James Crews: The Slightest Kindness
We were walking the icy streets,
talking about the ways our country
has betrayed us again—promises
unkept, laws broken beyond repair.
Alison Hurwitz: On Resilience
In 8th grade English class my son’s assigned
a sonnet, asked to find an image, select
one metaphor that can expand to bind
disparate thoughts together.
Philip Levine: The Poem of Chalk
He knew feldspar,
he knew calcium, oyster shells, he
knew what creatures had given
their spines to become the dust time
pressed into these perfect cones
H C Palmer: Two Poems
My father believed the bedrock beneath our ranch—
once an immense sea—
was still alive, that natural rhythms persisted
in its sluggish consolidation.
Naomi Shihab Nye: 300 Goats
O lead them to a warm corner,
little ones toward bulkier bodies.
Lead them to the brush, which cuts the icy wind.
Another frigid night swooping down
Rachel Trousdale & Charles W. Brice: Two Elegies for Renée Nicole Good
I think of long dead Germans caught in the Bardo.
Are they wagging their fingers at us?
Now you know what it felt like, they say
Valerie Bacharach: Barbara, I’m Sipping Coffee
My hands have morphed into my mother’s; arthritic knuckles, thin skin, and yesterday I
discovered her Mah Jong set dumped in a guest closet
Stuart Kestenbaum: Prayer for Joy
Every butterfly knows that the end
is different from the beginning
and that it is always a part
of a longer story
Naomi Shihab Nye: Generations
At the end of an unseasonably warm day
New Year’s Eve 2017
I stood in my kitchen holding
one wooden spoon.
Vox Populi: The Most Popular posts of 2025
Since mainland China blocks western media, I was very surprised a few months ago when a flood of visitors from China began clicking on Vox Populi.
Chard deNiord: Erebus
This is the river’s music that still plays
like the wind in its accompaniment
to the only song I know how to sing
Barbara Crooker: When I Gave Away My Tent
…some protection from sun, snow, rain in this, the very imperfect
twenty-first century where working two jobs isn’t enough to get
an apartment in a country where too much is not enough.
