Red Crow Poetry

Lament
For he who sleeps in all of my dreams.

The dead speak and I have ears to listen.
Night curls around the heart’s eaves
clutching at stars like starved winter soil,
leaving traces of your hasty journey.

Even unseen, the dead speak of secrets.
Theirs is a prayer untempered by time—
a song obscured by infinite longing
and the shadows of hopelessness unhinged.

Your heart carves a path through the pit of night,
looks with wise eyes upon my stifled grief.
In dreams, the dead sing me to sleep
as I cross the stars to greet you.

© 2011 – 2012, Hannah Andersen – All Rights Reserved
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I’m super excited to be included in “ Railroad Poetry Project: Issue 1 for my poems, Fallen and Bright Claws (pages 25-27).

It’s an honor to share page space with such word-wise poets! Please check it out and submit your own poetry for Issue 2 at Railroad Poetry Project.

Martius Contest – Honorable Mention

I’m thrilled to discover I received honorable mention in “ Sea Giraffe’s Martius Contest for my poem, Murmur.

5/13/2011 – UPDATE: The Martius Contest Winners, 2nd Wave has been published. Go here to see the 3 winning poems: http://seagiraffemag.com/current-issue/poetry/

Why Write Poetry?

I recently discovered Stephen Burt’s old blog post, “Mere Fondness for the Beautiful,” and it got me thinking about the reasons I enjoy reading and writing poetry.

There are plenty of simple answers. I love poetry because it’s beautiful; it’s an unusual type of music that engages my intellect and delights my senses. Sometimes, it forces me to live in the present instead of fretting about the future. At other times, it helps me to relive, and even relinquish, the past.

Poetry lets me rage against the injustices of the world without endangering myself, and it shows me how to face the truth—be it a feeling I might otherwise not have acknowledged, or an idea that could prove too fantastical for mundane life.

Poetry is what leads me through the dark nights of the soul when the heart is bruised or broken. Not only does it give me the strength to carry on, but also a purpose—a reason for living and continuing to love through life’s many losses.

When I read a poem that moves me, I delight in its perfection, in the way someone arranged the right words in the right way to make my soul sing with pleasure. What new love does to the body, poetry does to the soul. It breathes life and heat and need and hope into who we are and makes us better for it.

Poetry is an important part of my identity. I wrote my first poem as a young girl. I tossed it into the sky, where a gust of wind seized it and it disappeared. From then on, I knew the secret—that poetry was something magical, a gift worthy of all the wonders of the world, of gods and nature and even love.

As a young woman, my life revolved around poetry. Everyone I met was a potential audience and I read my work to anyone who would listen. I believed that my purpose in life was to dress the sad masses in a comforting coat of poems, to let others know in the midst of their struggles that I, too, had been bound by sorrow so deep it penetrates soul and bone and everything else beside. If I could make a difference in just one life, dress one wound, soothe one ache, my own griefs would have been well worth it.

Somewhere along the way, I came to the conclusion that the sole purpose of my voice would be to sing myself though sadness and regret. Having spent my life writing for everyone else, I had forgotten to use the power of poetry to heal myself. So I spent more than a decade hoarding my poetry. I wrote for myself and refused to share as the words became balm for my many wounds.

But one day, something strange happened. I began to feel the need to share my words with anyone who wanted to receive them. If my words give you comfort or pleasure, my heart sparkles with joy. If, however, my words remain nothing more than my own personal panacea, I embrace them and thank the universe for giving me the power of poetry.

The power of poetry–that’s why I write. Why do you write?

© 2011 – 2012, Hannah Andersen – All Rights Reserved
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Pounce
For Gerard Manley Hopkins

Chicken hawks hurt, too,
when racked with hunger.
Lumbering for prey
and fresh-footed flesh
baits their fierce-flown flight with pain.

Endless, the strain of untamed sense
sends all food, fast-footed, fleeing.
Only folded feathers flock,
together drop in dine-driven dives,
discover the ease of deep hunger hushed.

Fluttering wings sing downwind,
plant hope in hard heart’s hunting hum.
Humble hawks flock to hunt again,
lend lean beaks beneath talon-tear
to minced meat and mating.

© 2010 – 2012, Hannah Andersen – All Rights Reserved
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Bright Claws
For Guiniviere

Memories etched between heel and toe,
distant memories of distances tread,
of quietly meeting the words of the dead
to pick the bones from every moment,
to hold the bones in our own soft flesh.

My bones have ached with the sorrow of knowing,
with the borrowed sorrow of saying goodbye
that hides in the belly and eats the soul’s seams.

The small-boned birds scour the sea for dreams.
Like them, I peck and scratch for what lies beneath.
And each night, I write the same quaint poem,
write the words that wrap my bones in night’s quiet.

Yet, the flesh speaks when the bones lie silent.
In my flesh is etched the unwritten poem—
the breath of the small-boned bird heard singing.

© 2010 – 2012, Hannah Andersen – All Rights Reserved
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Some

Break them up and remake them.
Tear them down and throw them up.
This is the moment of their awakening.
This is the moment their false hope fails.

Break their skulls with pens and sticks
until their words unravel are thoroughly purged.

Does it hurt?

Their words have bled a river of ideas.
Their words have cast a shadow upon our contradictions.
Silence them with songless thirsty birds
and the earth that covers our hungry dead.

Cover them, their words are burning.
Cover them over with the scourge of yearning.
They may not walk among us long.
They may not sink their roots beneath us.

Their words must will adhere to the letters of law,
for no wide words may cross here.
No wise words may bridge the many silences we share.

And when their words have fallen down and down,
when their pens have torn apart ribs and heart,
we will sally forth selling our nasty little selves.

© 2010 – 2012, Hannah Andersen – All Rights Reserved
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…………………………………………………………………..

Edited on 2/3/2011 – My twitchy, itchy fingers simply had to tinker with this one a bit more. Besides, I like to think of my poems as living, changing beings–who knows what they might become! — H.A.

Falling In Fallen

Some nights
I beat it back with a stick.
This poetry that sings
into the ether of my senses,
that sinks its ragged teeth
into the deep murk of the soul.

Let go,
I whisper to the thrush song
longing for release.
Slide back into this twilight’s quiet,
into this night’s unending sleep.

But the thrush in the throat
knows the hurt of hunger,
knows how to spin yarns
into songs and sweaters.

Where is this misplaced haven
that we seek in dreams,
this infinite stream
that unfolds my hopes
like the last of the wine.

I have grabbed up everything
by the roots,
adorned my heart
with the lost art of my ancestors.

So I have shredded everything
down to the roots,
and bruised my heart
with the lost art of my ancestors.

We are chained ankles
and feet unfit for walking.
We are shrunken eyes
and tinder tongues
plunging our secrets
into songs and poems–

while outside,
winter falls
from the deep hush of night.

© 2010 – 2012, Hannah Andersen – All Rights Reserved
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Wound

First, goes the right eye.
Then, the small fingers
of the left hand.
Next, polished bones
atone for the tongue
until what the eye sees
is stilled
by what the heart hears—
the long, undone silence
of the soul.

© 2010 – 2012, Hannah Andersen – All Rights Reserved
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Swallow Song

I will never slam a poem
into your ears,
hollow out your eyes
with words so wicked
they lick your fingers
and stick to your ribs.

I give you this poem
penned in pencil and
wrapped in parchment.

I etch it into
your heart,
weave it into
your memories
with nothing
but words and wishes.

I even sew it into
your immaculate skin,
like a Swallow
crawling home to die.

© 2010 – 2012, Hannah Andersen – All Rights Reserved
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