NPM: Day 17

I've had this interview with Yusef Komunyakaa open in a tab since last month, ever since I posted his poem about seeing Barack Obama with a copy of Derek Walcott's poems. (You can see that post here.) 

I've been reading Komunyakaa's work, and here are some I found on the Poetry Foundation site that I particularly appreciated:

Islands. This one has an epigraph "For Derek Walcott," and it definitely makes me think of Walcott's long poem "Omeros." (I wrote some about that here.) 

This next one continues the Homeric theme. Infidelity is about Zeus, and the part of the Iliad it refers to is not in the simplified version I read with my eighth graders every year. That's the part where Zeus goes on and on in great detail to his wife Hera about all the other women who appeal to him, apparently thinking she's going to find this somehow an aphrodisiac. 

And this one, Ghazal, After Ferguson, is about an altogether more modern theme. The Ferguson of the title is Ferguson, Missouri. 

Today's line for the Progressive Poem is here.