Hi Friends,
When I get asked to pick a single favorite poem in the whole wide world, I often answer with Emily Moore's "Ghazal" from the January 2002 Yale Review.
Emily Moore will be the first to tell you why teachers are not "those who can't" — she teaches high school English in New York City and has never published a poetry collection.
To learn more about the ancient Persian poetic form of the ghazal and its various rules and restraints, click here — and, if you really want to get into it, also here.
April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own
selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this poem-a-day email list at any time, please
reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in
heroic couplet form). Remember that receiving your notes and comments on
various poems is one of my favorite parts of Poetry Month, so feel free
to write back!
Love,
Ellen
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Ghazal
Beneath her slip,
the slip of her.
Iron. Lust.
The flint of her.
In dorms and parks, motels
and tents: the din of her.
What I would not have done
for another sip of her.
She swore she'd never love another.
The fib of her.
She kicked off the sheets; I held on,
breathless, through the fit of her.
Good or evil, she was first.
The rib of her.
That she could leave me after all
that I had been to her.
Hands pressed deep
into my mouth. The bit of her.
A lengthy, doe-eyed nuzzle
at the salt lick of her.
Cock sure,
the spit of her.
A week spent curled up on the floor,
gutted, sick for her.
Nights she ground my bones
to dust. The grit of her.
Teeth, nails, my name
whispered low. The grip of her.
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Many thanks to Rick Barot for introducing me to this poem (among others).
Labels: NPM, Rick Barot