Anti-War Pantoum
              Everyone should write a spring poem.  
                                                      Louise Glück

For, in spite of everything, spring has come again:
Daffodils push up spears, as if marching to war.
Robins scratch the ground, kick up turf,
Who could imagine, grass this shade of green?

So many young men, marching off to war
Under a cloud of lies and patriotism— 
Who could imagine, news that’s not real,
Concocted out of someone’s rich imagination?

Under a dark cloud of invented facts,
Forsythia explodes in blossom.
Reporters at laptops, inventing news,
the furrowed earth, waits for rain.

The forsythia’s rockets explode, electric;
Our bodies spark when they undress.
Your brow furrows, and the rain
Comes down on the just and unjust, alike.

Our electric bodies, in the dark.
Robins fighting for their turf.
The just and the unjust wait for rain.
Despite all rumors, spring returns.

-first published in Santa Fe Broadsides



Summer Women
 

The warm May sun has brought them out,
these summer women—hair streaked with light,
limbs already turning golden.
They belong on the courts,
so graceful, so stately,
returning perfect backhands.
They never sweat.
Beside them, we seem less
(or more, if our flesh exceeds
the bounds of propriety, or shorts),
our imperfections magnified
in the dazzling light.
This is never-land, where messy life,
with its bills and children, does not intrude,
where happiness is attainable,
desires fulfilled,
and if it equals zero,
they'll call it love.

-from Barbara Crooker: Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2015)



Freight Train
​

Swollen like a melon in July,
lumbersome as a moose,
I've boarded that train
and I can't get off,
no return trip.
 
Some babies are sweet
and pink as peaches;
others are wrinkled,
and scream like herons;
dispositions not optional,
all sales final.
 
Yet I know
that first cry
will bond me like glue,
and those wandering, wondering
dark eyes will fix my heart
faster than any lover. 

-first published in Journey Into Motherhood (Putnam’s, 1996)



The Lost Children


The ones we never speak of— 
miscarried, unborn,
removed by decree,
taken too soon, crossed over.
They slip red mittens in our hands,
smell of warm wet wool,
are always out of sight.
We glimpse them on escalators,
over the shoulders of dark-haired women;
they return to us in dreams.
We hold them, as they evanesce;
we never speak their names.
How many children do you have?
Two, we answer, thinking three,
or three, thinking four;
they are always with us.
The lost children come to us
at night and whisper
in the shells of our ears.
They are waving goodbye
on schoolbuses,
they are separated from us
in stadiums,
they are lost in shopping malls
with their fountains and pools,
they disappear on beaches,
they shine at night in the stars.

-from Barbara Crooker: Selected Poems (FutureCyclePress, 2015)



Compare & Contrast
after “Control Top Panty” by Martha Silano

When I was an undergraduate, I thought it
would be brilliant to write my compare &

contrast paper on the Maidenform three-way stretch
girdle and the three branches of US government:

executive, legislative, judicial.
I somehow worked in power panels

and breathable mesh, control
and flexibility, checks and balances.  

And this makes me think about two women
from church, raised on hot bacon dressing,

potato filling, donuts fried in lard, talking
about how they got stuck in their Spanx

in a dressing room at Macy’s—  But back
to the paper, written in the sixties, 

on a manual typewriter (an object
preceding the word processor that went

“ding” when you reached the end of a line.
You had to do the hard return yourself,

with a silver lever) before any shots 
were fired over the prow in the sexual 

revolution.  Then we got liberated, 
went braless, girdleless, shoeless. . . .

But where are we now, in a world that 
sneers if our waists pop out in muffin tops?  

Has the world spun out of control, or is it spun
out of Lycra?  We’ve raised our consciousness

and hemlines, but now the elastic waistband’s come
full circle, and we’re stuffed into our shapewear

like my Uncle Angelo making da sausiche, grinding
plump rumps, adding spices, stuffing the mixture

into casings.  Some with fennel, some with cheese.  How 
do we feel, encased in Power Panels?  Empowered

or corseted?  Should we go Slim Cognito?  Pray
to a Super Higher Power?  Start speaking in tongues,

waving our arms above our heads (no slippage here),
shouting Bra-lelluhjah, amen, amen?
        
-first published in Earth’s Daughters, 2014