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
Some poems are just made for celebrating, and this poem went into the poetry box without me knowing that on our street it was a time for celebrating. A neighbor emailed me to say how much the poem “hit the spot.” He and his partner brought home their first baby and he found cummings saying, “this is the birth /
day of life and of love and wings.”
Another reason to feel glad? The poetry box has letters now, designed by the talented Elena Eidelberg. There is no doubting what sits behind that plexiglass display.
“i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky”
All these years, I didn’t know that Tony Hoagland had written a poem about Barton Springs, and I discovered it the same weekend I went to the springs for the first time in years, still using the paper swim pass a friend gave me in 2002 when he moved away from Austin. I went with out-of-town friends, after a hike on the hot and dusty greenbelt, and I agree that it is a marvel. So is this poem. Truly, I hope Tony Hoagland found his way to the water many times before he died.
“Now, because all things are joyful by water,
there just might be time to catch up on praise.”
What fun, what summer fun, this poem! And to affirm this, when I went to change out the poem at the end of the week, every single copy had been taken.
“When toddlers swallow you,
their top lips mustache in color
as if they’ve kissed paint.”
When I threw myself into poetry as a young adult, I threw myself into Stephen Dunn. His poems were plain spoken and sometimes witty and incredibly honest. I carried his poem “A Secret Life” around in my day planner as I went to work and went about sifting through my lists and responsibilities. It ends by affirming what I suspected: “A secret life is that important.” When I learned Dunn had died, I wanted to give him a space on the curb. “Sweetness” seemed the right poem for celebrating his life and his voice.
“ Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough
to make sense of what it means to be alive”
Few poems have been as impactful as Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” something I didn’t know until this year, when a colleague and I taught a unit on ekphrastic poetry, poems written in response to works of art. She provided an art historian’s perspective on the Statue of Liberty. I brought in Lazarus’s poem, with its famous lines now written on a plaque on the sculpture’s base.
Lazarus wrote the poem as a donation to an effort to fund the statue, somewhat begrudgingly. She died in 1887, a year after the statue was dedicated. More than 15 years later, the once-forgotten poem found its home on the plaque through Lazarus’s friends, who wanted to give her a fitting memorial. But ultimately, the poem changed how people the world over view the Statue of Liberty. What was intended as a monument of “republican ideals” and the friendship between the U.S. and France became instead an international symbol of hope, of welcome, of the country’s open arms toward immigrants and refugees. And thus it remains.
Lesson over.
This is what poetry can do.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”
How much do I love this poem? So much that I asked a friend to read it at my wedding reception, sometime after dinner and before dessert. At another friend’s wedding, I read it to the friends and family gathered around a Texas Hill Country swimming pool, not far from where farmers set out tables along the road to sell baskets of peaches. I read it to my classmates when I graduated from yoga teacher training and to my students just out of love and joy and in the spirit of sharing. And I knew it needed to go in the Poetry Box in the summer, peach season, which just happened to be the very weeks that we were out of town. It’s the first poem put up and taken down by someone else while we were gone. I wanted to share it at just the right time. I hope someone discovered it while ripe fruit waiting on the kitchen counter.
“O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days...”
One of the delights of the Poetry Box is discovering other people who post poems each day or week, mostly on blogs and journals they keep sometimes for years. And thus, the delight of discovering poems I might not have found otherwise. Gary Soto’s poem “Oranges” is among my favorites and I never teach a poetry workshop without including it. But I didn’t know “How Things Work” before now, and now its quirky fun conversationalist lines will forever be part of me.
“If we buy a goldfish, someone tries on a hat.
If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.”
In my experience, stories of summer are always stories of childhood. This poem captures that beautifully with its raspberries and hiding and soft fruit in the mouth. Mark Jarman was my professor in college, when I knew I loved poetry but didn’t know how to express that love. Thus, putting his work in the Poetry Box is a lovely coming full circle.
“We lie in bed at night, thinking about
The future, always the future...”
It’s a time of peppers and basil and zinnias here, the rain departing and the heat arriving as we always knew it would. I didn’t expect to add another Grace Paley to the box so soon, but her matter-of-fact voice seemed right for this moment. In only days the leaves of the vegetables will start to crisp and the electric utilities will tell us to back off the a/c because the system can’t handle it.
“I had another day in mind
something like this one”
This is one of those old classics, a poem that I have heard read aloud at gatherings, a poem I have been moved to have given to me by a colleague. After we rest, we get up again. We dive in again. We return to the work of the world.
“But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.”
