Vox Populi

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

Charlotte Matthews: Draw With Your Eyes Closed

On Fridays, we drew animals with our eyes closed. Mrs. Plath said it could be anything we wanted. So, there we were: 25 six-year-olds bent over manila paper, crayons in stubby … Continue reading

September 6, 2025 · 7 Comments

Video: The Medallion

In Ruth Hunduma’s short documentary “The Medallion,” a mother’s memories serve as a window to a history of genocide and survival in Ethiopia.

September 5, 2025 · 3 Comments

Video: Eternity

Valerie and Alan have been married 57 years. Eternity is a look at love that lasts a lifetime, whether they like it or not.

August 30, 2025 · 4 Comments

Julia Margaret Cameron: Photograph of Julia Jackson (1867)

This poetic image depicts the woman who was the model for the beautiful Mrs. Ramsay in “To the Lighthouse”, Virginia Woolf’s great novel of 1927.

August 24, 2025 · 7 Comments

Video: Side Hustle

Interweaving fiction with documentary testimony of sugar babies and sex workers, Side Hustle follows a young dancer making rent with the financial support of her sugar daddy.

August 23, 2025 · 5 Comments

Video: Scotland Hates Trump | The Music Video

The Scottish people have much in common with the majority of Americans.

August 16, 2025 · 8 Comments

Rachel Hadas: Two Poems

One sight that sticks with me is the tail
of a blue phoenix soaring on a tile
from fifteenth-century Turkey. I couldn’t draw it
worth a damn, but gazed until I knew it.
I used the pencil in my hand to see.

August 13, 2025 · 14 Comments

Sean Sexton: Herculaneum (audio and painting email to Robert Cording)

I’m reading Basho’s “Backroads to the North Country,” on my trip, an old, crumbling Penguin classics series that includes four separate journeys and a great intro. He conveys at one point how grateful he is to be on the road, Mt Fuji far away back home in Edo, so he needn’t ponder it in his life for awhile.

August 10, 2025 · 24 Comments

Betsy Sholl: Monet’s Garden 

When he was painting his lilies,
when he was refusing evacuation
despite the war being close enough
to hear from his garden,
was Monet offering the world lilies,
saying there are lilies as well as guns?

August 8, 2025 · 26 Comments

Derrick Z. Jackson: Administration Cuts Will Leave No Refuge for Wildlife

Smyrna, Delaware—Bald eagles descended to pose on the banks and boulders on the mudflats. Shorebirds bobbed in shallow pools. Great blue herons, great egrets, and snowy egrets snapped up fish … Continue reading

July 21, 2025 · 8 Comments

Video: Dear Philadelphia

With the help of their family, friends, and faith, three fathers unravel the incomparable partnership of forgiveness and community in North Philadelphia.

July 19, 2025 · Leave a comment

Mike Schneider: Three Hats

When Oddjob flings his bowler
in Goldfinger, it leaps from his hand
& sails like a frisbee across a meadow
& hovers, or seems to, as in a dream

July 15, 2025 · 17 Comments

Video: A Swim Lesson

An ode to an everyday hero: Bill Marsh, a swim teacher who helps children manage their fears and discover their own power when submerged in an overwhelming unknown. 

July 12, 2025 · 2 Comments

Michael Simms: All Time Most Popular Posts in Vox Populi (2014-2025)

Vox Populi was founded on April 1, 2014 when Nisha Gupta and I met for coffee and decided to start a website to support the anti-fracking activists in Western Pennsylvania.

July 12, 2025 · 35 Comments

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