The Sunday Poem
The Sunday Poem: “Attention” by Lucy Griffith
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 Sunday Poem: “The news” by Emilie Lygren
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 the rest of the way. Forget with me for a moment. Take an unguarded breath. Do it now, the world needs your attention here, [...]
The Sunday Poem: “Climbing the Golden Mountain” by Michael Kiesow Moore
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.
The Sunday Poem: “Dear Vaccine” by Naomi Shihab Nye
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.
The Sunday Poem: “Carrot” by Leah Naomi Green
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.”
The Sunday Poem: “August Morning” by Albert Garcia
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...
The Sunday Poem: “I Would Like” by Jane Hirshfield
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.”
The Sunday Poem: “Before” by Jane Hilberry
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).
The Sunday Poem: Rebecca Foust’s “Kinship of Flesh”
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.
The Sunday Poem: “What Stillness” by Laura Foley
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.
The Sunday Poem: “Coniferous Fathers” by Michael Kleber-Diggs
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.
The Sunday Poem: “All I Want” by James Crews
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.
The Sunday Poem: “Mimesis” by Fady Joudah
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.
The Sunday Poem: “For the Korean Grandmother on Sunset Boulevard” by Christine Kitano
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.
The Sunday Poem: “Elation” by January Gill O’Neil
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.”
The Sunday Poem: You Don’t Know Me But by Laura Grace Weldon
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.”
The Sunday Poem: Nothing Wants to Suffer by Danusha Laméris
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.”
The Sunday Poem: Let This Day by Annie Lighthart
In “Let This Day,” Annie Lighthart makes the case for not trying to force some immediate alteration in outlook, and for not resisting it either. Instead, she says, “Let it change, rearrange.” Her words here remind me of what Rilke once wrote: “No feeling is final.”
The Sunday Poem: Dawn Callers by Alberto Ríos
It can be useful and centering to meditate on the sounds that begin our days, becoming attuned to certain birdsongs or noises of the human-made world. In this poem, Alberto Ríos employs a playfulness with language to convey what calls down and brings the morning for him.
The Sunday Poem: Lailah Dainin Shima’s Spring Ephemera
Spring Ephemera by Lailah Dainin Shima I don’t know How tiny, chartreuse Spears push through Thawing earth, penetrate Layers of leathered Oak leaves, reaching Unseen sun, not moved By fear or even hope Not freighted with worry How blood rivers its way Through my body How I hear it whirring How like this crocus These purple-sleeved arms Open wide to sky, to light For the time being [...]
The Sunday Poem: Angela Narciso Torres’s Chore
By describing first how her friend can turn any action or so-called chore into a form of prayer, and then showing us the way she does this “today” by folding laundry, Angela Narciso Torres teaches us to do the same. She writes so carefully and lovingly of how she smoothes, folds, stacks and drapes all of her and her family’s clothing that we can’t help but feel a sense of calmness and order emanating from this otherwise simple scene.