At some point in the day, as such, there was a pool. Of
                                                         stillness. One bent to brush one's hair, and, lifting
                                                         again, there it was, the
opening–one glanced away from a mirror, and there, before one's glance reached the
                                                         street, it was, dilation and breath–a name called out
                                                         in another's yard–a breeze from
                                                         where–the log collapsing inward of a sudden into its
                                                         hearth–it burning further, feathery–you hear it but you don't
                                                         look up–yet there it
                                                         bloomed–an un-
learning–all byway no birthpain­–dew–­sand falling onto sand­–a threat
                                                         from which you shall have
                                                         no reprieve ­then the
reprieve­–Some felt it was freedom, or a split-second of unearthliness–­but no, it was far from un-
                                                         earthly, it was full of
                                                         earth, at first casually full, for some millennia, then
desperately full–of earth–of copper mines and thick under-leaf-vein sucking in of
                                                         light, and isinglass, and dusty heat–wood-rings
                                                         bloating their tree-cells with more
life–and grass and weed and tree intermingling in the
                                                         undersoil–& the
                                                         earth's whole body round
                                                         filled with
                                                         uninterrupted continents of
                                                         burrowing–& earthwide miles of
                                                         tunneling by the
mole, bark beetle, snail, spider, worm–& ants making their cross-
                                                         nationstate cloths of
                                                         soil, & planetwide the
                                                         chewing of insect upon leaf–fish-mouth on krill,
                                                         the spinning of
coral, sponge, cocoon–this is what entered the pool of stopped though–a chain suspended in
                                                         the air of which
                                                         one link
                                                         for just an instant
                                                         turned to thought, then time, then heavy time, then
                                                         suddenly
air–a link of air!–& there was no standing army anywhere,
                                                         & the sleeping bodies in the doorways in all
                                                         the cities of
                                                         what was then just
                                                         planet earth
were lifted up out of theirs sleeping
                                                         bags, & they walked
                                                         away, & the sensation of empire blew off the link
like pollen–just like that–off it went–into thin air–& the athletes running their
                                                         games in Delphi entered that zone in the
long oval of the arena where you run in
                                                         shadow, where the killer crowd becomes
                                                         one sizzling hiss, where,
coming round that curve the slowness
                                                         happens, & it all goes
                                                         inaudible, & the fatigue the urgent sprint the lust
                                                         makes the you
fantastically alone, & the bees thrum the hillsides, & all the blood that has been
                                                         wasted–all of it–gathers into deep coherent veins in the
                                                         earth
                                                         and calls itself
                                                         history–& we make it make
                                                         sense–
                                                         & we are asked to call it
                                                         good.

"Just Before" is excerpted from Sea Change, by Jorie Graham.
Copyright © 2008 by Jorie Graham. Used by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved.

We are Sudanese children's bedtime stories.
Their mothers feed their daughters dreams instead of grain
one day, they say, we will rise on the horizon
green tanks and desert camouflaged soldiers
bearing peace, and guns
and flour.
It is a country of women and infants
waiting for their husbands and sons to set down the burden
of the cross and crescent
and come home.
Waiting for us to save them
they grow boy-soldiers like the crops they lack
boys who will learn to fight to save their faith
by martyring themselves to their oppressors
and cutting the breasts off enemy women
to starve their newborn sons.
Waiting for us to save them
they cultivate the soils of their daughter's futures with hopes of American salvation
fueled by CNN headlines and photojournalist's faces
they pray that their stories will become truth
rather than proof that their struggles remain nameless.
We came before
bearing the flag of our self-declared freedom we burst open the gates of Krakow ghettoes
and fleshed out the white limbs of concentration-camp survivors
we freed the Jews from genocide and tore pink triangles from the arms of those we would later make outcast again
and so we are Sudanese children's bedtime stories

They do not understand that we only bomb when we are bombed back
and then fast, and thoroughly,
and sometimes at the wrong country we do not support genocide
but if brown-skinned people are killing
brown-skinned people
we will not put our children on the line
America is the only thing worth dying for
we are not coming
and there will be no fairy-tale ending.
They tell their daughters we are coming
as their bellies swell
as if they have fed them the moon
and they dream, sometimes, of leaving their children behind
they could flee faster, and surely they would be forgiven
from the safety of the stars
but instead they wait
for a rescue that is not coming
for a hope that is too silent, too foreign,
and too black
to ever be answered.

