Audio: Adrienne Rich introduces and reads “What Kind of Times Are These”
the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows
Barbara Crooker: Praise Songs for Autumn
Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning’s quick coffee
and evening’s slow return.
David Kirby: Leg Day at the Gym
Life isn’t always hard, but it’s almost never easy.
Abby Zimet: Pity the Nation/ Whose Shepherds Mislead Them
Amidst plunging polls and righteous rage at his Epstein Memorial Ballroom, the inept manchild faces growing resistance, sublime to ridiculous, to his nascent kingship.
Daniella Toosie-Watson: A Series of Small Miracles
Listen: in this poem, there are no men.
I give to myself & give again.
Cesare Pavese: Notes on Certain Unwritten Poems
The poem he will write is like a door, it opens out to his ability to create; and he will go through that door—he will write other poems, he will exploit the ground and leave it exhausted.
Christine Rhein: Chop Suey
A bright, spring coat hangs on a hook—Chop Suey customers
unaware Wall Street will crash, the country will plunge into war
upon war, torrents of technology. Yet already, in their face-to-face
hunger—no smiles, no laughter shatters the loneliness.
Barbara Crooker: Coffee
Because each day
is a fresh new start, revised as the sky
after rain. Because my mug is full
of dark goodness, and the day is a clean
blank sheet.
Louise Bogan: Simple Autumnal
The measured blood beats out the year’s delay.
The tearless eyes and heart, forbidden grief,
Watch, the burned, restless, but abiding leaf,
The brighter branches arming the bright day.
Ma Yongbo: Your Voice
Your voice, echoing in the narrow and dark corridor,
continuously echoing, warm and bright,
as if beyond this ordinary dusk
there is no hunger, toil and separation in the world.
Dion O’Reilly: Post Anthropocene
Can we imagine such emptiness? Such quiet.
Every bit of us, gone: the jackal-mouthed
and gospel-wild, razor wire
keeping out the needful
of our kind, even the ruins of holy cities
Brad Davis: On the Way to Putnam
in late summer’s
westering light,
his yellow cornfields and,
toward the middle,
that lone, misshapen tree
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: Sunrise at the River
The light steps forth out of the heatand darkness, out of the stillnessand ghost-lit world while I feel the dead staring downat me from some other shoreas if I was … Continue reading
