
Tags: Alumni, Professors