"Sudanese Children" is excerpted from Obatala by Shannon Leigh. Copyright © 2007 by Shannon Leigh. Used by permission of author. All rights reserved.                             

Just off shore, five ducks—
I raise a hand in salute
and they rush away.

If I write spring moon
or mountain, is that
haiku plagiarism?

A cloud glides over
the face of the moon—
sound of the belled cat, hunting.

We drank many cups
of strong coffee—still
no mention of the money.

Black hearse rushes by–
blue chickory on the roadside
swaying in its wake.

Moon in the window–
the same as it was before
there was a window.

Mid-winter evening,
alone at the sushi bar–
just me and this eel.

"Just off shore, five ducks," "If I write spring moon," "A cloud glides over," "We drank many
cups," "Black hearse rushes by," "Moon in the window," and "Midwinter evening" are
excerpted from She Was Just Seventeen, by Billy Collins. Copyright © 2006 by Billy Collins.
Used by permission of Modern Haiku Press. All rights reserved.

We get car jacked in L.A.
Mugged in New York
Kidnapped in Mexico

then sold to the sex trade in Albania
we hand pick coco leaves for cocaine in Columbia
and for diamonds...

cut the hands of little children in Sierra Leone.
We are victims of the holocaust in Germany
We are the ones being culturally cleansed in Rwanda.

you see pain is pain
             suffering is suffering
             murder is murder

whether Liberia or Siberia
we point our fingers at them
when its us killing us

for we are raising raising school shooter in Columbine
     we are the ones raising suicide bombers in
Palestine
     

     we are Jewish made missiles
               melting Muslims bodies at the Gaza
strip

for we kill in the name of God
                                       Allah
                                       Jesus

we kill for the sake of communism
                                  fascism
                                  capitalism

we bleed for what we believe in

see everybody wants to play the part of the martyr
but somebody has to be wrong

yet still we sing our songs of liberation
trading in one tyranny for another
then calling it a revolution

we slice ourselves at the wrists
then try to bandage it with the constitution

but no piece of paper can stop the bleeding.
2008 presidential election will stop the bleeding

for a politicians true mission is to get paid
whether republican or democrat
their nothing but aristocrats looking to getting
paid

fox news and newsweek propose nothing but propaganda
...just to get paid

and eat it like babies being taught to feed from the
tit

but one day when your children don't have enough food
to eat
      one day when the military is rolling upon your
street
      one day when the dogs are barking at your ankles
                                                water
hose at your back
                  

                   when suburbia is burning
                   when the stock market crashes
                   when the club closes
                   when the drugs just aren't enough

      one day. when your in a concentration camp

not for being just Jew or gentile
                           black or white
                           gay or straight
                           young or old
                           rich or poor

but for simply breathing...

that's when you'll realize we all need a change
that's when you'll realize we're still do for a
revolution...
that's when you'll realize our hearts are still
bleeding for freedom

"We Are... Searching For... " is by Filmore Johnson. Copyright © 2006 by Filmore Johnson.
Used by permission of author. All rights reserved. Performed by Quentin “Q” Talley and Filmore Johnson.

"Hi, I'm Paul Muldoon and I want to thank you for sending in your questions to Borders Open-Door Poetry. We have a question here from Elizabeth F.: 'The more I change a poem the better it reads to me, so my editing process never ends. How do you know when a poem is finished and editing should stop?' she inquires.

Well, that of course is one of the big questions, perhaps the biggest one. There's one that comes before it though, and I don't want this to sound too silly. The first question is, 'where do we begin the poem?' What I like to think is that we try to begin the poem whether it sounds like an ad for a detergent or a washing powder. We try to begin the poem where you might have expected it to end. We try to begin in a place where one is really going into territory that is unexpected. So we try to begin with an engaging idea . We try to continue in an engaging mode, of course.  And we try to end with some sense of resolution. Not necessarily with fireworks going off but there has to be a sense that we have come out of something; that there's been a reason for us being in there in the first place. And there's a sense, I suppose, that we've come out through a window or we hear a door shut, however quietly, behind us. Sometimes the door slams; sometimes it just creaks closed.

