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”
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.”
