Beth Copeland: Pyre
Enough wood for a bonfire, I say, recalling the night
we torched a dead Christmas tree, drinking white wine and dancing
around the leaping blaze and the dark morning I burned your love
letters in a metal trash can outside, drunk and weeping, liar! liar!
“Walking in Beauty”: Closing Prayer from the Navajo Blessing Way Ceremony
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.
Chard deNiord: On Such An Evening
everything just gets sweeter as I sit under
the maple after working all day in the garden
and listen to the music of silence disguised
as birdsong and breeze in the overstory
Thom Hartmann | Urgent Message to Progressives: Infiltrate Your Local Democratic Party Before It’s Too Late
Take over the party from the inside, from the bottom up!
Baron Wormser: If
If, as a poet suggested a long while ago, the center is not holding. If morality no longer has any practicable basis. If public statements are cant and platitude. If … Continue reading
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.
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?
Barbara Crooker: Two Poems for Summer
And tomorrow, another hot one,
and that sweet juicy sun
will pop up again, staining
the horizon red, orange, gold.
Robert Cording: New Morning
Always that moment
when I wake up
in the dark
before dawn
and the first birds
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
Barbara Crooker: This Summer Day
We are still ripening
into our bodies, still in the act of becoming.
Rejoice in the day’s long sugar.
Praise that big fat tomato of a sun.
Ryan Eckes: memo for labor
you cannot separate the job from the house from the rent from the earth from the food from the healthcare from the water from the transit from the war from … Continue reading
John Paul Lederach: Why movements need to learn to fly like bees and thread like spiders
For insights into building a broad-based pro-democracy movement take inspiration from nature.
Amy Lowell: Lilacs
The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs
Peer restlessly through the light and shadow
Of all Springs.
