I resonate with the stubborn optimism of this poem, the way the speaker seems to be convincing herself, with the repetition of the word, “praise,” over and over, that there’s still beauty in “what little there’s left” at the end of November, before winter sets in.
It's difficult to resist the social pressure that turns the holidays into an excuse for consumption and stress. Yet Marjorie Saiser brings love and acceptance to a situation that might anger or disappoint other parents: her children will not be coming home for Thanksgiving.
Dorianne Laux’s “In Any Event” seems tailored to our times. I would like to say that it gives me hope, yet what I feel after reading the poem runs much deeper than that.
This poem from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s luminous collection, Hush, challenges our typical fears of the cycles of mortality. Instead of resisting or bemoaning the “uncertainty” with which we all must live out lives, not knowing when they’ll end, or when our loved ones will pass on, she chooses to celebrate how “the field rehearses to die."
At a time when so many of us are watching gardens fade and dead leaves twirl down from the trees, it can be useful to meditate on the beginnings of all the plant life around us, reminding ourselves that they too will soon sprout again.
Our culture, and the people in our lives who don’t always understand depression, can often imply that it is a made-up or fleeting thing—“a wraith or a demon.” Yet Diana Whitney’s moving and precise poem tells the truth about the psychological and emotional weight of something that bears down on us like a “huge container ship,” blocking all movement.
We might feel that we missed out on some necessary information handed out to everyone else long ago. It's a natural human response. In his poem, Brad Aaron Modlin offers a playful yet sincere take on this idea as he explores what we all might have missed...
I find this poem by Ada Limón a deeply moving reminder of all the times in my life when I wasn’t aware of what someone was giving up to take care of me, to offer something I needed.
The practice Heather Swan refers to in the last stanza of “Bowl” is called kintsugi, which in Japanese means literally, “golden joinery.” Yet this drive to highlight the cracks in something—what some might call its failures—goes against the message most of us receive throughout our lives, that we should be striving for a perfection I’m not even sure exists for anyone.
I can’t help but read Derek Sheffield's “For Those Who Would See” as a commentary on the nature of our minds, the way thoughts and worries come and go with only “winks of calm/coming between bouts” of distraction and disturbance.
Michael Kiesow Moore’s opening invitation in this poem is to “listen” to all the noise our devices create in our lives, and then to “Turn everything off,” and feel the difference for ourselves.
Young People’s Poet Laureate Naomi Shihab Nye wrote “Dear Vaccine” as the seed poem for the Global Vaccine Poem Project, which invites people from all over the world to write their own letters to the COVID-19 vaccines, sharing any part of their own personal experience to form a “community poem” that now boasts nearly 2,100 poems from 118 countries and every state in the U.S.
Reading Leah Naomi Green’s poem, I think of what Rabbi Abraham Herschel once wrote: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement . . . get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”
Albert Garcia begins “August Morning” with the scent of a ripe melon that wakes him, perfuming the house “too sweetly.” And throughout the rest of the poem, he keeps opening his senses wide to the moment at hand...
We often move through life with preconceived notions about what will affect us, and what will make us the person we hope to become. Yet I see Jane Hirshfield’s “What I Like” as a full awakening to all the ways we are touched by each day, with its many chance encounters and so-called “mistakes.”
Though written during the pandemic, Jane Hilberry’s honest poem resonates at this moment as well, when so many of us find ourselves reemerging into the world, heading out to offices and workplaces again (or deciding to make larger life changes).
During such divided times, it can be easy—when we disagree so fundamentally—to forget the humanity of other people. What might seem to us a gesture of supporting the greater good and the well-being of our society (like getting vaccinated, for instance), can just as easily seem to someone else a threat to their liberty, or a source of fear for their own health. What is perhaps most shocking at this point in the pandemic is just how separate we can feel from the people we love most, from family members with whom we share a "kinship of flesh," as the title of Rebecca Foust's poem points out.
As much as I value silence and down-time, especially when spent in nature, I still resist the stillness I most need in order to glimpse, as Laura Foley puts it so well, “the world below the surface” of our stressful lives.
In this poem, and indeed throughout his stunning first collection of poetry, Worldly Things, Michael Kleber-Diggs fearlessly enacts his own rebellion against the cultural stereotypes of fathers and men as hard, stoical, often detached from their loved ones.
One of the basic questions we can ask ourselves is this: Who or what am I not appreciating right now? When my father was still alive, I seldom took the time to notice those work-shirts he’d shed as soon as he got home, draping them over the kitchen chairs. My father worked long hours as a maintenance mechanic at a factory that made plastic toolboxes until he grew too weak with Hepatitis C to keep it up. Now, of course, I’d give just about anything to be back in our old house some evening, watching as his rusty Dodge pick-up pulled into the driveway, seeing him smile as he threw open the screen door and greeted us all.
Young people have the uncanny ability to distill what we believe are complex concepts into the simplest, most relatable human terms. The speaker’s daughter in “Mimesis” clearly does this, and with nothing more than a sincere question asked at the end of the poem: “that’s how others/Become refugees isn’t it?” With those few words spoken in defense of a spider, she calls us all into a greater empathy with the world that we might not have realized was possible.
As Christine Kitano shows in her moving poem, if we’re present enough to another person, we can actually become attuned to what they’re feeling. In fact, even the act of paying deep attention to a stranger can create a sense of connection, no matter how fleeting.
In “Elation,” January Gill O’Neil exquisitely captures the sense of privacy and relief that can arise when we enter a forest, even if it happens to be in the middle of a bustling city. O’Neil’s poem reminds me of what David Wagoner once wrote: “If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,/You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows/Where you are. You must let it find you.”
Laura Grace Weldon begins her poignant poem with a list of what she has come to miss ever since the pandemic first hit. Confined to her home, she pays special attention to those people she once encountered on a daily basis out in the world—her fellow walkers, the cashier she’d learned to recognize, as well as the librarian “whose voice,” she points out, “is soft as my mother’s was.”
It seems essential that in Danusha Laméris’ poem, humans don’t make a real appearance until the very end when she posits that we are “offspring” of the stars, “scattered so far beyond reach.”