Sample Poems by Kareem Tayyar
In A
Nashville Hotel
It's after eleven when,
Barefoot and half-asleep,
I take the
elevator down to the lobby
To purchase a bottle of water
From the vending
machine.
The singer is a kid no older than twenty,
Maybe twenty-one years old,
Yet the
way he sings "Walking in Memphis"
Makes me believe his soul is five or six times that
age,
And that he was there the night
W.C. Handy first stepped off a train in
Memphis,
Tilted his cornet towards the sky,
And began to rearrange the stars with his
songs.
King Oliver In San Francisco
Geary Street will
always be the place you and your orchestra
Set up shop one afternoon
Before a crumbling brick
wall
And opened up the Heavens with your songs
"Mabel's Dream" and "Canal Street Blues"
and "Weather Bird Rag"
Turning the City into a satellite New Orleans
The streetcars rolling up and
down the hills
Like itinerant musicians
And all the Richmond District immigrants
Coming
to and from work
Transforming blue collar life
Into something resembling a glorious
parade
Oakland, 2:35am
Those Orpheus Blues the musician
strums,
Those twelve-bar Crossroads Blues,
Blues for the subway girl who got away,
Blues for
the young man in the mirror
Whose face you have not seen in years,
Blues for those pre-war
nights,
For those rolling fields fired by the lights
Of all those dreaming railroad men,
Their
hearts tied to the tracks,
Night rolling over them and them still beating,
Those Welfare
Blues,
Those I'll-Never-Drink-Again Blues,
Those Last-Call-and-She-Isn't-Going-Home-With-You
Blues,
Those Rooftop Blues where you're standing close enough
To the ceiling of the world to paint
it,
To turn that bald blue canvas into fresco,
Those early Adam Blues,
Those No-Looking-Back
Blues,
A man and a woman,
One suitcase between them,
Leaving the Garden Forever
Blues,
And somehow everyone is dancing,
More than a few people's feet have left the floor,
It's
the Levitation Blues,
The God-Give-Me Pain-and-I'll-Raise-You-Grace-Blues,
And anyway it's
raining outside,
And some drunk girl near the bar says something
About the moon falling from
the sky,
And it's too late for us to catch our train,
And you've never looked as lovely as you do right
now,
Your soul like a G chord that just rings and rings and rings,
An electric church bell calling me
to Worship Blues.
In The Library, Golden West
College
You are sitting at the Tutoring Desk
And waiting for your next
appointment to arrive,
When you notice one of your literature students,
A good-
natured,
Enthusiastically intelligent young man
Who has shown a fondness in the early weeks
Of the semester
For the stories of Sherman Alexie,
Kneel down in front of the large
windows
That look out onto a small courtyard,
And begin to pray towards Mecca.
It lasts
only a few minutes,
And all around him people go about their lives,
Checking their
iPhones,
Thumbing through textbooks,
Scanning the shelves for the titles they need,
But
what you notice as he goes through his ritual
Is that watching a good man pray
Isn't so much
witnessing an act of faith
As much as it is watching an artist at work,
His entire body a
paintbrush,
The pen of a poet,
The guitar in the hands of a true musician,
The mundane
suddenly transformed
By his belief in its sanctity