But to know, to know when the poem's finished as it were, I think has to do with our having a sense as the first reader of the poem, that something has happened to us; that we've seen something, that we've experienced something new, that we've had a revelation.  Emily Dickinson, of course, had this idea that, at end of a poem, coming out of a poem, one should have a sense that the top of one's head has been taken off.  Certainly at least, she felt, that the back of the hairs should be standing on the back of one's head. So a physical sensation often accompanies that sense that the poem is finished. We have a visceral sense that something has happened to us and that's often an indicator of something really really major having happened. The hair standing on the back of one's head doesn't necessarily come to us with every poem, alas, but certainly to come out with a sense that something has changed, including ourselves."

My son, budding dreadhead, has taken a break from obsessively twist-
ing and waxing his naps, swelling his delts, and busting rhymes with
no aim, backbeat, or future beyond the common room. For want of a
plumper canteen, the child has laid claim to a jailhouse vocation.

I'm the writer, Mama, he tells me.
That's what I'm known for in here.

In my kitchen, clutching the receiver, I want to laugh, because my son
has always been the writer, muttering witness to the underbelly, his
rebel heart overthumping, his bladed lines peppered with ready-mar-
ket gangster swerve and cringing in awe of themselves. I want to laugh,
but

I must commit to my focus. I must be typical, single, black, with an
18-to-30-year-old male child behind bars. How deftly I have learned
the up/back of that tiring Watusi.

I guess it's a poem, he'd mutter.
Throw it away if you want.

And oh, I'd ache at what he'd done, the bottoms he'd found, the clutch
he claimed on what refused to be held, the queries scraped from sur-
face. What are you chile?, I'd whisper as I read. Could there be a dream
just temporarily deferred wallowing in those drooping denims and
triple-x sweats, could there be a poet wrapped tight against the world
in those swaddling clothes?

He was the writer then, but now, reluctant resident of the Middlesex
County House of Corrections, he is the writer, sanctioned by the bad-
dest of badasses because he has trumpeted the power of twisting verb
and noun not only to say things, but to get shit:

They paying me to write love letters to their ladies.
I write poems if they rather have that,
this one big musclehead brother everybody be sweatin
even asked me to write a letter to his mama on her birthday.

They call him Scribe.

They bring him their imploded dreams, letters from their women-in-waiting tired of waiting. On deadline, he spins impossible sugar onto
the precise lines of legal pads, pens June/moon dripping enough to
melt a b-girl's hard heart. He drops to scarred knees, moans and
whimpers in stilted verse, coaxing last ink from a passed-around ball-
point, making it wail:

please please babygirl,
don't be talking about not waiting out my time,
only five years left, that ain't much,
hey Scribe, Scribe, hook me up, man,
I ain't got no answer for this shit she sudden talking.

Tattooed in riotous colors, they circle him in the common room,
whispering to him beneath the surface of their reputations:

Got a job for you Scribe, got a job.

When the letters are crafted just right, copied over and over and
edited for the real, the customers stumble through the aloud reading
of them, scared of their own new voices. Too dazzled to demand
definition, they scrunch scarred foreheads and whistle through gold
caps at the three-syllable kickverbs:

I'm gon' trust you, they tell my son. I'm gon' trust you on this.
They don't want their softness. They don't want it.

You know, Scribe, damn, damn this shit SINGS!
You blessed man, you blessed.
I don't know what you saying man, but it sho sound good.
So I'm gon' trust you. I'm gon' trust you on this.

Then they copy the words in their own hand and send spun silk shoutouts
to the freewalking world, hoping that a disillusioned girlfriend or a neg-
lected mother or a wife-in-waiting tired of waiting will slit open the
envelope and feel a warm repentant should spill out into her hands.

And I must admit, as a fellow poet, I envy my son, this being neces-
sary. Think of it. Which of us would refuse to try on the first face of a
killer, our life teetering on every line? Wouldn't we want to craft a
new front for everyone just once, to rewrite one moment of a life
story, to beg for mercy on behalf of someone who has never known
life on his knees?

And at the end of our flowery betrayal, the white-heat moment of no
sound. In the steamy pocket of it, all we'd need is one person rising up
slow, full of spit and menace, to say:

O.K., O.K., I'm gon' trust you on that one.
I'm gon' have to trust you on that.

"Scribe" is excerpted from Teahouse Of The Almighty, by Patricia Smith. Copyright © 2006 by
Patricia Smith. Used by permission of Coffee House Press. All rights reserved.