It’s vital to look back on our lives and trace those first, formative encounters with wonder and awe. We might ask ourselves: What experiences taught us to revere the world? As Naomi Shihab Nye reveals in “Little Farmer,” her own childhood connection to the organic farm in Missouri close to where she grew up planted the seeds of wonder in her.
Living in cities and moving from place to place for most of my adult life, I had fallen out of the habit of gardening. Like many, I’d lost touch with the food I found for sale in grocery stores and even at farmer’s markets, forgetting the pleasure (and intense hard work) of being part of the growing process from beginning to end.
Directed at the so-called “influencers” and advertisers online who vie for our attention, this poem rejects such marketing manipulation. Instead, Patrick Ramsay says he would rather be influenced to “send more postcards./To kiss with more tongue . . . and make cold brew at home.”
Life presents us with so many moments when we can choose to react or not, turn one way, or go in another direction. Do we choose peace, or move into reactivity?
Even in the midst of a ravaging sorrow, joy can arise in us seemingly out of nowhere. And as Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer illustrates so well in this week’s poem, our task then becomes not rejecting the joy, accepting that “key,” we often receive from someone else.
It can be useful, of course, for us to hold onto instants of joy and connection when they happen in the moment. We can pause, truly take them in, and allow them to stay, instead of turning away from those bursts of deeper happiness. Yet it’s also possible, as Rage Hezekiah illustrates so beautifully in her poem, to look back at certain times in our lives and relive the “guiltless” pleasure that we felt then.
The poet Ross Gay has said: “Gratitude is a grave thing.” Kelli Russell Agodon’s exuberant “Praise” embodies this truth by listing all the seemingly plain things in life that bring her pleasure, in spite of the disappointments and failures that come along with them.
It’s amazing that we can create a singular place on the page—a whole world—as Natalie Goldberg does so well in the wide-ranging and open-armed “Home.”
It’s hard not to feel wonder and awe for the migrating birds that finally return to us, “bearing the light” of the faraway places they’ve been. Here, José A. Alcántara, who writes with such deep affection of his connection to the natural world, recounts a moment spent trying to attract the hummingbirds hovering near him.
It feels refreshing that the attentive speaker of Terri Kirby Erickson’s poem refuses to turn away from this scene of a father lowering his disabled son into a wheelchair.
As is so often the case in his work, Ross Gay calls us back to delight over and over in spite of the “brink” and final “deep sleep” that await us all.
Most of us probably remember those times when some elder or parent first passed onto us their reverence for the natural world. Often, it’s not until we grow older and mature ourselves that those scraps of memory return in full and vivid detail.
Poet and farmer Wendell Berry once wrote: “Be joyful, though you have considered the facts.” Yet with our packed schedules, and so much negativity and injustice in the world, it can be difficult to believe we deserve any of the daily joys that actually renew us.
This poem is an invitation to become more aware of your weariness, and to do something “with your whole heart” again, with full attention.
All through Kari Gunter-Seymour’s striking and precisely rendered poem, we feel a bone-deep desire to be known, to be touched in the midst of both geographical and perhaps some greater isolation.
In this poem from his marvelous book, Garden Time, W.S. Merwin gets at the heart of a mystifying truth: It’s often easier to write or speak of grief than it is to describe some sudden burst of joy.
Molly Fisk’s simple yet profound poem speaks to nature’s constant cycles of death and rebirth, and our own part in them. She also points out how deprivation, especially in the depths of winter’s shorter days, when we’re forced to stay more distant from each other, can help us appreciate any little light when it does come, sometimes seemingly out of nowhere.
We often dismiss it as nostalgia when we look back with joy on those simpler, more innocent times in our lives. Yet as Jennifer G. Lai’s poem illustrates so well, certain periods in life simply are less complicated, before our culture, families, and peers place their expectations and limitations on us, before a larger awareness of the world seeps in.
Looking out at a bleak and seemingly bare winter landscape, I’d just had the same thought a few days before I read Ada Limón’s poem—that it’s hard to tell the difference between the few birds left, and the leaves tumbling over the frozen ground.
The repetition of words and phrases in “Coffee Break”—such as “Coffee would be nice”—lends this poem an incantatory, prayer-like quality that often appears in Kwame Dawes’ work. But what we think will be a portrait of a man offering to make his sick friend a cup of coffee on a cool evening, quickly becomes a larger meditation on life’s transience.
A poem of winter delight like this one by Albert Garcia seems the perfect way to mark the turning of another year.
As Ted Kooser shows us in “It Doesn’t Take Much,” simply noticing the people we encounter in daily life, and really seeing them in all their uniqueness and humanity, can also become a form of kindness.
One can almost hear the song of a rustling wind passing through tree branches in the word, “Tutuwas,” which the poet uses here. Tracing the etymology of this evocative term, Joseph Bruchac writes that “Tutuwas” carries “more than one connotation. It’s the name of a song that’s also called ‘Little Pines,’ which can be heard in all our various Wabanaki nations throughout New England.
As she does in so much of her work, Linda Hogan fosters a quiet yet wide-sweeping intimacy in this poem. Here, we find the affection of a speaker and her beloved, “em-braced/in animal presence,” curled up with their dog and cat before bed on a winter night. Yet Hogan masterfully extends this closeness until the whole world is also held at the warm center of this late night scene.
I always try to be on the lookout for moments of sudden attention in my life, like the one Sierra Golden describes so vividly in “Winter Heat.” Like her, I believe this is how a poem happens: some sound or image observed in stillness shifts something inside us, and we do our best to find the language to capture that unexpected change in perception.