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.
We often think of resilience as the ability to spring back instantly from a challenging, harrowing time in our lives. Yet Shuly Cawood’s tender portrait of her mother as a resilient woman who has risen above difficult circumstances to make a life for herself and her family in the U.S. implies that resilience is a muscle built more slowly over time.
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.
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."
Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s poem, part of their “Miss You” series, captures the longing for a lost loved one with tenderness and fearless vulnerability. Through the listing of intimate details from the relationship—the “shrimp saganaki” they once made, the now-hip “puffy blue jacket” they once wore—Calvocoressi brings the lost one back to life, however briefly, in each reader’s imagination.
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.
It’s fitting that such a seemingly “small” poem, pointing to the fact that we each share “the same little bones” in our feet, should also hold so much wisdom. Kimberly Blaeser’s intention, after all, is to find the ways that we are all alike, rather than what divides us.
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.
Home— the place of attention. / Where you know that swirl in the road / marks the dust bath of a jackrabbit. / Or that a particular Canyon Wren ends / her descending aria with a startling yee-haw.
The news by Emilie Lygren Each morning we listen for what is breaking— the sound of a thousand tragedies fills the air, shattering that never stops, headlines, a fleet of anchors tangled at our feet. We watch, worried if we turn away even for an instant, it will all crumble [...]
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).