The weather map is daunting with its palette of orange, red, and purple. If you’ve found yourself someplace temperate, count yourself lucky. Here in Austin we are burning up and a glimpse across the globe tells me we’re not alone. So I knew heat would be the theme for the poetry box this week, though only the hardiest of dog walkers may pass by in person. Here’s a little plea for a breeze from H.D.
“Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air—”
Oh, transitions. In my life people are leaving jobs, selling houses, moving to new places, following up on diagnoses, completing degrees, starting new careers, having babies, testing the word retirement in their mouths. So much change is underway, and I was delighted to discover this poem by Major Jackson in my in-box this morning, care of the marvelous Chris at Firefly Creative Writing. Wishing you blessings on whatever journey you’ve undertaken. There are “no more dress rehearsals / to attend.”
“This time, let me circle
the island of my fears only once then
live like a raging waterfall and grow
a magnificent mustache.”
It is a new month, a new season – summer is already pummeling us in Texas, and the kids are out of school. Even small transitions can make me reflective, and the news from Uvalde and Ukraine and elsewhere has me asking again how it is we are supposed to live our lives. This poem, which I first encountered through the wonderful Parker Palmer, offers ways of reflecting beyond the big transitions. How did we live our day?
Here is some of what we know about how the poet, Jeanne Lohmann, lived her days: She continued to mentor poets in her community into her 90s, opened her home as a gathering place for writers, and her poems can be found in the woods and walkways at Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia, WA. Her obituary opens, “She was a mother, sister, wife, poet, lover of literature, social justice, beauty and cooking!”
“What did you learn
from things you dropped and picked up
and dropped again?”
And suddenly I missed a week in the poetry box, unsure what words were right for the moment, or the many moments happening right now. Then today, I offered it some Rita Dove. This is a poem that says, “Chin up. Hop to it, now.” And so we will, amid spring gardens and war and hard news and graduation joys. Amid all of it.
Plus, who doesn’t love a poem with fried eggs in it?
“The whole sky is yours
to write on, blown open
to a blank page. ”
We are home from nearly three weeks of meandering through Southern Spain (glorious!). As we step back into our lives at home, we face again the realities of our responsibilities. Some of them we want to turn away from—the leak from the washing machine, the mountains of email. And some of them draw us forward. I’m happy to water the garden, to try the new chicken and rice recipe, to refill the bird feeder. As I got ready to do the latter, I came across this small poem. It reminds me again that while the domestic life may lack sweeping landscapes, it is also where we often find the holy.
he jumped into her hand
began to eat
she smiled
This poem by Pat Schneider, founder of Amherst Writers & Artists and its teaching method, often appears in collections of spiritual poetry. The journey here is metaphorical, and one we all take at different times in our lives. One that sometimes takes us far away and sometimes leads us right back home.
“The world, too, sheds its skin:
politicians, cataclysms, ordinary days.”
It’s prime garden time here in Austin, one of those rare moments of lushness in our often scruffy, prickly environment. The greens in my veggie beds are insistent in their brightness, and they brought me to this little domestic scene from Lucille Clifton. In this reading, she said, “Greens aren’t funny. Greens are good.” Greens are good.
(Also wonderful is poet Terrance Haye’s more recent reading of this poem.)
“i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship.”
I listened (again) last week to Krista Tippett’s interview with poet Mary Oliver, and Oliver talked about how as she got older, her poems got shorter. “But if you can say it in a few lines, you’re just decorating for the rest of it,” she said.
Seeking poems for the poetry box has made me aware of how rare and powerful a tiny poem can be. I need something short enough to be read during a pause in a walk, short enough to be printed in a font that can be read from the curb. The search is training my eye differently.
This poem by Leonard Nathan is 14 lines like a sonnet. It’s one of those I come across every few years, and reading it now, it seems to align well with Oliver’s famous lines, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
“You’ve been given just the one life
in this world that matters”
This elegant poem by the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai captures the way that violence reverberates, the way that we are all contained within the circle of “pain and time.” It is a poem of war that reminds us that its real impact is found not in the logistics or big news stories, but in the small losses that echo outward. It’s a poem I always return to when the world erupts, here and elsewhere.
“...the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.”
The William Stafford poem I last put in the box got such a response that I left it up an extra week, letting its nine short lines have their say a little longer. I took it down about an hour before a series of tornadoes ripped through Central Texas, overturning semis and tearing roofs off houses. Given that Stafford places a tornado at the end of his first line, perhaps he should have been afforded a few more hours
But Ellen Bass picks up Stafford’s theme in “The Thing Is,” a poem that acknowledges all the dark and hard things central to our human experience and still urges that ultimately, we must come back to love. I think Stafford would agree
“Then you hold life like a face
between your palms”
I appreciate how this poem by the much-beloved William Stafford grapples with the complexities we are ever grappling with — the way that life at any time is both beautiful and terrible, uncertain and fully realized in the moment. It is not a poem about how a war carries on in Ukraine while the redbuds begin their springtime display of fuchsia. But it very well could be.
