As we roll into the last days of 2021, I am thinking about how we move out of one year and into the next, especially in this time of extended pandemic and uncertainty. It makes me think of Lucille Clifton bestowing the blessing, “may you […] sail through this to that.” May you. Wishing you peace and calm waters for the holidays.
“may you kiss
the wind then turn from it”
Going through paperwork this weekend, I came across a packet of poems and prompts for students, old enough that I don’t remember whether I put it together or someone else did (probably a combo of both). This poem seemed right for the moment. The prompt, if you’d like it, is: Write about a time of waiting in your life. What did it look like, feel like, smell like? What were you anticipating? Did you know?
“What else is there
but waiting in the autumn sun?”
While other places are already blanketed in snow, here in Central Texas fall has finally really arrived. When the wind rises, we hear the patter of leaves against the house, and the lawn and flower beds are beginning to fill. The cypress trees along the water shine orange. Neighbors bundle in jackets (if temporarily) to walk their dogs. Thus, this poem seemed right for the moment. It’s been a double Joy Harjo month.
“Forever will be a day like this
Strung perfectly on the necklace of days.
”
This evening I start teaching a poetry unit in Free Minds, and we will begin by reading aloud from Leaves of Grass. I’ve never taught Whitman before, but in the spring of 2020, all of us locked down in our individual homes, Free Minds offered a virtual reading of the poem. For the better part of an hour we read aloud—alums and faculty and friends in Austin, England, North Carolina, Boston. Different voices, accents, intonations. It was transcendent.
So we will try it again tonight. And in the box I placed these famous lines from Whitman’s Preface that might very well be titled, “Instructions on Living a Life.”
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals…
My family will be coming to our house for Thanksgiving this week, including our adolescent niece and nephew. When they were here for Easter, the poetry boxy held Ada Limón’s glorious ode to spring, “Instructions on Not Giving Up.” My niece, then 10, declared, “But there are no instructions in it.” Fair point.
I wanted this holiday poem to be as available to middle schoolers as retirees. And I’m glad to include a poem from Joy Harjo, Poet Laureate and member of the Muscogee Nation, and to celebrate the glory of gathering around a table, as we couldn’t for so long. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.
“The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what,
we must eat to live.”
I discovered this poem while preparing to facilitate a monthly gathering of Free Minds writers on Saturday, and it hasn’t left me since. So it became an unplanned addition to the poetry box. And I offer with it the prompt I gave the writers as we wrapped up our time together: What hopes are you carrying from one day to the next?
“So many plans I’ve laid have unraveled
easily as braids beneath my mother’s quick fingers.”
It is neither the first nor the last time that Danusha Lameris has appeared in the poetry box. Her mindful and accessible poems always resonate.
“Abide” is such a beautiful word, and so mysterious. How to define it? I feel the same about this poem by Jake Adam York, which is beautiful and mysterious and infused with the sense of autumn mingled with the last bits of summer. It’s the title poem of York’s posthumous book, Abide, which elegizes martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement. To spend more time with it, watch this choral performance of music Dan Forrest composed for the poem.
“...forgive me the few
syllables of the autumn crickets,
the year’s last firefly winking
like a penny in the shoulder’s weeds
”
I’ve been thinking about community, after a Halloween that included a potluck meet-and-greet party on our street, the first in the 17-ish years we’ve lived here. Turns out that Copper Canyon Press put together a beautiful anthology of poems of connection early in the pandemic, and I discovered this Dan Gerber poem there. Through the poem I also discovered the myth of the Jian bird, which is born with just one wing and one eye and thus must lean against another bird and act as one in order to fly. It’s an ancient myth, which is to say as true as ever.
“no me, no you, no opinions,
no beginning, no middle, no end
”
This poem is darker than I usually put in the box, and perhaps more mythic. I spent the weekend in a Narrative Medicine workshop and in one of our small group sessions, we spent more than an hour with this poem. As we talked about it, pulled out lines that stood out for us, and wrote to the prompt, “Write about a different manner of weather,” it kept opening up and opening up. Each person saw it in a different way. And so I finished the weekend with this poem on my mind and the sense that it might have something—many things—to offer this week.
