Bruce Lader

Bruce Lader Poems

Bruce Lader Biography

Bruce Lader is the former director of Bridges Tutoring, an organization educating multicultural students. Currently he brings writers' groups together in the Raleigh area, gives readings in the NC Triad and appears widely on YouTube, local TV, radio, podcasts and international magazine sites. Poetry Foundation, Poets & Writers, New York Quarterly, and many other literary resources archive his work. Lader’s poetry is characterized by a humanistic world vision, psychological insight, ironic humor, and speculative imagination. His themes are the need for freedom, love, and social justice. Describing Landscapes of Longing, Kathryn Stripling Byer commented: “…a powerful, unsparing, and yet tender book about the realities of self and culture that have assailed us since the beginning of human time.” Kelly Cherry wrote of Fugitive Hope: ... " [the book] deepens, broadens, and sweetens, as a pastoral symphony might…. an astonishing journey, beautiful and hopeful.” Discovering Mortality was a finalist for the 2006 Brockman-Campbell Book Award. In addition to winning the 2010 Left Coast Eisteddfod Poetry Competition, he has received a writer’s residency from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and numerous honoraria.)

The Best Poem Of Bruce Lader

Messages Of Light And Dark

The stories of resistance writ in my face
disclose the many-faceted dreams
of confluent cultures.
This common nose indicates a lineage
with Mid-Eastern roots, European limbs.
These ordinary hands are branches
offering help to Latinos, Africans, and Asians
wanting to be free. Together our palms unfold
convoluted maps, a global network
of nerves and capillaries.

Undulant as the sea, my Mediterranean hair,
is a mingling black and white multitude
of wave-posters: Mohawk, Afro, Cleopatra,
Liberty spikes plead Disarmament now.
Teargas that targets protestors in Los Angeles,
Damascus, Ferguson, and Santiago
burns these eyes reflecting sorrow and hope.
The irises display layers of identity, whorls
of hues explain We've been weeping a long time,
millions of ancestors have dispersed in smoke.

Even when my mouth doesn't make a sound,
the second language of my body broadcasts
emotional accents, a traveling ethos of gestures,
tattoos, and clothing that advertises views.
My judicious language yearns to skywrite
opinions like Prevent animal poaching,
Cutting down woodlands injures everyone.

My soul, a hybrid of colloquial flyers,
voices myriad riddles, epigrams, idioms,
wings memos like We breathe the same air
and drink the same rains.
War is a fatal disease, the remedy is peace...
words obliterated in military winds.

The dead are also demonstrating,
projecting memory-dreams over land and sea
to reclaim lives, countries, and music.
When my brother and I visited our mother's
grave in Eugene, branches above the tombstone
morphed a tuning-fork vibrant with leaflets
publicizing a flavorful dialect in soothing wind,
her friendly spirit joined rallies
of dancing and weeping tombstones.

Borders cannot block dreams—the spirits
of migrants grieve, laugh, and love
in diverse languages and universal texts
declaring worldwide solidarity, a climate
of interwoven ancestry and spaces
shared with other species.
Events announced, and disregarded,
stream before and beyond the final caress.

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