The Sunday Poem
The Sunday Poem: “In My Mind’s Coral, Mother Still Calls Us from Inside” by Jennifer G. Lai
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.
The Sunday Poem: “It’s the Season I Often Mistake” by Ada Limón
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 Sunday Poem: “Coffee Break” by Kwame Dawes
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.
The Sunday Poem: “Ice” by Albert Garcia
A poem of winter delight like this one by Albert Garcia seems the perfect way to mark the turning of another year.
The Sunday Poem: “It Doesn’t Take Much” by Ted Kooser
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.
The Sunday Poem: “My Mother Says She Does Not Know How to Cook” by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood
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.
The Sunday Poem: “Tutuwas” by Joseph Bruchac
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.
The Sunday Poem: “Arctic Night, Lights Across the Sky” by Linda Hogan
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.
The Sunday Poem: “Winter Heat” by Sierra Golden
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.
The Sunday Poem: “Praise Song” by Barbara Crooker
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.
The Sunday Poem: “Thanksgiving for Two” by Marjorie Saiser
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.
The Sunday Poem: “In Any Event” by Dorianne Laux
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.
The Sunday Poem: “Shavasana” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
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."
The Sunday Poem: “Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you.” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
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.
The Sunday Poem: “Essence” by Kai Coggin
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.
The Sunday Poem: “About Standing (in Kinship)” by Kimberly Blaeser
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.
The Sunday Poem: “The Ever-Given” by Diana Whitney
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.
The Sunday Poem: “What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade” by Brad Aaron Modlin
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...
The Sunday Poem: “The Raincoat” by Ada Limón
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 Sunday Poem: “Bowl” by Heather Swan
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.
The Sunday Poem: “For Those Who Would See” by Derek Sheffield
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.