Poem of the Day
Yellow Striped Pajamas
By Shamsher Bahadur Singh
walking silently on his paws, he emerges from the semidarkness and disappears into it.
walking silently on his paws, he emerges from the semidarkness and disappears into it.
Moving as a mind moves across a math problem,
Or an eye across a lover’s body,
Or a dragonfly across the sky,
First my books grew stiff
brass clasps like the books monks read.
A hush enshrouded them. They were
Here Follows an Account of the Nature of Fish.
Here follows a description of an unknown town.
Shit is the taste you want in your mouth,
said love, said love, be a dog,
If I look to the opposite shore and greet myself there,
if I call out to myself come here
and watch myself laboriously construct from shore-things
Stacked the mind with fear: In my room, age eight
I hear him coming up the stairs, penance box
When spring opens the faucet out pours water, water;
if there were a baby playing in the driveway it would be
carried away, water would carry away every baby like the movie
Clouds scuffle and clinch in this March sky;
wind presses our turned collars to chin
and Chris casts his line against the grain.
Jerome discovered fifteen signs of doom
each of a day; seas will explode in steam,
man's towers burst into ash, the earth will move,
Perhaps by the time I have written this
the last three or four will also be gone:
not many people will mark a few less