Category Archives: New Poems

Living on Long Island is…

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Like a sanctuary.
The place where I can always come back to,
The place where countless memories flood in,
As I set foot within this place.

Anything beyond this place,
This long island,
Is like a whole new world,
Beyond my wildest dreams.

But people tell me it’s dangerous out there,
Rampant with chaos, injustice, and disorder.
People fighting just to survive each day;
How can anyone live like that?

Deep down I know,
That my Dad is out there somewhere,
Fighting for his life and country,
Fighting for his family.

And one day I’ll fight alongside him,
We’ll fight together,
Protect each other.
Yeah, that’s what we’ll do.

But for now,
I think I’ll stay here on this long island,
My sanctuary,
The place I call home.

– Pun
I know this is extremely out of the blue, but this is a poem I wrote a while back in english class in high school. I think it can be interpreted in many different ways depending on the background of the reader. I’m curious to know what kind of thoughts this might instill for you guys, so feel free to let me know! It’s perfectly okay if you don’t like it, no hard feelings. 😀

“Harlem” by Langston Hughes

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This poem is on page 67 of our handy dandy “Poems of New York” book. The poem is written by the Langston Hughes and it goes like this:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

     Or does it explode?

I saw this poem and immediately recognized the first three lines of the poems. They are famous phrases that I immediately associate with Langston Hughes (as well as the “Life ain’t no crystal stairs” from Hughes’ “Mother to Son”). In the poem, Hughes is questioning what happens to a person’s dreams when it is halted. Hughes is talking about the progress of African-Americans, which is subject to White oppression in the early 20th century. In my 10th grade English class, I remember seeing Lorraine Hansberry’s film “A Raisin in the Sun”, which obtain its name from this poem. The film focuses around the lives of a black family in Chicago who strives to get rich, but their “dream is deferred”. The poem is short, crisp and to the point, yet powerful and has a deep meaning behind it, which I think makes it a good poem to go over in class.

 

~Christopher Chong

“Return of the Native” by Amiri Baraka

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I tried to find the poem online but for some reason it’s not popping up, so feel free to look in Poems of New York, pages 152-153, for the poem.

I absolutely love this poem. Amiri Baraka, a famous black poet of the 1960s, write this poem centered around Harlem, the hub of black life at the time. He imagines a life in a place like Harlem that’s meant only for black people and brings a sense of communal joy. He ironically describes Harlem as “vicious” and “violent” and “transforming,” yet somehow beautiful. He dreams that in this world Harlem sees only sunny skies, never rain, as a symbol of the warmth that fills that place. He imagines that they will have everything they need in this world, including love for themselves. There will be a sense of joy that they thrive among themselves and will be comforted by familiarity. In the poem, I feel like he skillfully juxtaposes this dream world to the reality of the 1960s.

This poem adds to what Harlem meant for so many Black Americans at that time – it stood as a vision of a better future. Living in The Towers near campus right now, I feel grateful to be in a community that meant so much to a people. However, standing in this present that this poem looks toward creates deep sorrow for what has happened to Harlem and this vision, especially amid the recent tragedies in America. It never fails to amaze me how art can open the door to social critique.

The Subway Platform

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I was reading this poem, by Laurie Sheck, while the subway was arriving at the station I was waiting in. It describes what you see and what happens in the subway station. Most people just let their commute pass by, but this poem makes the reader pay attention to what is going on. Like art, it encourages stopping what you are doing to enjoy every fleeting moment, even if you do something routinely everyday, like waiting for the subway. It demonstrates the excitement you can feel when seeing things you don’t notice in your common day: “Why hadn’t I noticed them before?”

Poem

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I became nostalgic thinking of some of the weirdest poems that I loved back in those days….

Ode to an Artichoke (Pablo Neruda)

The artichoke
of delicate heart
erect
in its battle-dress, builds
its minimal cupola;
keeps
stark
in its scallop of
scales.
Around it,
demoniac vegetables
bristle their thicknesses,
devise
tendrils and belfries,
the bulb’s agitations;
while under the subsoil
the carrot
sleeps sound in its
rusty mustaches.
Runner and filaments
bleach in the vineyards,
whereon rise the vines.
The sedulous cabbage
arranges its petticoats;
oregano
sweetens a world;
and the artichoke
dulcetly there in a gardenplot,
armed for a skirmish,
goes proud
in its pomegranate
burnishes.
Till, on a day,
each by the other,
the artichoke moves
to its dream
of a market place
in the big willow
hoppers:
a battle formation.
Most warlike
of defilades-
with men
in the market stalls,
white shirts
in the soup-greens,
artichoke field marshals,
close-order conclaves,
commands, detonations,
and voices,
a crashing of crate staves.

