Poem of the Day: ‘Girl In a Miniskirt Reading the Bible Outside My Window,’ by Charles Bukowski

It took all month, but we finally found a Bukowski poem clean enough to post in this public forum (there are kids out there, we like to be careful.) Today’s poem of the day is  Girl In a Miniskirt Reading the Bible Outside My Window, originally published in the collection Mockingbird Wish Me Luck and which can also be found in the more recent collection, Run with the Hunted  (Ecco, 1994.)

~

Girl In a Miniskirt Reading the Bible Outside My Window

Sunday, I am eating a
grapefruit, church is over at the Russian
Orthadox to the
west.

she is dark
of Eastern descent,
large brown eyes look up from the Bible
then down. a small red and black
Bible, and as she reads
her legs keep moving, moving,
she is doing a slow rythmic dance
reading the Bible. . .

long gold earrings;
2 gold bracelets on each arm,
and it’s a mini-suit, I suppose,
the cloth hugs her body,
the lightest of tans is that cloth,
she twists this way and that,
long yellow legs warm in the sun. . .

there is no escaping her being
there is no desire to. . .

my radio is playing symphonic music
that she cannot hear
but her movements coincide exactly
to the rythms of the
symphony. . .

she is dark, she is dark
she is reading about God.
I am God.

~Charles Bukowski wrote poetry, prose and novels. He loved drinking, women, and drinking, in that order. Poetry Foundation has a most thorough bio.

(The poem originally recommended by one of our staff members, for the record, was like a flower in the rain, which you can find in Love Is a Dog From Hell publised by Ecco in 2002, but which, for reasons which are evident if you know the poem, we’re going to leave in the book for now.)