Vox Populi
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Michael Simms: Ecstasy & Envy
Ecstasy
Someone offered me Ecstasy
And I wondered what they had in mind.
Perhaps lying on a beach on the island
Of Antigua, the sun on my skin, a red sail
In the distance soon to arrive?
Cooking a marinara sauce while listening
To Pavarotti reach the high notes?
Waking in bed next to you, light
Slanting across the bed, our love
Awake again after sleeping too long?
Watching you push our daughter
Into the midwife’s hands, the tiny face
Squinched against the new day,
An old soul among us again? Sledding
With our son down the long hill
Of his childhood, and years later
Holding him in my arms after
He emerged from the darkness
Still alive? My falling on my knees
After the years of worry, thanking
What-is for delivering this miracle?
What is Ecstasy, but a blue pill
Of gratitude, a recognition
All I love is an undeserved gift
Slipping away even now?
*
Envy
I hear an interview on NPR
with my friend from grad school
who won a Presidential Medal
and stood on the White House lawn
with other luminaries of our age.
My friend is appropriately
modest about her accomplishment
so I say to my wife Good for her
no one deserves fame more
but an ugly little corner of my soul
hates my friend’s success
because it makes me feel small
untalented and undeserving. I spend
the rest of the day brooding about
my trifling pathetic life, writing for
a handful of indulgent friends and
former students. After a day of staring
at the white screen of my failure
I hear you come through the door
home at last from the trauma workshop
you teach. You tell me of a young man
who held his dying brother in his arms
after a drive by and how the family
is still grieving years later and how
the workshop has given the young man
a few tools to help his family recover
and then we read an email from a friend
who now lives with her two children
in a refugee shelter in Poland
while her husband is fighting
somewhere near the Russian border
and I think of my own brave brother
in Houston who discovered the provost
of his university has been lying
and stealing and Jack went
on television to speak truth to power
and lost his job… And even my dog Josie
faces each day with the thrill of play,
the joy of long walks through the alleys
and faith I’ll place a bowl of her favorite food
on the floor. And then you pull pasta
out of the pantry, I dress a green salad
with care and my self-pity fades
into the evening ritual of loving gestures
and I feel joy and gratitude for the gifts
I’ve been given in this one small life
Michael Simms is the founding editor of Vox Populi and founding editor emeritus of Autumn House Press. His poetry collections include American Ash, Strange Meadowlark and Jubal Rising. His speculative fiction novels include Bicycles of the Gods and The Talon Trilogy. His poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Poem-a-Day published by The Academy of American Poets, Scientific American and Plume Poetry. In 2011, Simms was awarded a Certificate of Recognition from the Pennsylvania State Legislature for his service to the arts.
Copyright 2025. From Jubal Rising (Ragged Sky, 2025). First published in ONE ART, edited by Mark Danowsky
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Sorry to arrive late to the party, but I tried to REPLY TO/DITTO Jan Falls’s wonderful July comment and was blocked.
Anyway… Love Michael’s two poems, too. Love the counterpoint of Ecstacy and Envy. The A-HA! pow of it. The ‘Living Love’ moments create our significance, not our accomplishments, which for the most part are temporal. Our writings–for ourselves and to one another– about our small, individual truths feed each other and inspire us on. We’re not self-indulgent, we’re insisting upon an essential, alternative reality. Living Love moments ALWAYS blow self-pity right into the scrap heap. Nothing tops Love. Right on, Jan. Right on, Michael. Grateful for you.
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Perfect, Desne! You are so right.
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Oh these poems Michael! and the richness of the comments! I’m feeling satiated with the generosity of it all. I particularly related to Envy – and I feel joy and gratitude for the gifts / I’ve been given in this one small life. Oh yes, gratitude for the gifts of poetry that feed me every day. Clearly the world is better for poets like yourself. Deep bow of gratitude.
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Thank you, Jan. Your praise lifts me up!
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“What is Ecstasy, but a blue pill
Of gratitude, a recognition
All I love is an undeserved gift”
and:
“And then you pull pasta
out of the pantry, I dress a green salad
with care and my self-pity fades
into the evening ritual of loving gestures”
Oh! ❤️
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Thank you, Lisa. I admire your poems so much. It is such a pleasure to hear that simple Oh!
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Makes a reader cry. Poignant. CAW
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Thank you, Christine!
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Michael:I’ve started about 5 different comments regarding your two lovely poems (I think of them as “windows into your heart,”) a day or so ago in the space allowed for such on the VP website and every time I’d get something half-written, It disappeared and I had to start over. So I’m writing here, in this more reliable, less public way to tell you how much I loved each thing you’d written, and how much insight I gained from them as you so beautifully and willingly conveyed your humanness in each subject. Its a perfect pairing: Ecstasy and Envy. You portray in these lines: whole life here, a thing I consider the truest accomplishment of being, and I am not surprised to see this from someone who has managed to enrich and bless so many people. You should be proud of your poetry and your work in this world. —SeanSorry to be so late in telling you all this. I’ll keep trying to work with the site, but it has been a bit of a challenge.
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First, Sean, let me apologize for the difficulty of commenting on the VP site. It behaves, I’m afraid, like a lost donkey, sometimes carrying the package in the right direction, sometimes not. And second, I want to thank you for your extremely generous comment about my two poems. I’m not surprised, though. You have been the most generous reader of poets’s work I’ve ever seen or heard of. Thank you so much for all you do.
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Hi Michael,
I really enjoyed “Ecstasy & Envy.” Glad to see your poetry in the rich mix.
All best,
Charles
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Thank you, Charles.
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Such a delicious way to start the day. Thank you for the rich tapestry of your words.
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Thank you!
