Poem of the Day
Consecutive Preterite
By Jessica Laser
That summer I learned Biblical Hebrew / with Christian women heaving themselves / toward ministry one brick building at a time.
That summer I learned Biblical Hebrew / with Christian women heaving themselves / toward ministry one brick building at a time.
The writing of poems
and the living of life
seem to require
because there is no reason for my sitting here laughing
O fate, O sad duty, / O mankind, O life, what does it mean?
Mmmm
I get up and am seized by the present
Whose presence is
Loneliness comes rushing toward me
Why does it move so fast
When I am moving toward it
When I am dead and gone
they will say of me,
“We never could figure out
“I’m going out for a pack of cigarettes.”
At one point in the history of our language —roughly
from the 1920s into the early 1950s is my guess —those
Beautiful, an O fell from your mouth
You were born already beautiful
My little wife suggested that I tell you this story / because she received such pleasure from it, / and I such pleasure in the telling.