Vox Populi
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Ellery Akers: After the Election
After my sister died, and I woke up, half asleep,
I forgot what had happened for a minute:
I felt as if something important
was floating
over my head,
and then it fell: the fact.
And now, every morning when I wake up, I forget for a minute.
Then I remember: I’m caught in history.
I see how the trees wait. The animals. They don’t know
what’s happened:
that men in power
want you to know they are
significant.
Grass is nothing to them. A beetle is nothing.
So today I want to praise
the insignificant:
A pebble. A ladybug.
The tiny gulping noises tadpoles make
when they shimmy up to the surface of the water
to sip air with their rose-colored lips.
Here’s a man hitching up his pants.
A man telling a woman
that she should shut up.
That a bird should shut up
and stuff the song back in her throat.
Beautiful wreckage of my country, I’m still trying to love you.
So today I want to praise the insignificant:
the breeze that lifts one leaf and not another,
the grass that brushes against my legs.
I listen to a sparrow. A mourning dove. A wren.
Smell the stream.
I watch bay laurel leaves fall
and sprinkle slowly through the forest
and forget to be afraid.
~~~~
Ellery Akers is an award-winning California poet and artist whose latest books are A Door into the Wild: Poetry and Artand Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance.
Copyright 2025 Ellery Akers
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Timely. Heart felt.
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Yes, I love this poem.
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Trying to love the beautiful wreckage – a worthy task, over and over, not just that of our country, but from the abandoned mine shaft to the image in the mirror.
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I love, love, love this poem.
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I do too. It captures the love and grief many of us are feeling.
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My comment yesterday disappeared and I worry I didn’t press the last button. I was unfamiliar somehow with Ellery and was drawn by this fabulous poem into your fortunate anthologies of more beneath and read them all as I often do, familiar or otherwise. She’s a star in my poetry sky, and even bears the surname of land.
I love these poems—all of them!
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Oh my…YES. THIS poem today!
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I love this one. It is slightly reminiscent of Mary Oliver, who has always showed us where the real healing lies.
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I hadn’t thought of the connection with Oliver. Thank you, Matt.
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Yes, to this poem — yes.
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Yes
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What a relief to wake up to this evocative poem, and in this space, today. Thank you.
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Thanks for giving us this poem. The lament at the beginning, the healing along the way. The praise of what prevails in details, the small beauties.
This morning I had two teeth pulled. Afterwards the dentist asked in his teasing voice; was that fun?” I almost wanted to say yes, for an hour I didn’t think about the coming political anger-storm. Instead, I just read Ellery Akers poem, and watched the backyard squirrels contemplating nuts.
There are poems that mentor readers in how to find beauty among the ugliness humans keep creating. This one is near the top. Filled with healing signficances
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You have a beautiful mind, Jim. I hope, despite the recent tooth loss, you’ll keep chewing on these thoughts.
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Thank you for this poem. I awoke in dread and memories, morning meditation interrupted by monkey mind. I will rise and prepare breakfast, watch the goldfinches, hug the dog.
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Thanks, Barbara.
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Yes, I totally understand this poem. It will soon be a poem recited by many of us from many more countries. I would like to praise something else insignificant to those cynical murderers: the average human being.
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Thank you for this poem. Today the rain has passed; though cold, the sun, bright and sure, offers me a smile and when one of our cats offers me a feathered gift I force open his mouth and the House Wren flies away back to his kin. Another precious moment. Today of all days there is always hope.
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Always, Leo. Thanks.
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Today is January 6th, the anniversary of the attack on democracy by a sitting president who is now returning to office. ‘Beautiful wreckage of my country, I’m still trying to love you.’
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good poem
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Yes it is.
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Wow. This one took my breath away–
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Mine too!
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