Ward Stories
Spring has sprung and our poets issue verse. Five poets have risen to grace the City Voices’ stage with works that reflect love, loss & self-hate. So read these poems aloud and record your recitations. Play it back on high volume, auto-repeat, while engaging in healthful practices during quarantine. I think you will find deep meaning here.
Words
By Sara Abend
It gets worse—I use meaningless words
So silence
I have private thoughts that don’t mean
Anything
Worse—opposite words
Didn’t mean anything—it’s a mystery
The nurses were nice—they listened
I had a narcissistic family
Be very careful with Orlando—
Pick words with care
Can’t get away with it
With friends, not friends
Hairdressers
Work
My family loves me
Even though I’m crazy
Untitled
By Kathryn Marie Fazio
Now that you are fifty
you are half.
Take the other half to the beach
and walk on the shore.
Find the hole some child left
while building castles in the sand.
Jump in the hole.
Eulogy for My Mother
By Craig Bayer
Thanks, Mom…
For being a dreamer and raising your children to be dreamers and to be people with good values.
For helping me study and get me through public school.
For introducing me to most of my childhood friends.
For helping me find Boston University when I wasn’t even sure I’d go to college.
For helping pay my way through college.
For fighting for me behind the scenes. I almost forgot you were a fighter until you got feisty later on in life.
For always supporting me and believing in me.
For putting me through Hebrew School.
For sending me to day camp and sleepaway camp, even though you did not like being apart from me.
For giving me a loving sister, whom I can look up to.
Mom, you can stop second-guessing yourself, you did a great job from beginning to end. I dedicate the rest of my life’s work to you!
Black Love
By Zisa Aziza
Negress to Negress
They my only Empress
God has a hue, she is true
In the mirror, we rendezvous
The bucket I bear, spills with pain
Neither profane, nor ordain–but I reign
Over the years, I pour it out
Dreaming of a drought
When the wound can speak
Shame loses its mystique
I am the practitioner of my liberation
My sojourn to self-love was a deliberation
The itinerary to my destination
Intimates that black love is salvation
Devoted I am
Stuff of Comfort
By Howard (Chaim) Kwass
I knew of a place where doubt lurked at all turns
In the end always losing, never seeming to learn
“I canNOT deal with this place I currently reside!”
(Self hate, fear, anger, were lurking inside)
When you’re human with problems you reach for assistance
My STUFF OF COMFORT and my least resistance
It was THE STUFF OF COMFORT! Then it proceeded to say……….
So I cursed it! And quickly it just ran away
I resolved not to meet up…No! Not just this time
With my STUFF OF COMFORT inside my mind
I was falling and failing, but let’s just be clear
I was trying – the sad part was that I WAS sincere
Then I pondered, “STUFF OF COMFORT your record is dimal!
“Worse than that YOU’RE THE FAILURE so cruel, so abysmal!
“With you on my team I lose – never winning!”
I got it! This was or is the beginning
Sometimes it is worse. But my friends, they ARE real
It can be glorious at times to actually feel
“So goodBye STUFF Howard (Chaim) Kwass OF COMFORT. It’s time for me to have fun
“My Higher Power is calling me. There is work to be done!”