“That’s why we wake
and look out — no guarantees
in this life.”
One of the things I’ve noticed as we’ve followed the news from Eastern Europe these past days has been how clearly people recognize their connection to the people of Ukraine, whether that connection is personal or universal. This poem by the Italian poet Gianni Rodari captures that spirit. When our friend Virginia Jewiss posted her translation this weekend, I knew I wanted to share it more widely.
“As I journey up here,
I make light for all”
The Moon Over Kyiv
I wonder if the moon
over Kyiv
is as beautiful
as the moon over Rome,
I wonder if it’s the same moon
or merely her sister…
“Of course I’m the same!”
-the moon exclaims-
“Not some nightcap
for your head only!
As I journey up here,
I make light for all,
from India to Peru,
from the Tiber to the Dead Sea,
and my beams travel
without a passport.”
Gianni Rodari
translated from the Italian
by Virginia Jewiss
Spelling of Kyiv/Kiev updated
Continuing the theme of love poems, on this cold morning I slipped into the box this bit of warmth from E. Ethelbert Miller. It was one of the Poem-a-Day selections for Valentine’s Day this year, and I appreciate that it is actually a poem of friendship, which is always a form of love.
Here’s what Miller says of the poem: “The poem focuses on the commitment required to maintain a friendship over decades. It’s about aging and acknowledging another person’s beauty and how it changes, but is forever eternal. What holds the poem together is the ritual of sharing food and the understanding of how friendship can cross the border into love.”
“You break a cookie in half like bread
and this sharing is what we both now need.”
Last year’s Valentine’s poem—Ada Limón’s “What I Didn’t Know Before”—was so perfect, I didn’t know what I’d choose this year.
What I can tell you after my searching is that the world is full of wonderful love poems. Some are too long for the box. Some remain in the head as a few lines only. Some include the tenderest of details. And so many are their own version of perfect.
Thus, I’m going to post several weeks of love poems, beginning with this from Naomi Shihab Nye, whose theme will have resonance for my Texas neighbors. Love well!
“I stood by your bed
and watched the sheets rise gently.”
Ah, February, February. Snow, ice, rain, and then suddenly the sky so deeply and confidently blue. As Linda Pastan puts it in her sweet and tiny rendering, “Abbreviated month. / Every kind of weather.”
“Outside, snow
melts midair
to rain”
I put this little bit of citrus sunshine in the box earlier this week and forgot to take a pic. I did so this morning as as a winter storm descends on Central Texas and the trauma of last year’s freeze ripples again through the community. I discovered this piece by Mary Ruefle in The Slowdown podcast. Host Ada Limón opens the episode by saying, “The other night, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the people I love.” She ends it: “In today’s poem by the extraordinary Mary Ruefle, we see how a strong attachment to the world can change the way we perceive everything. Even something as small and seemingly inconsequential as a piece of fruit.”
“save their children from drowning
in love, save my friends from
going through the ice, save
all animals from starvation”
What small escapes allow you to turn your back to the heaviness of the world? Netflix? Books? Wordle? Making music? In this poem by Dorianne Laux, the answer is a jigsaw puzzle, one of my own go-to escapes, offering the “satisfied tap” of piece into piece.
“We patch together porch swings and autumn
trees, matching gold to gold.”
Last night I got to watch the national premiere of A Reckoning in Boston, a documentary film that began in the classroom of Boston’s Clemente Course. Woven through the film are texts students read for the class—Plato and James Baldwin and this tender love poem from Amiri Baraka. I didn’t know the poem before, and in the film we hear it read aloud as one of the film’s subjects, the wondrous Carl Chandler, travels by bus to visit his daughter in Philadelphia. I’m moved by its assertion that to know each other, to be connected to each other, is what defines our lives and makes them worth living.
“So for us to have been together, even
for this moment
profound like a leaf
blown in the wind”
Feeling glum? Yeah, me too. The glumness is all around, along with winter’s bare trees and patches of brown. I’d saved this lovely poem by poet and gardener Ross Gay for a time when we might need to be reminded that there is something we could call “dormant splendor.” This is a perfect week for it.
“Do not raise
your small voice against it. And do not
take cover.”
I took some end-of-year time away from the computer and let Lucille Clifton carry us out of 2021 and into 2022. It seems every conversation that I have about this new year is tinged with sadness and loss—illnesses, relinquished plans, the weariness of heading into the third year of pandemic. And yet we yearn for newness, for awe. This dual pull made me think of a favorite poem by the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. May we find the wonder in this year ahead, looking back, looking ahead.
“O my love, where are they, where are they going”