And
Maria
come
down
with her hamper
to
make trial
of an artichoke:
she reflects, she examines,
she candles them up to the light like an egg,
never flinching;
she bargains,
she tumbles her prize
in a market bag
among shoes and a
cabbage head,
a bottle
of vinegar; is back
in her kitchen.
The artichoke drowns in a pot.

So you have it:
a vegetable, armed,
a profession
(call it an artichoke)
whose end
is millennial.
We taste of that
sweetness,
dismembering scale after scale.
We eat of a halcyon paste:
it is green at the artichoke heart

———————————————————

This ties in with my previous snapshot of NY; sometimes we are just like an artichoke, thinking greater of us than we are, until the moment it strikes us to realize that Maria is coming to boil us down. Perhaps, that is the very reason why movies featuring the destruction of the city due to natural disasters tend to be stimulating (not in a positive sense)…

If there is glory in something fleeting, when will New York become glorious?

Subway Riders Can’t Miss This

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Without a doubt, the acronym “MTA” has a negative connotation do it.

Nonetheless, we all use it. In the recent years MTA has implemented a program called “Arts for Transit”, which displays any form of arts in the stations, in the trains, basically anywhere in the transit system.

I remember we read a poem in the beginning of the year called “Construction Site, Windy Night” (Pg 201 in Poems of New York). The thing that I most remembered from it was some sort of scaffolds, plastic sheets that was flying from the building. Today, as I was on the D train going back to the dorms, I notice a poem titled “Scaffolding” by Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). The poem went something like this:

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seems to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.

This beginning of the poem is pretty straight forward. The first two stanzas pretty much depicts a mason’s job when they begin to build. However, the poem starts to change in the third stanza, when the speaker seems to be sad that the scaffolds are falling. This however exposes the beauty of the building when its done.

The fourth stanza is the highlight of the poem. The speaker speaks to someone he cares, someone he loves, most likely a mate, and it reveals that the relationship between the two may be “falling apart”. But he ends up with the fifth stanza, saying that whats behind that scaffold is something stronger, something more beautiful.

So next time you take a ride on the MTA, check out the arts and all the stuff you see just may very much surprise you! See if you can spot this poem as well! 🙂

~Christopher Chong

“Observation” by Dorothy Parker

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Sorry to post another poem that may not be a great fit for class, but this is one I felt really fit well with most of us as college students:

“If I don’t drive around the park,

I’m pretty sure to make my mark.

If I’m in bed each night by ten,

I may get back my looks again,

If I abstain from fun and such,

I’ll probably amount to much,

But I shall stay the way I am,

Because I do not give a damn.”

 

I feel like this is something a lot of us have to go through now that we are in college. We received all those lessons on time management early in the year and this poem shows that for a lot of us, we know what we should do with our time, but we just do not care enough to do those things. Instead, we would rather stay up late (not me, I actually go to bed at 10) and have a good time. This certainly is not a bad thing, as whatever we have done has gotten us this far.

“Subway Rush Hour” by Langston Hughes

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I found this poem on page 68 of our poetry book. I am not entirely sure this is a great poem for us to go over in class, as it does not take any special talent to decipher what it is about. It is rather short, spanning just 16 words. Nevertheless, this is a very powerful poem that I figured was worth sharing, since not everyone would see it. Because it is short and I doubt many of us read these posts with our poetry book open, I will copy the poem here:

 

“Mingled

breath and smell

so close

mingled

black and white

so near

no room for fear.”

 

I think those last four lines are especially meaningful, as it speaks to the diversity of New York, but more importantly, to the fact that you cannot fear others when you are always around them. Hughes explains that there is no way to hide from people of a different race and, unless you plan to always be fearful, you cannot be afraid of these people. You have to recognize that a person’s skin color is not related to the kind of person they are. This poem also goes beyond race and beyond the subway. New York is so diverse with many people of different religious beliefs and sexual orientations and they are all over the city, not just in the subway.