Vox Populi

A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 6,000,000 visitors since 2014 and over 9,000 archived posts.

Video: Israeli And Palestinian Mothers Walk Barefoot For Peace In Rome Streets 

The activists demanded an end to violence, emphasizing that mothers everywhere want their children to live in dignity and safety.

Featured · 2 Comments

Philip Levine: Blue

the men wakening one
at a time and reaching for
both the sky and the earth

Featured · 15 Comments

Rebecca Gordon: American Gulag

We know we can dismantle the American gulag, because some of us are already doing it. It’s time for the rest of us to get to work.

Featured · 21 Comments

James Crews: The Pond at Sunset

I forget I’ve already arrived
in the life I want, and that I am
still arriving at the same time.

Featured · 14 Comments

Alison Hurwitz: Submerged

the story run across his skin, his mind a moving wheel
that cannot stop its circling, bearing down the road
with grackle wings, a story leafing past each turning

Featured · 19 Comments

Michael Simms: Three Young Poets Drinking All Night In the Cemetery of the Black Angel, Iowa City, 1977

as if we could carry away the urn
of grief long dead parents felt for their child
lost to diphtheria, typhus, pox or pure accident

Featured · 42 Comments

Michael Simms: Apologies for the tech glitches at Vox Populi Sphere

Friends, odd things have been happening with the Vox Populi website lately.

March 26, 2026 · 22 Comments

Andrew Reginald Hairston: On Building

I lost my second election on March 3, 2026…. I’m just getting started.

March 25, 2026 · 4 Comments

Eman Abu Zayed: With Gaza’s Libraries in Ruins, Palestinians Fight to Preserve Historical Memory

More than 87 public libraries and archives in Gaza have been partially or completely destroyed by Israel’s genocide.

March 24, 2026 · 15 Comments

Ma Yongbo: Frost on the Window

It is spring now and the frost on the window is gradually thinning.

March 24, 2026 · 27 Comments

Senator Bernie Sanders: I spoke to AI agent Claude

I spoke to Anthropic’s AI agent Claude about AI collecting massive amounts of personal data and how that information is being used to violate our privacy rights. What an AI agent says about the dangers of AI is shocking and should wake us up.

March 23, 2026 · 14 Comments

Dorianne Laux: The Optimism of French Toast

I think of my Acadian ancestors
landing on the shores of Nova Scotia, divining
logs from the deep woods, fashioning windows,
hanging laundry from two oars dug into sand—
the flags of domesticity flayed by the wind.

March 23, 2026 · 31 Comments

Michael Simms: Trump’s Nightmare

Who is James Talarico, and why does the Trump administration fear him?

March 22, 2026 · 26 Comments

Al Ortolani: Prayer Boat

Each night I say a prayer of thanks
to some higher power, a thanks for
the chance to be alive as a thinking
being, for the family and friends
that surround me

March 22, 2026 · 24 Comments

H.C. Palmer: An Old Kansas Farm Boy’s Take on Gary Snyder’s “Hay for the Horses” or Why I Became a Poet

In the early 1950s I worked summers as a part of a team of 4 high school football players bucking bales of alfalfa hay for a local rancher in Southeast Kansas. We moved over 1,000 bales from his hay meadow to the loft in his barn each cutting.

March 21, 2026 · 35 Comments

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