WELCOME TO “Poetry from the Gargoyle's mouth”!

This is a new section on the OG dedicated to spreading awareness about poetry by publishing recitations of favorite poems of the Uni community every Monday.

Since poetry is meant be heard and read, we will supplement these submissions with poems of our own choosing that have a similar theme as the original poem, and publish a new poem a day for the remainder of that week. Where copyright is an issue, we will publish an excerpt and include a link to the full text.

We feel that besides the poetry that we encounter in our English classes, our exposure to poetry is rather minimal. Thus, in an effort to garner a larger community of poetry readers at Uni, we will give our readers a diverse collection of poetry every week, in the hope that their interest in poetry will be resurrected.

The ultimate goal of this project is to stimulate discussion about poetry and to encourage critical thinking about what we read. Rather than just shoving poems down the throats of our readers, we hope to create more of a symbiotic relationship in which readers get to actively participate in the success of the project and engage in dialogue with other readers.

On that note, we hope that our readers will reply not just with comments, but also with submissions of their own favorite poems that they would be willing to read out loud. To start off, we present senior editor Sarah Pfander reciting one of her favorite poems, “The Piano Speaks” by Shira Erlichman, and discussing it. Since the poem was written for a slam poetry contest, we will be publishing other slam poems for the remainder of the week.

Excerpt: “THE PIANO SPEAKS”
by Shira Erlichman

I am the mental hospital piano and I have seen hands.
Yes, you would call them hands, but I call them night-creatures
clasping chords in their teeth, translucent spiders cooing dawn home.
I’ve been touched by black boil-fettered fingers fat as tarantulas,
let me tell you about the spiders I’ve seen …
These are not hands, these are sky-scouting web-weavers.
These are not hands, these are teeth and eyes, and fingers like legs,
running, jumping, leaving, they are the quiet legs of children standing after being left,
they are the hospital-socked shuffling arrivals at 2 a.m. come to sleep in aluminum beds.
I have heard them speak in the language of pressed flowers: take me home.

And I remember every single last one of them:
Shamanistic surgeons, they tore music out of me with a rusty knife.
Dogs the color of urine, they howled hymns in neon hospital moonlight.
Heroin-blooded teenagers who wet the bed they were so terrified
of their hallucinations, they smoked me instead and got higher than Jesus.

I remember those towering monuments to loneliness
you call hands. They were peacocks spreading in front of me
and I saw their coats of bruises.
They sang like the dying, sang like mothers to children,
sang like a choir of prophets in jail.

They wanted me honest. They liked me honest which is to say I was broken.
Nobody on staff fixed my raspy keys.
My notes remained sour and they played me like loving:
not quite perfect, unlearned, without a how-to-book—played me solemn,
like tortoises making at loving, slow and fevered and with their eyes closed.
And though some were old, they were all ancient,
they were all legends for sleeping in hell while others walked through and got out.
They played symphonies that tore-down the walls
so drugged up hall-walkers fled their loneliness and joined in the fever.
They played onetime, completely improvised, endless and sky-scraping AIDS cures,
they played healing and they tore off their tourniquets for me to kiss
their bloody wildfires.

I have never belonged to opera-houses or your mother’s cushy living room.
I live with those who bang daylight out of moondust,
now you tell me how you do that unless you are built of magic.
They study their own burning bodies.
They transcribe smoke signals and tear the lightning from their throats.
I have heard five-tongued creatures smash sunrise into pulp.
I have seen rhododendrons blossom thunderously
with the quiet hope and hunger of living and dying
as they play and bloom and smash and burn.
And you call them hands,
you call them hands.

Watch Shira Erlichman recite her poem at the Border's Open-Door Poetry Web site.

“The Piano Speaks” is reprinted with the author's permission. The poem is excerpted from “Advertisement For A Human Being” by Shira Erlichman.