Katha Pollitt Poems

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1.
Small Comfort

Coffee and cigarettes in a clean cafe,
forsythia lit like a damp match against
a thundery sky drunk on its own ozone,
...

2.
Two Cats

It's better to be a cat than to be a human.
Not because of their much-noted grace and beauty—
their beauty wins them no added pleasure, grace is
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3.
Amor Fati

Everywhere I look I see my fate.
In the subway. In a stone.
On the curb where people wait for the bus in the rain.
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4.
Mind-Body Problem

When I think of my youth I feel sorry not for myself
but for my body. It was so direct
and simple, so rational in its desires,
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5.
November Fifth, Riverside Drive

The sky a shock, the ginkgoes yellow fever,
I wear the day out walking. November, and still
light stuns the big bay windows on West End
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6.
Job

Worse than the boils and sores
and the stench and the terrible flies
was the nattering: Think.
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7.
Old

No one left to call me Penelope,
mourned the old countess, on being informed of the death
of her last childhood friend. Did she sit long
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8.
Silent Letter

It's what you don't hear
that says struggle
as in wrath and wrack
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9.
Night Subway

The nurse coming off her shift at the psychiatric ward
nodding over the Post, her surprisingly delicate legs
shining darkly through the white hospital stockings,
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10.
LUNARIA

Now that I am
all done with spring
rampant in purple
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