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mygod, dear Michael, I am grateful for your small life and how vastly you inhabit it
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Oh, thank you, Rosemerry. I love your poems for their wisdom and compassion. Praise from you means so much to me.
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Beautiful poems here, Michael. Brave and raw.
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Thank you, Stephanie. I always love to see you on these pages!
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Stunning poems, Michael. Vital poems.
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Thank you, Christine!
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Just when I am really down because of what humanity is doing or not doing, along. comes Vox Populi! This post is especially beautiful and especially powerful. Thank you as always, always for being so inspiring.
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Thank you so much, Mandy. I am often inspired by you as well.
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Love this Michael! Really needed this today (and many days after!)
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Thank you, Alison!
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Thank you, Michael. You track some very real, shared and not often admitted feelings.
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Thanks, Betsy!
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Today I awoke from a nightmare, checked in with a text to my son who had also had a nightmare, meditated, and went back to sleep looking for a different awakening. Now finally up and dressed, after reading these poems, I walk up behind Tashi at the window to see finches at the birdbath and feeders, my old dog perched on her broken stuffed chair, the native plants in the garden. I am fortunate, though my happiness is marred by knowledge of world pain and how little I can do, and yes, I am envious, though happy for, folks who have an old companion sharing the morning. Your poems, and Vox Populi keep me getting up each day. Guess I am woke ?
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Such a beautiful post, maybe itself a poem? Thank you for being here so steadily.
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Thank you
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Thank you, Barbara!
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What wonderful warm hearted poems. Your honesty is stellar and admirable! The truth is we all feel as you do in our envy but not enough in the gratitude department. Thank you for the reminder and the beauty of your recognition.
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Thanks, Deborah. It’s nice to hear your voice here again.
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Such joy, Michael. And the second one ought to be titled ‘Joy’, not ‘Envy’, because the ‘envy’ part it small compared to the joy of being in a life that’s full of love. And how wonderfully you were able to make me “count my daily blessings”. And what you do is definitely more than just “writing for / a handful of indulgent friends”. You are one of the big fat drops we need in this ocean of blindness and indecision. Thank you.
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Thanks, Rosemary. This is the first time I’ve ever been called a “big fat drop we need.” I like it, I think.
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:=D
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Your poems wake up my dormant gratitude–thank you.
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Thank you, William!
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Waking up late, eating and watching the horrible news, and finally getting my dark coffee and going to my study full of light, your poems remind me to be grateful for coffee, light, for the gift of being able to sleep. I love your admission of envy, which I feel too and am ashamed of, and thankfully, you show how living with love and working make envy recede into the nothing it is. Thank you for sharing poetry, which helps me be, and for yours especially this morning.
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Yes, envy, like jealousy, is the green-eyed monster I dare not feed.
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Beautiful poems, Michael!
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Thanks, Jane. Sharon and I had a conversation last week that was basically a love-fest for your writing. “Odd and brilliant” was the gist of it.
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I’m moved, warmly grateful and feel so much less alone when I read poems such as yours, Michael. Our small, modest, anonymous, ‘un-famous’ loving gestures, moments, writings, thoughts & actions in life DO accumulate, DO make us able, little by little of letting in, & truly experiencing joy, beauty, elation & gratitude while, all along, living our grief & sorrow. Yes, tossing a small, green salad, yes, taking a friend’s hands in yours and listening, yes, yes missing the dead loved ones so painfully yet still humming a little tune when cleaning the ‘living’ rooms of our lives, yes, throwing your head back in laughter at a silly joke, yes stuffing our face in a flower or smiling utter kindness to a stranger in a waiting line: yes, Michael, yes Eva, yes Josie, yes, indispensable companions-in-poetry.
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What a beautifully expressed sentiment, Laure-Anne. I am so grateful to have you as a friend and companion on this road to nowhere and everywhere.
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Not sure my comment will post (they almost never do) – but just wanted to say that so much in both these poems resonates. Your achievements are not small. Thank you.
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Thank you so much, Jennifer. Love your work.
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Thank you for these beautiful expressions of the “small” wonders of life, which are so important to remember, particularly now.
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Thanks, Kathryn. After your note, I re-read the Reverdy poem. It is so important to love each other in difficult times.
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“joy and gratitude for the gifts I’ve been given in this one small life.” Oh, we should all tattoo this sentiment on our hearts. Remember it every day. Thank you, Mike.
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Thanks, Valerie. We carry large griefs, don’t we? We need the strength of gratitude to help us carry them.
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Yes, we do. Wednesday it will be 16 years since my son died. Impossible to understand. And yet, I have to make time to see the joy still around me every day. Thank whoever for poetry.
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18 years since my sister took her life. I know I will carry the grief until the end. These are not tragedies we get over; we just learn to live with the weight of them.
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Yes, I agree. I’m so sorry about your sister.
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And I’m so sorry about your son.
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Love and generosity of feeling : two gifts you bring us here in your own poems; plus the words of the other wise souls you share. Heartfelt thanks.
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Thank you, Jim. Your daily comments on VP are so important. You are like the dad who keeps encouraging us to do our best (I know, I know we are about the same age, but you really are the senior bucker-upper here.)
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aw, shucks. Seriously, thank you.
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I agree with Michael; thank you for your daily comments, Jmnewsome!
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Yes, agree. Another day I can face because hope and humor, and humanity have arrived in a small rectangle renewing hope.
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Thank you, Barbara!
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Fame is accidental. Poetry, like being a good person, is its own reward.
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Thank you, Alfred. The better half of my psyche agrees with you wholeheartedly.
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Ah, to be awake in our lives undrugged. The best.
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40 years ODAT. Awake at last.
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