“....something
Large and old awoke. And then our singing
Brought on a different manner of weather. ”
How often we talk of aging—significant birthdays, life shifts, bodily ailments, reflections on shrinking (or expanding) horizons. I like this poem by Chaun Ballard for the way the speaker laughs at himself and his midlife restraints while also capturing the poignancy of being the one still living. I discovered it while meandering around the poetry selections in the New York Times Magazine, a fine place to encounter new and familiar voices.
“...I’m
my father in that faded polaroid
taken somewhere in California.”
I’ve long loved this nugget of verse, the smallest poem I’ve put in the box so far. I chose it this week because I asked a friend to read it at our wedding 13 years ago today. When I shared it with her, I apologized for giving her something so short, and she laughed and said she’d read whatever I wanted. And this was it.
“And did you get
what you wanted from this life, even so?”
This is not the only poem titled “Dust” that I have in line for the poetry box. But this is the one that speaks to this tired moment where many of us find ourselves, where we might find wonder or vision or inspiration, but lack what it takes to rise to it. Thus, Dorianne Laux unwittingly gave us a poem for pandemic, year two.
“Now, I remember only the flavor —
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.”
I don’t remember where I discovered this poem by Roque Dalton, as he wasn’t a poet I was aware of until recently. But I love its theme of shared experience, shared humanity. And I too believe that poetry is for everyone, and that those of us who love it should also do our best to share it.
“I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone
Creo que el mundo es bello
que el poesía es como el pan, de todos”
I read this poem for every Free Minds orientation for years, and its final lines show up repeatedly as inspiration and reminder. I posted this on the final week of summer, a blazing hot afternoon where we felt ready to give up, the sun so oppressive. But I wanted to squeeze this into the season. And I wanted to return to Mary Oliver at the one-year anniversary of the poetry box. Maybe it’ll be a tradition.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
In September 2001 Lucille Clifton sent the Academy of American Poets a short manuscript titled “September Suite.” The poems responded to the world in that moment. It is 20 years later.
“thunder and lightning and our world
is another place”
Of all the things to miss during this seemingly endless pandemic, dancing alongside other dancers is high on my list. Rita Dove offers a glimpse of that in this week’s poem. I remember reading about how after their house burned down, when they were literally combing through the ashes of their former life, she and her husband went out and danced. This poem offers dance as a reprieve from grief to which I’d add, right now, grief personal and grief communal.
Here’s a delightful video of Rita Dove and her husband dancing.
“one man and
one woman,
rib to rib,
with no heartbreak in sight”
We were gone for the month of August, off to someplace cooler where we ate our breakfasts beside windows that looked out on hollyhocks and mountains and held our Zoom meetings from a table on the back porch. I asked our house sitter to put up this poem for the week we returned, not knowing what surprises would await us on return (the politics of Texas being one of them) but also knowing we would be grateful to be home.
“We turned into the drive
and gravel flew up from the tires
like sparks from a fire. So much
to be done —”
I discovered this poem on the lovely A Year of Being Here blog, a great source of mindful poetry that seeks to do much of what I hope to do with the poetry box — invite a pause, invite a reflection. I don’t know David Watts’ poetry, but I know that he is a doctor alongside being a poet, and I know that the intimacy that exists or can exist between patient and physician—and here between father and son—is central to his work.
Stars care of Courtney. Posting care of Meredith. Abundance of green and flowers care of the surprise of summer rains in Texas.
“...how lovely it is to be with each other
in the long, resilient mornings.”
I don’t think of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh as a poet, but it turns out he is. I do think of him as a voice for mindfulness, for meditation, for finding happiness in the simplicity of washing dishes or taking a walk. The poetry box sits on the curb, so most of those who interact with it do so while walking. May our walks be peace walks, May our walks be happiness walks.
“We walk for ourselves.
We walk for everyone
always hand in hand.”
Thanks to Meredith for posting this while we were off on our own walking adventures.
This poem reaches back to a time when I thought a lot about relationship endings and what holds us—and doesn’t hold us—together. It takes on a new meaning 18 months into a pandemic that has both bound and divided us.
“And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;”
Artwork by Courtney Tucker